Here follows the text of a talk I gave to a food and cookery history weekend at Christchurch, Oxford in 2004. Rather like a lazy eighteenth century vicar, I have occasionally pillaged texts and talks that I have given on previous occasions (for example in Adelaide now published by that University in 'Culinary History', edited by A. Lynn Martin and Barbara Santich, 2004). To enliven the affair, and to compensate for the fact that I don't understand Powerpoint or audio visual techniques, I distributed photocopies of some historical documents which I have attached here as a PDF file which according to all the television advertisements this season you should have no difficulty in opening and reading. However, if you can't be bothered with the download, you can equally well ignore the whole thing.

RECIPES AND SOURCES OF INFORMATION IN FOOD HISTORY: A LECTURE

The reason for my standing before you is a seventeenth-century aesthete and diarist called John Evelyn. He was not educated at this college, but rather at Balliol up the road, but for forty years of the last century, his manuscripts were housed in Christ Church library. A friend of mine, who was educated here, began to fossick among the papers and eventually edited the collection of recipes made by John Evelyn over most of his adult life. This edition I published.

John Evelyn was a remarkable man. He was born into a Surrey family in the 1620s (their wealth had come from the manufacture of gunpowder), a younger son and somewhat shy and retiring. The troubles of the Civil War were not for him and he had gone travelling in Europe to avoid any upsets. Interested in the arts, a friend and protégé of his Surrey neighbour, Henry Howard Earl of Arundel, England's greatest connoisseur and collector, he had used his time abroad to bone up on things artistic, particularly with regard to gardening, architecture and furnishings. Although he was never rich, nor ever exactly important, he was the sort of chap that people went to for advice, who knew what was good and bad, vulgar or refined. He was also ace at gardening and his own grounds at a small country house near Greenwich were famous to his peers. This sort of sensibility is maintained by a general curiosity and enquiring mind: if you can't afford it, at least you can talk, look and note. The results of his curiosity remain among his manuscripts. He made very extensive collections: about old skills and trades, about gardening and fine arts, and about cookery. This is not as bizarre as it might sound: although very few courtiers actually took off their jackets and put on their pinnies, there were several men of the court circle who made collections of recipes. They were sufficiently interested in their food to do this at least. They asked their friends and their family and jotted down their experiences abroad.

One of these collections became very famous indeed. It was made by Sir Kenelm Digby, a soldier and sailor (pirate indeed), a mathematician and courtier, a man with a big brain. After he died, his steward collected together his recipe manuscripts and published them as The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digbie, Knight, Opened. There were many recipes for mead and metheglin and other drinks, but plenty for food as well.

What I would like to do today is to look at the form cookery books took in the early modern period, and the arrangement of their recipes. Then to identify various other sources of information that we have about people's eating habits, and then to wonder how far some cookery book literature, particularly in the eighteenth century, was, like our glossy magazines, as much wish fulfilment as hard and realistic advice.

The recipe book as a literary form has an amazingly long life. Already, in the 5th century BC, there was a corpus of cookery books (though none has survived save a fragment here and there) to instruct the classical Greeks. Albeit there is surprisingly little that has survived from the Roman Empire (just the treatise named after Apicius) when we get to the Middle Ages, (whether we are talking of Byzantium or the Greek Roman Empire, of the Arabs, or of the Western barbarian Franks) we soon find a number of cookery texts. Although these are all manuscripts, not printed books, it is also remarkable how strong are the links between various groups of these surviving records. The same dishes are described, the same texts are sometimes repeated from scribe to scribe. It is almost as if there is a 'recipe-central' out of which people are taking their material.

Once the printed book became the accepted form, from the middle of the fifteenth century, so cookery books cropped up once more. There seems to have been an inexhaustibly need for the form. Yet who, in the first instance, required a cookbook?

The form of early recipes is not exactly encouraging to the novice cook. A medieval recipe for stewed chicken reads:

Take (there is that first and vital word to every recipe: 'Recipe' the Latin for 'Take') boiled chickens and strain the broth into a pot. Add wine and sugar to it and season it with powdered ginger, verjuice (a sour juice of green apples or grapes) and cinnamon, strain it again and colour it with saffron.

Rather than a useful method (and certainly no quantities), this is more an aide-memoire of ingredients. Yet, it is positively oozing with instruction when compared to a recipe for the same dish in an earlier manuscript:

Sweet broth, verjuice of grapes, chopped parsley, cloves, mace, cubebs, in the time of chicken after Easter, and that it tastes highly spiced, saffron boiled in the broth with parsley, the colour yellow.

