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Gilly Lehmann. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003. Pp. 494.
Gastronomic history is suddenly everywhere, thanks to a market ravenous for new taste sensations. A few years ago, the phenomenon would have surprised historian Barbara Haber, who in the New York Times Magazine for 1 September 2002 opined that in developing new food trends, "My guess would have been that chefs would look backward at what people ate a long time ago, but no one knows enough to do that. So instead they're inventing another weird direction"-that is, raw foods. Soon after Haber spoke, however, food history began to take off. On 2 April 2004 the Wall Street Journal ran a story entitled "Party Like It's 1599," with the subhead "Fed Up with New Food Fads, Chefs Hit the History Books: Low-Fat? No, Bear Fat." The article noted that upscale hostesses were throwing theme parties with Renaissance food, and that classes in historic cooking were becoming popular. Francine Segan's Shakespeare 's Kitchen (2003) was an early entry into the "retro" culinary revival, offering updated recipes primarily from Robert May's classic, The Accomplish Cook ( 1660)-Segan's source was three generations post hoc, but in the rush to resuscitate obsolete cuisine no one was a purist. Segan received awed reviews, not least in the New York Times, which declared the Kitchen brilliant. Beyond the hoopla, however, gastronomic historians recognized a more edifying renaissance. Culinary classics, May's among them, were being reprinted, frequently with fine introductions. Web sites proliferated old recipes, with detailed directions on how to prepare them. It was like 1780, when Samuel Pegge revived a fourteenth-century culinary manuscript, The Forme of Cury, advising readers to embrace its strangeness:
The common language of the formulae, though old and obsolete, as naturally may be expected from the age of the MS, has no other difficulty in it but what may easily be overcome by a small degree of practice and application. . . . If here and there a hard and uncouth term or expression may occur, so as to stop and embarrass the less expert, pains have been taken to explain them. {The Forme of Cury [London, 1780], p. xxxi)
In the tradition of Pegge-quickly followed by...