Grace Dent’s Hungry and Pen Vogler’s Scoff

Grace Dent’s gose She shares many thematic similarities with Olivia Potts ’A Half-Baked Idea, both of which are memories of the joy of food, starting out in a competitive London career and in difficult family situations. Although Potts ’memoir enrolled in a baking course at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, after deciding not to pursue a career as a lawyer after her mother’s untimely death, Dent’s inexpensive 1980s food is about childhood nostalgia for beige, finding her feet. Vascular dementia including a 2-year-old journalist and his father’s health problems.

Dent is currently best known in the UK as a judge on the BBC MasterChef series. Since writing the first column of his regular restaurant less than a decade ago, he has been hailed as the best critic, utterly unattractive: “Heston Blumenthal appears to be making a risotto using a Dyson Airblade and a conical flask. No wonder, Dent’s observational humor is consistently bright about his childhood in Cumbria, where the arrival of the great Asda was a decade-long event, not a century-old one, as he wrote in the Stirling University student newspaper. She worked in fashion magazine offices with names like “Flinty-Wimslow Taffeta.” She also writes about her family: in her teens, she discovered that she had siblings on her father’s side, and when her health began to deteriorate, she He spends more time in Cumbria and returns to Toby Carvery. it’s fun.

The double meaning of the title Pen Vogler’s mockery especially suitable for a book entitled ‘A History of Food and Class in Britain’. It travels through the history of traditional British cuisine (including roast meat, Cornish pasta and Christmas milk), accepted national dishes (turkey, curry and ice cream among many others) and foods that have been dependent on fashion and fashion (gin and avocado). will inevitably appear here) with examples from the medieval period to last year’s pasta store.

Vogler shows how most aspects of British food culture are closely linked to all sorts of social class issues. How people use cutlery, the time of day, the vocabulary they use to describe food, where they buy food and which restaurants they go to often, can often tell a lot about a person’s wants and prejudices. Sharing a meal with someone, therefore, will make us unconsciously make lightning-fast judgments about their social class. British cuisine has never had a great reputation abroad, but it is clear that we as a nation are quite obsessed with food, at least in terms of what it reveals about social status, if not the food itself. It is not surprising that the word “scone” should continue to be debated for a while in the national debate.

Britain’s social history is great, entertaining and informative alike. I’ve refused to use food-related wordplay in this blog post so far, but let me tell you that I swallowed these two books and they were delicious and certainly not trivial. More, please.

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