These were notes indeed and give us a clue as to the main intention of early cookery books: they were to help forgetful professionals, or to act as bibles for apprentices. They already knew how to cook, but they had a terrible memory for ingredients.

The same pattern is evident in early printed books of recipes. But there soon comes an added ingredient which is WOMAN. Printed literature, because it can be more simply replicated, gets into far more homes than do manuscripts. There were hardly enough male cooks to act as a market: hence the secret of growing literacy and availability of books: knowledge extended to ever wider spheres.

Women had always worked the kitchen: men only worked as professionals, and then probably only among the upper classes. And then, they too were often assisted by women. Twas ever thus, and would remain so for some centuries to come.

There were two more revolutions that coincided with the spread of the printed book. The first was the spread of sugar beyond the medicine cabinet (the 16th century was the first period when we suffered from an overdose of sweetness) and the second was the discovery (as far as western Europe was concerned) of the art of distilling. These two activities were the preserve of women: practised especially in the still-room, and it was to address these questions that many early recipes books were composed. They were books of secrets (often of alchemists of chemists) and instructed in the art of producing sweet dishes and sweetmeats suitable for the new sweet banquet course in fashionable meals, or the art of producing medicines and distillations ('waters' as they were called) that could be deployed for perfumery and medicine by the Lady Bountiful. Our document number 2, which is the illustration for a later seventeenth century title page by a woman writer called Hannah Woolley, shows the woman in all her activities (and the sort of activities that a recipe book might hope to instruct her about). At the top left she is making preserves (oranges and suchlike were also a new thing of the Tudor era, which needed treating with the new material, sugar). At the top right she is making waters, with a still behind her. In the middle she is adorning her face with creams and unguents, all of which she might make up herself according to recipes handed out by books such as this. At the bottom she is making pies on the left and roasting and boiling over the kitchen fire on the right. The oven can just be discerned at the back left, and the dresser lined with all the serving platters behind the larder of dead game in the centre.

These women were a newly literate force to be reckoned with and a new literature had come about to help them in their new labours. But they were not without energies and abilities on their own account and it is quite apparent that they had not waited for some man to print a book for their use but had begun to gather recipes and instructions in their own notebooks. Much of seventeenth and early eighteenth century printed cookery literature depends on these female (and sometimes male) manuscript collections.

John Evelyn's is one such. The sheet which is the first of your little folder is a sample of the extremely neat presentation of Evelyn's collection written by his clerk. After the clerk had done the first couple of hundred, the book then entered general use and further additions are made by Evelyn and his wife in less ornate form. The first recipe is for a cream cheese, then for a couple of chestnut dishes.

Many young ladies did the same as John Evelyn, they started their recipe books as neat as can be, they grouped the recipes, indexed them, and then proceeded to add to them with jottings, tipped in press cuttings all higgledy-piggledy for the rest of their lives. Their books were then taken over by their daughters and added to in their turn.  The recipe book on Sheet 4 is an example. It comes from a young girl of a Sussex family. A lovely title page, and the neatest of writing. Note how a later hand has added 'good' to the recipe for Wafers. This was Elizabeth's daughter.

Such manuscript recipe books can be monuments to a writer's life. We should not think of them only as museum pieces. We all have them, in our homes today. And those of people who have moved through space, or up social ladders, or through time, have precious historical documents in their hands. A migrant, for example, will record her original memories, then versions of these memories as they are filtered through the medium of the host culture, then the memories of the host culture itself, perhaps filtered through her own particular vision. In the seventeenth century it was a journey more likely through time. A young girl, preparing her trousseau, would compile a collection of her mother's recipes. These might include mother's own collections (thus including granny), then should would add to it as time went on. When the book comes down to us, it seems dated 1712, but it may in fact have recipes of two or three generations before that.

The recipe manuscript illustrated on sheet 3 of your folder is one from 17th century Northamptonshire. Here the writing is cursive, not formal, but the book is still neat and orderly. The compiler has noted the source of her recipe, this is very similar to how we make up our own collections ('Aunt Sadie's fruit cake').

