Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. Elizabeth Raffald with Alessandra Pino & Neil Buttery https://open.spotify.com/episode/0oPYbFhNAfIHOfj6KL9RWC?si=cfdfadbbf32a4d24

English Food: A People’s History - William Collins

I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions. I find the narrowness of individual ‘subjects’ defeating. You bring more to reading poetry, I think, if you have a strong sense of what they are likely to have had for dinner. We mustn’t underestimate the shaping power of what we eat. I’ve been doing some work recently on the English at sea, and thinking about scurvy. The effects of scurvy on the mindset of entire naval armadas is almost impossible to overestimate. That’s the remarkable thing. People were literally dying in droves of a disease that nobody fully understood right up to polar exploration. But it’s wonderful in places, and you can also get fantastic bread in Britain now. But around 90% of the bread flour sold in Britain is augmented with high gluten flour from the Canadian wheat belt. The average gluten content of a loaf made in the 19th century would have been around eight or nine percent. Now, that’s more like eleven to fourteen percent. If you use low-gluten flour, you have to put way more time into baking, spend longer kneading it, give it longer periods of rest, a much longer rise. It’s a much heavier workload for the baker. I mean, it’s a horrible illness. Not only is it physically incredibly painful, and unbelievably exhausting—like a dreadfully bad Covid—but the worst thing about it is that healed wounds open up again. So it has this spectral quality in a military outfit. The leg that got shot suddenly reopens and starts bleeding again. Things like that.Imagine you’re standing on a hillside. You look at the lumps in the grass. You are probably wondering what they are, or what they used to be. A panel nearby says that they are prehistoric burial mounds. Clip of Philip Harben demonstrating boiling techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj-tapF1kgU The night in Oxford was the most beautiful event I have ever done. Not just the spectacular setting (of the Sheldonian), but an unforgettable evening. The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will. I think we’ve come to your final history of food book recommendation. This is The English Housewife by Gervase Markham, dating from 1615.

English Food by Diane Purkiss review – a mouthwatering

My undergraduate degree was dual English and History. In various ways, so was my doctorate. The short answer is that teaching English literature is really interesting, because the answer is always different, while in history a thorough look at what’s available to you could lead you to the same answer every time. I find that less interesting than teaching Shakespeare. Before our interview began, you said something interesting about how food history is not really about the food. It’s what the food says about those making or eating it. So I guess we are looking at food as a proxy for other social forces or social factors. Did I get that right? It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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That discussion of scurvy might have led us quite neatly to Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire, a study of British imperial history structured around twenty recipes. It was first published under the title Tastes of Empire. after newsletter promotion It transpires – no one tell Liz Truss – that more than 70% of the cheese consumed here in the 1920s was imported

Diane Purkiss - Wikipedia Diane Purkiss - Wikipedia

It’s the end of the current run so that means it is time for the now traditional end-of-season special postbag edition. Diane’s book English Food: a People’s History available here: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/english-food-a-peoples-history-diane-purkiss?variant=39825973411918 Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.In this delicious history of Britain’s food traditions, Diane Purkiss invites readers on a unique journey through the centuries, exploring the development of recipes and rituals for mealtimes such as breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to show how food has been both a reflection of and inspiration for social continuity and change.