Category: English Food
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Fried Chicken in Colonial Virginia: Assessing the Evidence
Was ‘Southern fried chicken’ an established dish in Virginia long before the publication of the first printed recipe in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824)? In Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time (2013), African American food writer Adrian Miller suggests that it was. Miller writes: No one knows…
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Hot Peppers and Hot Sauces in the English Cookery of the 17th to 19th Centuries
Hot peppers – capsicums – were introduced to England from Spain in the 16th century, and were growing in England by 1548.[1] Looking at 17th century English books, a number of references to ‘Guinea peppers’ and cayenne pepper appear, with an early example being found in John Parkinson’s Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629).[2] In…
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Guinness: A Very British Drink
Today, Guinness is seen by many as a quintessential expression of ‘Irish culture’. If you attend a St. Patrick’s Day event – which now take place all over the world – drinking Guinness is basically mandatory. Unsurprisingly, this stereotypical ‘Irishness’ has its critics. In an article titled ‘Hey Americans, Please Stop Pretending to Be Irish’,…
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The Lives of the Rural Poor in 19th Century England
In 1892, the English writer Richard Jefferies published an account of the lives led by the rural labourers of his home county of Wiltshire, expanding upon a piece he originally wrote for The Times in 1872. Jefferies described a grim life of grinding poverty and malnutrition and noted that the poor English agricultural labourer ‘presents…
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The English Origins of Sweet Potato Pie
The sweet potato is native to South America and Christopher Columbus records its discovery in his journals from his fourth voyage (to Yucatan and Honduras). Columbus introduced the sweet potato to Spain around 1493 and by 1500 they were an established crop in Europe. Sweet potatoes were ‘enormously popular in sixteenth century Europe, especially England’.…
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The War On Pubs: A Brief History
The rise of the middle classes in the 18th and 19th centuries saw the birth of a new type of Englishman. Whereas previously, English society was largely made up of a wealthy aristocratic elite at the top, and the masses below them, there was now a new and growing class of people who fitted into…
EDMUND STANDING 