I have put on the same sheet the identical recipe (the third one here) from a book by Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, perhaps the most famous of 17th century cookery books. May's work represents another strand of literature for the time. There were many books that relied on women's (or men's) manuscript collections - simply dishing them up with not much editorial change. Interestingly, these books were usually written by men. Until the later 17th century authorship was not reckoned a female activity. The men therefore took it upon themselves to present women's work (for it was mainly women's manuscript collections that were pillaged). There were some more serious book, especially in the later part of the century that were by professional chefs who were making a real effort to write books of instruction and let people into the secrets of their craft. These were more than just memoranda books (though the recipes still show signs of needing some editing) and really looked to the next stage of development: into some form of DIY manual.

We have been talking about two ways of transmitting culinary information: the printed recipe book and the private manuscript collection. We have noted that there may be connections between them. There was a third which was really no different from the samizdat novel of communist Russia. Unable or unwilling to go to a printer,  private copies of a single text were made and distributed. This form seems particularly connected with cookery schools. These seem to have begun in Restoration Britain. Most tradesmen learnt their skills as apprentices. But women were not apprenticed, and had no structure of trade and guild as did men. But they still needed instruction, particularly in cookery as the growing middle class populations of London and other towns took on servants to cater for themselves. Hence schools sprung up teaching both young servants and sometimes their employers. No school was more famous that Edward Kidder's which ran in London in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Sheet 5 of your folder gives you a portrait of the man himself, as well as a doodle from the working notes of one of his students, which seems to show a formidable lady who might have been Mrs Kidder. There survive several versions of Mr Kidder's recipes written out in fine clerkly hand and evidently distributed to his students. Similarly, there survive a few versions of a set of recipes of one Edward Ayres who was a cook at Oxford at about the same time. Presumably these too were copied out for the same sort of reason. The Ayres recipes never made it to printed text. Edward Kidder's did, although they were printed as if they were written by hand (sheet 6 of your folder). That Edward Kidder emphasised the importance of pastry work just shows the sort of priorities that were evident at the schools themselves. The invitation card that my colleague Ivan Day has found of another contemporary cookery school, Nathaniel Maystnor, shows how pastry was pretty important to them too.

What I have been showing only serves to underline that cookery literature was more than just cookery books: there was a tremendous interplay between private manuscript and printed text, and even things that might be no more than lecture notes. Different sources of cookbook will reflect different styles of cooking. Thus a book based on private manuscripts will probably be full of domestic or family recipes, and might be even rather old-fashioned; books written by practising chefs will be up to the minute and probably full of desperately fancy cooking.

I then wanted to touch upon the gap between what people actually ate every day of their lives and what cookery books think people ate or encouraged them to eat. I wanted to this in two ways: to end with I will look at a few diaries and other sources, but to begin I would like to point to other ways of pulling out culinary information from our libraries and record offices. Many of these sources relate to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to the relatively well to do or even rich landed classes. Nonetheless, we should attend to them.

Item 8 is a page from a notebook of a not very important Northamptonshire Georgian gentleman. He liked to keep notes about many things, among which were his dinners - either out with friends or entertaining in his own home. This is the record of a particularly grand dinner given by his neighbour Lord Spencer during an election campaign in 1793 when he was particularly out to impress. The notes are arranged so one can see how the table was arranged (the writing is drastically bad) and the beauty of the record is that it confirms what might or might not be in the cookery books of the time. Plenty of other families kept this sort of record. Ivan Day has even discovered notes for the Cecil family at Hatfield from the middle of the 17th century. As I will stress, not all dinners were this grand.

Sheet 9 contains two extracts from account books of country gentry families, one from the end of the 16th century, relates to the household of Anthony Mildmay, soon to be Elizabeth's ambassador to France and Earl of Westmoreland, who lived at Apethorpe Hall (which survives) in Northamptonshire. It is the kitchen account for the last week of 1594 and shows the remarkable range of birds, meat and fish consumed in a large household at that time.

The second account is from a Warwickshire family, the Shirleys, who lived in a giant Gothic house Ettington Park, now a hotel, near Stratford on Avon in the Victorian period. The account gives the weights, but not the cuts, of meats cooked for the parlour and for the servants hall during the week. It also totals up the number of dinners served and underlines something that cookbooks can never tell us, how much people might have eaten in previous ages. Of course, statistics is a problematic thing, but some conclusions should be able to be drawn from all this evidence.

