As late as the Regency period, Diane Purkiss informs us, middle-class dining custom dictated that soup and salad, sweet and savoury, were all placed on the table at once. A typical course might consist of “curry of rabbit soup, open tart, syllabub, macaroni, pastry baskets, salmon trout, sole, vegetable pudding, muffin pudding, larded sweetbreads, raised giblet pie, a preserve of olives and a haunch of venison, and buttered lobster” all arranged around a centrepiece, such as the wonderfully named “bombarded veal”. Once everyone had taken what they wanted, these dishes would be removed and replaced by a different selection and then, in turn, by several desserts.
Readers of Purkiss’s new survey of English food, a weighty 560 pages packed with morsels of culinary history, may feel similarly bombarded with riches. Her day job is as a professor of English literature, and it shows – the book kicks off with a line from Virginia Woolf on the gender divide in Cambridge college catering and is liberally seasoned throughout with literary references, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Michael Ondaatje.
