Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen ( Ancient and Modern English Cooking: Vol.1 )

Ultimately an irritating and lazy book, promises so much then fails to deliver. It starts on a high as in her usual very readable style of regaling us with the history and other antedotes about the topic in hand. Revelatory in her width of knowledge about all things cookery. So the opening chapters

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are little golden nuggets of information that you never knew you would want to know about all the variety of flavourings and how they have influenced English cooking. Having run the gamut of the normal and a few odd flavouring ingredients suddenly she loses interst and tell us she cannot be bothered to go on to other flavourings. We are dumped back into a very conventional cook book very conventionally structured with starters, fish meat and so on. Minimally they all have a flavouring as a important theme within the recipe but they are not great recipes and I for one would go elsewhere just looking for recipes. So three quarters of this slim book is wasted as far as I am concerned. Just an ordinary recipe book with her unique mixture of old, new and borrowed and few antedotes to whet the sated appetite. No, for me 'Herbs, Spices and Flavourings' by Tom Stobart is a much better bible.

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There was quite a lull after Elizabeth David's (1913 - 1992) prodigious output in the 1950s, then this volume appeared in 1970. Although titled English Kitchen, the history of imports coming along with immigrants was recognised with coverage of risotto, kebabs, pilau rice, etc. Full of typically

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David snippets, such as the fact that a copy of Mrs Rundells 'A New System of Domestic Cookery' published in 1806 fetched £130 at Southeby's auction house in 1965.

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