Sheet 10 is the ground plan of a small country house in Northamptonshire, Ecton Hall. The family were intent, towards the end of the Victorian period, on bringing it up to date by the addition of a library, a billiard room and a new service wing and kitchen. This is quite a modest arrangement, no bakehouse, brewhouse, game store, etc., but shows the sort of things that one should bare in mind when reading recipe books and how they relate to day to day life: the separation of the master and servant; the control of the butler over the plate, the housekeeper over the stores, and so forth.

Many of the assumptions underlying eighteenth-century English cookery books failed to take account of the daily routine of their readers. Using them as the only evidence of dietary patterns, may lead us down byways that ought never to have been explored.

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Cookery books comment upon diet and life in two ways. Firstly they choose recipes and ingredients. That doesn't mean that the recipes are those which everyone wants to cook, however. In the 1753 edition of Eliza Smith's Compleat housewife, the author writes:

There are indeed already in the world various books that treat on this subject, and which bear great names, as cooks to kings, princes and noblemen, and from which one might justly expect something more than many, if not most of those I have read, perform; but found myself deceived by my expectations; for many of them to us are impractiable, others whimsical, others unpalatable, unless to depraved palates; some unwholesome; many things copies from old authors, and recommended without (as I am persuaded) the copiers ever having had any experience of the palatableness, or had any regard to the wholesomeness of them; which two things ought to be the standing rules, that no pretenders to cookery ought to deviate from. These [i.e. my] receipts are all suitable to English constitutions, and English palates, wholesome, toothsome, all practicable and easy to be performed.

Secondly, cookery books may suggest means whereby their recipes should be deployed on the table, and in the diet, of the reader. This often took the form of table and meal plans, bills of fare and sundry comments on proper behaviour or modes of cookery. Not every writer was so prescriptive. Hannah Glasse (she of 'first catch your hare') wrote in 1747:

Nor shall I take upon me to direct a lady how to set out her table; for that would be impertinent, and lessening her judgement in the oeconomy of her family. I hope she will find here every thing necessary for her cook, and her own judgement will tell her how they are to be placed. Nor indeed do I think it would be pretty to see a lady's table set out after the directions of a book.

 I shall say no more, only hope my book will answer the ends I intend it for; which is to improve the servants, and save the ladies a great deal of trouble.

Whatever Hannah Glasse might feel, the role of the cookery book was as an essential educational tool. As gentility seeped down the social scale and the consuming middle class expanded, new entrants to the social hierarchy needed points of reference as much in the kitchen as in the counting house. So too did their servants, both because they climbed the ladder in step with their mistresses and because their employers were so taken by their new-found gentility that they retreated from the kitchen itself. The experience of a single, relatively uneducated but on the verge of genteel woman in Georgian Lancashire is a case in point: Ellen Weeton's early adulthood was spent as an impoverished schoolteacher eating next to nothing. In 1808 she noted that she was happiest eating milk, bread, eggs, fruit and vegetables. When thanking her brother for a gift of rooks for a pie at her uncle's, she admitted to dining herself on 'sallad and bread and butter, which I am fond of and is little trouble'. Some relief from a life of drudgery was afforded by the offer of the post of governess to a young girl and her stepmother in a small country house in the Lake District. However, she found that her responsibilities extended beyond the schoolroom into the kitchen and dining room and that she was not equipped for the role. She wrote to her brother:

If any  rules of modern etiquette with which it is probable I may be unacquainted should occur to you, write them down for me, particularly at the dinner or supper table. I was at Kendal on Monday last, and enquiring of an old lady in a bookseller's shop for a pamphlet on the art of carving, I observed she looked very odd, and seemed a good deal confused. 'No-o, Ma'am,' she hesitatingly answered, 'we have not got any.' I repeated the question in two or three various ways finding she either did not hear or understand me. 'Have you got any books about cows?' she enquired of her husband. 'Cows!' I thought to myself. 'What is the woman rambling about?' 'Have you got any books,' I again enquired, 'that give directions for cutting up meat at table when cooked?' 'Oh!' she said, and she smiled, 'I thought you wanted a book about cows and farriery.'

