Tasting the Past: Recipes From the Stone Age to the Present

Fascinating bookl I must get my courage up and try some ancient recipes!

I love this book. I looked at a friend's copy of it and ordered it instantly. Its got some very genuine recipes from all eras of British history - some which are still so relevant today. I intend to treat friends to samples of all the eras at some point!

This book is going to be loved by foodies and those interested in our history. Lovely pictures and interesting recipes and facts - you could use it for a themed evening or event.

At first glance this is an interesting book, giving collections of recipes from various time periods. Sadly the author has used very few original sources and her bibliography quotes almost entirely secondary and even tertiary sources. None of the original texts are quoted or even referenced with the recipes so it is impossible to track down the original to see how Ms Wood has adapted them.

You know there may be problems with a cookbook when the all page numbers given in the index are wrong ... sadly, the problems with this as a cookbook worsen when its considered as a piece of practical research. Published to fill the historical recipe niche, the history is badly done and the recipes poorly written. If you're looking for a good historical cookbook, I'd recommend  British Museum Cookbook  in lieu of this work although the British Museum work does cover more than just British historical cooking.On the food book side of 'Tasting the Past' the recipes are often just ingredient lists with a bit of vague instruction following. For example, the recipe for Celtic 'bread cups' omits any reference whatsoever to the temperature at which the bread should be cooked; you're going to have to recreate the author's trial and error to arrive at an acceptable result. A recipe for cooking leeks with bacon & thyme indicates that the bacon & thyme are chopped but makes no mention of what to do with the leeks - slap them in whole? Clearly they ought to be chopped, unless they should be cut in larger pieces? There are bean recipes that neglect to mention beans really do need just a bit of salt, an ingredient Celtic Britons had easy access to, and recipes neglecting any mention of substitutions for types of seaweed one can collect from certain British shorelines, and so on.This sort of hit-and-miss approach to recipe-writing persists through the book: "they're not recipes, they're more of a guideline" as a Pirate in the Caribbean might say. The point of publishing a recipe book is to make it easier for others to achieve the results the author has worked so hard at, not to send them off in a general direction with a piece of paper and a 'best of luck' attitude.On the historical side however the errors are much louder. One recipe is better called 'The Bacon Sarnie', i.e. assuming out of nowhere that pre-Roman British Celts breakfasted upon Bacon Sandwiches: "wholesome bread liberally spread with butter and eaten with lots of bacon crisped on stones by the fire."Historically speaking this is indefensible make-believe with fairy glitter on top.There is evidence for wheaten yeast bread but jumping from the tostada-shell looking 'bread cups' found in archaeological digs to the common consumption of the buttered breakfast SANDWICH, a food item unknown until the 17th Century Netherlands in the form of the beledge broodje, demands *some* sort of reference aside from starry-eyed speculation. At the very least label the starry-eyed, playing-at-ancients speculation.This type of make-believe taken from an historical/archaeological beginning makes the entire book questionable. I simply cannot rely on the author for those eras about which I know little when she is so casually inventive about those eras about which I am familiar, eras where one can find conclusions from evidence supported by research from respected, reliable, published sources, the British Museum chief amongst them in English.At its best, the book is amateurish as a cookbook and just plain silly as history. It was written for a British audience (Borlotti beans are what North Americans know as Cranberry or Roman Beans) but that's no problem if you have a kitchen scale. Originally I'd thought they forgot to put a recipe for the attractive photo of "Civil war fried beans & onion cakes" in the book. After searching page-by-page several times, I did finally find it, on p.75 - after reading the Civil War chapter THREE times.Save your money, give this one a miss. British Museum Cookbook