The home of hungry readers
As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, food and memory are inextricably bound up together.
In Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), her autobiographical account of her Oxfordshire childhood, Flora Thompson’s food memories evoke the old custom and habits of a world that has long since disappeared and the delight of being a child at this time. Continue reading “Food and memory”
Since I started this blog more than five years ago, I’ve discovered how much literature can tell us about the food preferences and practices of a particular society or culture. Continue reading “Food in the historical novel”
For mother’s picnics were planned on a tribal scale, with huge preparations beforehand… There were sliced cucumbers and pots of paste, radishes, pepper and salt, cakes and buns and macaroons, soup-plates of bread and butter, jam, treacle, jugs of milk, and several fresh-made jellies.
(Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie)
I do love a picnic. Whilst the vagaries of the English weather can make picnics a hit and miss affair, I still enjoy them. Continue reading “Picnic food”
They were eating cake, almond speckled with chopped-up pieces of chocolate, an old recipe of Mrs Glover’s handed down on a piece of paper that was covered in greasy fingerprints. (2 September 1939, page 303)
One of the things I like so much about cooking is the idea of food as a legacy, as something that is passed down through the generations over time. And of course the way in which that manifests itself is through recipes – through writing down how to make something to eat, the joy and pleasure of food can be transmitted from person to person, from age to age. Continue reading “Life after Life 5: Almond Choc-Chip Cake”