Growing and eating: book ‘picks’ of 2014
Jans Ondaatje Rolls ‘The Bloomsbury Cookbook’ (Thames and Hudson) is as much social history as cookbook. The ‘Bloomsberries’ may have been the foodies of their day, but were profoundly ignorant of all aspects of food production and preparation. The book combines food related paintings, prose and gossip, with recipes, to provide a very human portrait of this much studied Group.
From a very different perspective and taking a much longer historical sweep, Margaret Willes in ‘The gardens of the British working class’ (Yale University Press) focuses more on the struggles of creating a ‘blessed plot’ from cottage gardens and allotments. She brings it to life through the words of people such as Joseph Turrill, small time market gardener and diarist who was a neighbour of Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington. A horticultural history of the people who latterly were employed as the cooks and gardeners to the intellectuals.
This post first appeared as an article in The Guardian ‘readers books of the year 2014’, on 27 December 2014.
