Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we subscribe to its codes of ethics. For example, chapter V, Meat, discusses "a rather interesting mediaeval miracle" and illustrates a traditional "Colonial Travelling Meat Safe of Mosquito Net". I don't know how to close this review, the book is one of a kind in my opinion, partly because it is not pretentious, and not fashionable in any way, but never boring. The cultural historian Panikos Panayi describes the book as a tour de force, seminal, and richly illustrated; and he notes that Food in England is partly a recipe book, partly a history. This often lonely, insular woman found in cooks of earlier times a kinship: "for we English cooks … have always been our excellent selves, under all conditions and in all centuries.

Far from settling down, she speeded up, refusing to marry or have children and indeed devoting herself entirely to her work of recording the past. As we travelled, I began to realize that my frustration in her technique as historian was misplaced. Contains 676 printed pages of text with monochrome illustrations and archive photographs throughout.

The Queen's Cheese recipe (1600), to be made between Michaelmas and Allhallowtide, and a huge cheese, nine feet in circumference, made in 1841 for Queen Victoria from one milking of 737 cows. I cannot recommend this highly enough for anyone interested in food, how it is grown, fed, penned, harvested, cooked, the history of when how and why we eat it. I'm moving this off the "currently reading" shelf, because, while I've read big chunks of it and will consult it in the future, reading 600 pages of recipes is tough going.

Nor was she fond of roast turkey or rook pie; the latter was only worth making, she thought, on occasions when a large rookery had to be thinned (once more, her head was in the 14th century). Fascinating in its detail, broad in scope, and precious to anyone who is interested in how people lived - and their ways of obtaining and preparing food - in the last century in this country.Not to mention the anecdotes of her own experiences, and her empathy with country people everywhere, as well as their ways and means of living their lives. Trained initially as an artist Hartley provided the "very exact, decorative yet diagrammatic explanatory drawings" for her histories which helped them to appeal to a wider public. At this point I began to realize that not only was she a terrific oral historian and journalist, but a pretty unusual woman for her time. A very important historic piece, although I wish she had referred to her sources for each recipe; sometimes she does but for others there are quotation marks and no source cited.

Boards have moderate shelf wear with mild bumping and fraying to corners and crushing and fraying to spine ends.

They are not necessarily fitting 21st century palate, but are nonetheless interesting - not unlike what Heston Blumenthal has done. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. But whether mad or not, Hartley "approaches the cuisine of the past with the humour and sharpness of a journalist.