Londoners' Larder: English Cuisine From Chaucer To The Present

In a vivid panorama, Londoner's Larder presents the food of a great city. Annette Hope has used biography, literature, and social history to explore the city of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Johnson, Dickens, Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, and to show in lively detail what these writers and their contemporaries might have eaten, where the food came from, and how it was cooked. She looks at problems of supply, distribution, nutrition, cooking, and health and hygiene as the city expanded and changed character, and in a final chapter chronicles the effect of social, economic, and ethnic shifts since the end of the Second World War. At the end of each chapter are recipes from the period, written in modern, usable form. From the take-away pasties baked by the Cook in The Canterbury Pilgrims to dinner at the Cafe Royal, this book charts the gastronomic life of London in scholarly and entertaining detail.