Tasting the Past

Food historian and archaeologist Jacqui Wood's excellent Prehistoric Cooking is now in its third edition and is one of Oxbow's all time best sellers. This new offering is a more directly practical and popular affair, a cookbook with over 200 recipes to let the reader really experience the flavours of the past. The recipes are linked by introductory text, explaining the development of cooking in Britain through the ages, and giving an idea of how people ate from everyday staples to elaborate feast dishes for the elites. There's also information about where people got their food from, evidence for nutrition, and culinary customs and curiosities. It's also good fun - on the lentil stew of the Roman army, for example Wood advises "In Roman times there was said to be a fashion one year to make ugly looking food to play a joke on your guests to see if they were polite enough to try it. This recipe would suit this well."