Books by Diane Purkiss
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English Literature, Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford. She was formerly Professor of English at Exeter University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed The Witch in History, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, and The English Civil War: A People’s History. She specialises in Renaissance and women’s literature, witchcraft and the English Civil War.
English Food: A People's History
by Diane Purkiss
🏆 Winner of the Guild of Food Writers 2023 Food Book Award
Most food history is about banquets. In thirty years’ time, when people read the food history of now, they will hear all about the coronation quiche, notwithstanding the fact that it doesn’t really represent a current food trend. Some people will loyally go ahead and make it, but it’s not really a good sampling of 2023 food culture. So I was interested in whether there was another way. I decided to go beyond cookbooks—because most food history is really based on recipe books—to sources for what people were actually eating, and how they were cooking.
There are two kinds of food historians. Ones who try out the recipes, and the ones who just copy them down. I’m the first kind. So I got really interested in how very few of us there are—there are honourable exceptions. Others will study without ever making their own bread or their own jam, or trying anything out themselves.
[Q: That sounds fun. Was it fun?]
Yes, actually too much fun, which is one reason why it took me ages. It’s also an inexhaustibly large topic, even confined just to England. My first draft was twice the length of the book actually published. And even so, the book is long, isn’t it?
But the interesting thing to me was that it isn’t like most other history, which is like writing a novel—this happens, then that happens because of this. In food history, you can’t connect things up like that. Things mysteriously appear and then disappear. I came to find that interesting, and learned to live with it.
The best books on The History of Food recommended by Diane Purkiss
Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods
Diane Purkiss and Naomi J Miller (eds)
Interviews with Diane Purkiss
The best books on The History of Food, recommended by Diane Purkiss
History too often glosses over basic questions of subsistence and food availability, argues Oxford academic Diane Purkiss—whose new book English Food is a social history told through the food on people’s tables. Here, she recommends five books about the history of food that focus on the diet of the common person as opposed to the royal banquet table.
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1
Red Shift
by Alan Garner -
2
The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia
by Neil Price -
3
Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
by Rane Willerslev -
4
The Annotated Collected Poems
Edward Thomas (ed. by Edna Longley) -
5
The Poems of Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë (ed. by Derek Roper)
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
For centuries, the witch has been an index not only of what we fear most in others, but also what we cannot cope with—the powerfully abnormal, strange and often irrational elements—in ourselves. And the best way to understand the history of witches and witchcraft is to first understand the supernatural, according to Diane Purkiss, Professor at Keble College, Oxford and author of the lauded book The Witch in History.