A characteristic of cookery books is that they are aspirational. They draw maps of a country inhabited by finer folk. Thus in the early eighteenth century, bookstalls seemed overrun by manuals of court cookery by chefs and stewards in royal service or, at the very least, in the pay of dukes and earls. The utility of their writings must have been zero - indeed it was acknowledged as such by their female successors, writing in reaction to their excess. A few decades on, things had not necessarily improved. A book such as William Ellis's Country Housewife's Family Companion of 1750  which claimed to give

Profitable directions for whatever relates to the management and good oeconomy of the domestick concerns of a country life, according to the present practice of the country gentleman's, the yeoman's, the farmer's, &c. wives, in the counties of Hertford, Bucks and other parts of England: showing how great savings may be made in housekeeping:

was the exception. Most persisted in suggesting meal plans and bills of fare that were at the very least for the upper gentry, if not for the aristocracy. Is that what the generality of their readers ate from day to day?

Take the meals of Parson James Woodforde, whose diaries tell so much of the minutiae of country life (in Norfolk and Somerset) during the second half of the century. Here are dinners aplenty that show off the cookery books' paradigm to a tee. When he goes to a formal affair at the local squire's in 1788, he had

some fish, ham and chicken, giblets, piggs fry, saddle of mutton roasted, boiled beef on the side table &c. 2nd course hare rosted, a pheasant [ditto] snipes [ditto] &c.

Similarly, when he gave a dinner at home to friends and colleagues in the church, he may not have had two meat courses but he still managed

2 dishes of soles fryed, ham and 3 boiled chicken, a large piece of boiled beef, beans, a couple of ducks rosted and peas, gooseberry pies and currant tarts. Our dessert after dinner was rasberries, strawberries, gooseberries and currants, almonds and raisins, and a couple of fine melons - Mr. Jeanes brought us a melon in his pocket. Port wine and mountain, strong beer, porter and table beer.

Going up the social scale, in 1791 he dined at Charles Townshend's mansion Honingham Hall (Townshend was sometime lord of the admiralty and member of one of the great East Anglian political dynasties). They sat down to

Stewed eels with onions, a saddle mutton rosted, boiled chicken and a tongue, veal-cutlets, beef-stake tarts in turretts of paste, piggs ears, &c. in the middle a stand of flowers on a painted board. Second course, a brace of fine pheasants, a roasted rabbit, amulet, macaroni, spinage and eggs, tartlets, &c. No kind of desert whatever.

He was not impressed by the last fact. Nor, indeed, had he been impressed on an earlier visit when 'most of the things [were] spoiled by being so frenchified in dressing.'

The parson's nights out do not tell the whole story. Running as undercurrent to his gastronomic excursions (which are mostly in the English manner, with little enough of a Frenchified air) are more humble meals or, at the very least, meals which anticipate the simpler two- or three-stage sequence with which we are more familiar. There are, to start with, his 'Family Dinners'. Woodforde does not record every dinner he ate. If there were no guests, the record is dumb. Occasionally, however, he is surprised by visitors. These take pot luck: they have to eat, in his words, 'Family Dinner'. This might consist of 'some skate and a piece of rost beef with a boiled rich plumb-pudding and tartlets' when he was visited by a couple of neighbouring clerics, or 'some small whiting and a rosted leg of mutton, and some jelly' at the return match a month later. That's a three-course dinner as we eat today, not a table with artful placements at top, bottom, middle and in the angles.

The social hierarchy of menu construction becomes the more obvious on tithe days and feast days when Woodforde has to feed either the yeomen farmers or the poor. The tithe dinners are substantial, but their structure is brutish. In 1788, he gave a dozen farmers,

a large piece of boiled beef, a surloin of beef rosted, a boiled leg of mutton, some salt fish, a couple of boiled rabbits and onions, with 4 large plumb puddings besides plain.

The poor were doubtless well treated, but what they got at Christmas 1789 was 'a large sirloin of beef rosted and plumb puddings with mince pies'.

The bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, whose husband had coal-mining interests in the north-east of England, used to make periodic tours of tenantry and workers. In 1786, she reported to her sister that,

We are today very busy in preparing a dinner for 500 persons, none of whom will I believe find fault with our meat or our cooking, tho' there are not any dainties or very relishing sauces; 12 enormous plumb puddings and as many with meat on them, and pyes innumerable, a sheep and more than the meat of one ox is roasting and boiling at different fires with 2 bushells of pottatoes and other garden things.

Although the scale may be gigantic, the meal structure is far nearer a traditional English Sunday dinner than it is an ambigu at the court of Louis XIV.

All this may seem a truism: the upper classes ate fancy meals, the lower did not. But I would also contend that the middle classes sometimes ate one way, other times the other. And the second manner of eating gets little mention in cookery books. Here are some further examples.

