The Roast Porpoise of Old England

What a delectable banquet of a book this is. Diane Purkiss examines how food has created and underpinned the history of the English nation by detailing the slow work of transforming raw ingredients into sustenance. Purkiss divides her book into chapters devoted to broad categories (such as apples, pigs, loaves, fishes, foraging and tinned foods), interspersing these with entertaining and discursive essays on breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. If occasionally the reader feels that the plate is pulled away before she has had a proper mouthful, this is only because even a book of over five hundred pages can’t do complete justice to such a vast subject.