Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 102

In this important book, the celebrated agricultural historian Joan Thirsk turns her attention from the fields to the kitchen. Put that way, it seems a short and logical step from how food was grown to how it was eaten; but it would appear that, hitherto, agricultural and food historians have existed in separate academic boxes.

As Thirsk remarks, the printed record of food in early modern England – in other words, the cookery book and its close ally the book of dietary advice – is familiar and well studied: Andrew Boorde and Thomas Elyot in the sixteenth century, through Gervase Markham and Robert May in the seventeenth, to Charles Carter in the eighteenth. Yet Thirsk rightly notes that they were written by people familiar with upper-class food and cookery. There were in fact ‘two food worlds’:

The one was inhabited by food writers who ... pontificated about food and were happy to pronounce authoritatively, though none of them knew as much about food throughout England as they liked to think. The other world was inhabited by women and some men cooking food according to their social, local and family traditions, while adapting them in each generation to suit changing tastes and circumstances. The two worlds interacted all the time, but coexisted and were recognisable different (p.x). After setting the scene of English food before 1500,

Thirsk looks at the printed record for the period 1500–60. Then five further chronological chapters follow, entitled ‘The widening world of food, 1550–1600’, ‘Science and the search for food, 1600–40’, and ‘War and a renewed search for food, 1640–60’, ‘Food in a quickening commercial world, 1660–1700’, and ‘On the edge of the next food world, 1700–60’. The final two chapters before the conclusion are especially novel and fascinating. Chapter 8 discusses ‘Regional and social patterns of diet’, showing a rich pattern of regional diversity in taste. And chapter 9 takes a closer look at various foodstuffs: bread, butcher’s meat and rabbits, eggs and poultry meat, fish, dairy foods, vegetables and herbs, fruit, drinks and condiments.

From a wider historiographical point of view, Thirsk’s most important thesis is that ‘It has become a conventional assertion among historians who have not studied food history in any detail to say that our forebears ate a monotonous and boring diet’ (p.xi), and she sets out to put an end to this mistaken conclusion. As a sociologist who has contributed to food history, I am one of the people who must probably plead guilty as charged. I think I took over that conventional assumption from Marc Bloch, and from Theodore Zeldin who was my mentor when I embarked on my book All Manners of Food (1985). In mitigation, I can claim that I was explicitly more concerned with the food and cookery of the upper classes than with that of the urban and rural poor, and more especially my interest was in comparing the development of ‘culinary culture’ – not just the cookery but the attitudes towards eating – of England and France (from the late Middle Ages until around 1980).

Yet although Thirsk convincingly shows that the poorer people ate a large variety of foods, and that what they grew underwent change during the two and half centuries before the conventional beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think she quite blows Bloch and his perhaps slightly uncritical followers like me out of the water. Bloch was well aware, of course, of the Columbian exchange. More to the point, though, he was arguing that in the field of food as in so much else, differential modes of time were simultaneously in play. The longue durée in food was more evidently at work at the lower end of the social scale, while the rapid succession of food fashions (sufficiently rapid to qualify as histoire des événements, I think, and increasing in pace over the centuries) could best be observed in the upper reaches. I am not sure that he meant that no change took place at all in the food of the peasantry. So I will admit to not having given sufficient attention to the pace of change in the food of the lower orders, but I am not yet convinced that the traditional model of differential rates of change can be discarded – even if our measures need to be carefully recalibrated.