A Cornish vicar, John Penrose, visited Bath with his wife in 1766, frequently reporting back to his daughter at base. When they were confined to their lodgings, they never ate what we would term eighteenth-century dinners but rather depended on their landlady for execrable fare, paying her for each cooking process:

April 9: boiling fish - frying fish

April 10: boiling mutton, boiling mutton broth. Not two different boilings but a little oatmeal of ours delivered to the cook and two china basins of broth made which we eat before dinner.

April 11: roasting mutton. The only thing tolerably cooked of all we have had.

April 12: boiling tripe. We ordered it to be fried, wretched stuff.

April 13: boiling veal - boiling bacon and greens - a pennorth of spinach and a little bit of bacon to eat with, or relish, the veal.

April 14: roasting veal - Mem. under-roasted, and I could not eat any of it. We have bought and boiled a few potatoes in our own saucepan; and must do more, in the cookery way, ourselves. [On] Sunday, Mamma poached two eggs herself.

At about the same time, another parson, George Woodward from Berkshire, wrote of his daily life to a relative in London. His meals had a far simpler structure than might be expected, although his skill in the garden meant that provisions were often impressive. When visited by friends in 1753 they seem to have lived on the product of one pig, killed a day shortly after their arrival, and brocoli and asparagus from the garden. When every meal seems to have been some form of pork, most likely pickled, is a situation often envisioned by the author William Ellis referred to earlier. George Woodward sees his farming neighbours and parishioners eating in the same style. He tells in the winter of 1754 of a lack of greens at the market:

Bacon is but poor stuff without cabbage; but our farmers and poor people are forced to get it down now without it; some of them indeed have a few parsnips, but they are but scarce, and now and then they bake apples and eat them with it, which they say does very well.

If Woodward gives us a hint of the diet of farming folk, the diaries of Thomas Turner, a village grocer in Sussex in the 1750s offer a daily record of the dinners of the petit bourgeoisie. Very occasionally, he might indulge in something approximating one of those cookbook table plans. One episcopal visitation day he sat down to knuckle of veal, bacon and greens boiled, leg of lamb boiled and spinach, rib of beef roasted, green salad and two pond currant puddings at an inn in Lewes. But his usual fare was very much simpler. Indeed it sometimes seemed to consist of nothing but the remains of a previous meal. On eleven days in succession he dined on 'remains' - they must have been getting hairy by the finish. And there are other periods when he simply dines on a single commodity for days on end. Like George Woodward earlier, when he killed a pig, he dined on piggy bits every day for up to a month. But to list a few meals at random:

Bullocks heart baked in the oven and stuffed, pudding under it.

Cold eel pie, batter pudding and bacon.

Shin of beef stewed.

Hog's sweetbread with apple pie and bread and cheese.

Sausages baked in a batter pudding and some apple sauce.

Boiled beef, currant pudding and some carrots.

The list could be extended.

Not only is the structure of the meal quite different from that usually proposed by cookery books, but you have to hunt high and low among these examples of everyday eating for examples of the fancy dishes described by writers. The style of cooking hits the description 'English' on the button. The great majority of English cookery books of the period hold out the promise of French influence (made dishes, ragoos, fricassees, and so forth) even if they indulge in xenophobic abuse along the way. But if you search records other than recipe manuals, this style seems often to be restricted to the highest social classes such as that dinner described by Mr Supple on that notebook in your folder.

Richard Supple would have understood entirely the comment of an elderly clerical relation visiting a Berkshire family at the same time where the hostess had imported a French cook to cater for a family wedding. When the chef left for his next contract, the lady of the house was worried that her guests would be disappointed by her offerings. Not so, reported reverend uncle:

Instead of being mortified by this account [we] sincerely rejoiced. When we came to table we had the pleasure of seeing seven good eatable dishes, and could really tell what they were, and we enjoyed our meal thoroughly.

What is intriguing about many meals recorded in contemporary diaries, correspondence and accounts is that often they anticipate the dietary structure of fifty years ago or of the recent past. Yet that might never be inferred from recipe books. The dynamic of changing meal structures also reveals parallels with developments in other areas of daily life, for example changes in men's dress where clothes once thought fit for moments of leisure or informality are gradually accepted as formal attire, or fashions which were once adopted by thieves and various forms of lowlife creep insensibly up the social scale. Consider too the popularity of givennames. In England, names that are first tried out on dogs and pets are found a decade later peppering the registers of high-society nursery schools.

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