Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking [Hardcover]

Every page is packed with good things, historical and cuinary, peppered with personalities and salted with wit... Colquhoun makes each period swim into view through little snapshots of the people and their culture... We learn of generations of cooks and kitchen maids and boys, follow the development of technology from Roman cauldrons and Tudor spits to tinned foods and microwaves and trace the fashions and shifts in meal times, utensils and place settings. From the mead halls of Beowulf to 1960s cocktail parties, Taste is a treat, stuffed with scholarly information yet whisked up light as a souffle...

Praise for 'A Thing in Disguise' 'A model of its kind. Like all good biographies, her study makes the past surprising again.' Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year 'If a better biography was published this year, I didn't read it.' Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year 'Energetic, irresistible, a marvellously invigorating tale.' Francis Wheen, The Observer

'Kate Colquhoun is the perfect combination of a meticulous social historian and gifted writer, one who combines information with anecdote to make this a readable history of Britain through its food.'

"This is a fascinating book, brilliantly researched and involvingly presented."

"The book teems with pleasing insights."

"Charming details appear on every page of this fluently written survey."

"Read Taste when you are hungry-by the end you will feel very, very full."

"Taste is a treat. Stuffed with scholarly information yet whisked up as light as a soufflé."

Every page is packed with good things, historical and cuinary, peppered
with personalities and salted with wit... Colquhoun makes each period
swim into view through little snapshots of the people and their
culture... We learn of generations of cooks and kitchen maids and
boys, follow the development of technology from Roman cauldrons and
Tudor spits to tinned foods and microwaves and trace the fashions and
shifts in meal times, utensils and place settings. From the mead halls
of Beowulf to 1960s cocktail parties, Taste is a treat, stuffed with
scholarly information yet whisked up light as a souffle...

Kate Colquhoun's delightfully savoury stamp through the past shows the
history of British cooking, like that of our language, has been one of
adaptation and imitation... not only is it a fascinating and surprising
story; it says more good things about the British than we might
imagine... Crucially, in such a history, Colquhoun excels at evoking
the smells and tastes of the past... this is z book that delights in
overturning our notions of the past... A fascinating book, brilliantly
researched and involvingly presented.

Along the way, Kate Colquhoun asks and answers a fascinating range of questions from the weighty to the lighthearted. Did the Romans use pepper? How did the Black Death lead to the beginning of rural baking? Why was the sale of fruit banned in 1569? What linked roasted meats and morality in the 1790s? When did we move from serving everything at once to the succession of courses we know today? From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, the Romans to the Regency, few things have mirrored society or been affected by its various upheavals as much as the food we eat and the way we cook it. In an age of convenience and waste, in which Delia Smith has written a book telling us how to boil an egg and Jamie Oliver has become the guardian of our children's diets, Kate Colquhoun explores two thousand years of our rich culinary heritage, uncovering the ebb and flux of fashions that have both linked and distinguished different societies throughout the ages. Celebrating every aspect of the history of our cooking - from Anglo-Saxon feasts and Tudor banquets, through the skinning of eels and invention of ice cream, to Dickensian dinner-party excess and the exponential growth of frozen food - "Taste" tells an intimate as well as formal story as rich and diverse as a five-course banquet. Filled with unusual facts and beautifully illustrated, it is as much about the invisible hoards who influence cookery as about culinary stars and equipment. It is nothing less than an involving and immediate history of the British people, told through the ways we have prepared and shared food down the centuries.

Kate Colquhoun is the author of A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton (2003). It was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2004 and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003. She reviews regularly for the Daily Telegraph and has written for The Times, the Financial Times, BBC History Magazine, Saga Magazine, The (RHS) Garden and Country Life Magazine