C Anne Wilson, who has died aged 95, was one of the first people in Britain to lay claim to the description of professional food historian, after her book Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to Recent Times was published in 1973. She spent most of her working life at the University of Leeds where, as a librarian at the Brotherton Library, she had the care of several categories of specialist literature. Among these were two matchless collections of early printed recipe books (singled out by the Arts Council in 2005 as having international significance), and having spent much time during the 1960s cataloguing one of these she boldly took the next step and wrote her pathfinding book.
Soon, thanks to her example, food historians would become an academic commonplace. The book might have projected her into another sphere altogether, when she was interviewed by the teenage magazine Honey a few months after publication. Her head, however, was not turned.
The great thing about Food and Drink in Britain is that it presents a narrative firmly based on fact (drawn from her early printed recipe books) rather than anecdote and speculation, the hallmark of many such accounts. The last serious appraisal of our food history had been Sir Jack Drummond’s more than three decades earlier (The Englishman’s Food, with Anne Wilbraham). She was able to extend her brief back into prehistory thanks to studying classical archaeology (under Sir Mortimer Wheeler) at university. As if anxious not to frighten the horses by an excess of historical scholarship, she stressed in her foreword that her work was also a recipe book, although the reader would have to be keen to explore some of her byways – have you ever asked your butcher for a couple of pounds of beef palates?
A few years later, she endeared herself still further to an important cohort of British food enthusiasts: those who make their own marmalade. The Book of Marmalade (1985) laid out every fact relevant to the history of the confection as well as supplying an excellent set of recipes for all sorts of amateurs, including those who wish to graduate to more esoteric combinations such as lime and honeydew melon. It is still the standard reference point for all those marmalade-making competitions and festivals, and sells steadily nearly 40 years after its first appearance.
Not content with writing significant texts (she was later to deal with the history of distilling, from Dionysiac ritual to modern cocktails, in Water of Life) and holding down her post at the university library, Wilson will be remembered as the prime mover of the Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions, the first session of which was held in 1986. Her exemplar was the Oxford Symposium, founded by Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin a few years earlier, but it had its own special character, which set the Yorkshire gathering quite apart. Its focus was relentlessly English, and often local; its approach was always historical, not veering towards more general matters of food policy or theory; and thanks to the involvement of Leeds University extension department, its attendees were drawn from a much wider social grouping than the internationalist, media-oriented Oxford affair.
Meetings in Leeds, and later in York, were serious, with heavyweight lecturers, but enlivened by brilliant lunches and teas with each plate brought in by individual cooks pursuing their particular culinary hobbyhorse, be it gingerbread, black pudding or mutton in a 17th-century manner. For several years, Anne was the single organiser and editor of the annual volume of themed essays. As a result of her efforts, there arose in Leeds a distinguished group of food historians – Lynette Hunter, Laura Mason, Ivan Day, Peter Brears and many others – whose work has had long-range consequences for the discipline.
Anne Wilson was born in east Gower, near Swansea, the elder of two daughters of Constance (nee Laycock) and Rowland Wilson. Her father was then an assistant lecturer in mathematics at University College, Swansea, but would rise to become professor of mathematics at the University of Swansea. Her mother was also a mathematician who had studied at Girton College, Cambridge, but had to give up her teaching post when she married in 1925. The two girls would follow their mother to Girton, although pursuing classical, not mathematical studies. Anne attended Mumbles primary school and then Glanmor grammar school for girls, Swansea, before going to Cambridge.
At university, Anne studied classics and thought to train as an almoner, as medical social workers were still known, in Chaucerian fashion. She soon decided this was not for her, nor the two short-lived jobs she obtained thereafter, and enrolled at the London Institute of Archaeology for a diploma. Subsequently, she worked in libraries arranging inter-university loans and pursuing qualification as a librarian at night school. This somewhat halting progress to permanent employment ended in 1961 when she was taken on by the Brotherton Library in Leeds, and there she remained until 1992.
For one whose outward demeanour was quite diffident, the grit and determination she showed in both her writing and in organising other people often caught one unawares. She was also, as if to underline these latter characteristics, a gifted clarinettist and constant member of Leeds orchestras and ensembles. As her publisher for 20 years, I never found her anything but amenable.
She is survived by her sister, Caroline.
• Constance Anne Wilson, born 12 July 1927; died 8 January 2023
