Food in Nineteenth-Century British History

A curious phenomenon occurred in British food writing from around the 1860s. Publishers began printing books dedicated to specific meals. Breakfast. Luncheons. Afternoon Tea. Dinners. Until this time, most cookbooks had been hefty tomes containing hundreds of pages of recipes, but the new recipe books were slimmer and more accessible, catering for a broader readership. The appearance of focused cookbooks reveals the growing influence of advanced printing technologies and rising literacy levels combined with changes in social life and class relations that coalesced around food, granting mealtimes great importance. The sources reprinted in this volume were produced in response to the changing social dynamics that accompanied industrialisation, urbanisation and socio-economic modernisation.