This is a revised version of the original 1991 edition. It is most easily tagged as gastronomy, but it is also memoir, history and recipe book.

There is no denying that, even among people who should know better, English cooking has a poor reputation. Boxer's thesis is that this is unfair. Between the wars there was a move away from stodgy Edwardian cooking, driven by a shortage of servants and the introduction of modern cooking equipment. (We are not talking about the working class, whose diet remained atrocious.) The momentum was lost after the Second World War, with Elizabeth David beginning a vogue for foreign cuisines that has not abated until very recently.

Boxer was born in 1934, and the introductions to each chapter include reminiscences from her own upper-class childhood, setting the food in its cultural context. The recipes are all sourced from books of the period; a great many of them are familiar to anyone raised on what I like to think of as "good plain cooking" of the British style (Boxer cannot avoid Scottish recipes, being Scottish herself).

Recommended to anyone with an interest in social history, or in unfussy, delicious recipes. If, like me, you are interested in both, you are in for a real treat. ( )