Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, Alice Thomas Ellis

Cookery books are not generally as amusing as this one! Alice Thomas Ellis gives us three centuries of recipes and tasty titbits about food, sprinkled with a delightful handful of comedy.

Take, for example, the anecdote about Edgar and Gladys – he married her in haste when he was leaving for a remote part of Africa. When she joins him, he shows her round the bungalow and asks what she means to cook him for supper. Eggs were, he claimed, the only available ingredients. ‘But I don’t cook eggs!’ responded Gladys, who hated cooking, ‘but I could play you some Chopin.’  He threw her to the lions.

The male chauvinism of such a story is matched by the opulence of some of the menus. A menu for a 21st birthday party includes 30 roasted bullocks, 50 hogs, 50 calves and 50 sheep as well as, rather oddly, one leveret.

Five a day was simply not the rule. We are struck by the absence of vegetables in menus of the last three centuries.

Full of laughs and well worth reading, Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring – A Gallimaufry, published by Virago, is nevertheless, a book to dip into. It will keep you laughing for a month, but would be difficult to digest in a single portion.

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