Consuming Passions

What is happening in this age of the broiler house, the factory-frozen, the tinned and the prepacked, to the fine tradition of English food. But then what is the fine tradition of English food? It is fashionable to look back wistfully to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and grieve for the fine ingredients, the simplicity. But, as Philippa Pullar so entertainingly shows, this nostalgia is based on a myth, compounded by scholars who never went near a kitchen and were convinced that medieval dishes were over spiced and repulsive. What have the ancient Romans with their orgies, the…