It writes of Charles I and Cromwell and Ireton and Milton but also of forgotten figures like Anna Trapnell and William Goffe too. There are descriptions of the wounds inflicted by combatants, and the rudimentary treatments given for them.

It is with great pleasure that we bring you details of the winners of The Guild of Food Writers Awards 2023 presentation, which took place in London at the Royal Institution on 6 September. You will find full details of the winners and sponsors below. Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for:As an accused witch, you could be tried in a church court, at quarter sessions (local courts), or at an assize court, where you could be condemned to death. The process, however, was similar at every level. Somebody would complain to the local justice of the peace (JP) that you had bewitched an animal, or a foodstuff, or a child. Whether or not the complaint is taken any further depends on how energetic the JP is and how much he believes in witchcraft. Established in 1954, QMP was set up in association with milk producers throughout the country to market and promote their new brand, Gold Top. Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. But I find history more interesting to research than English literature. There’s not really a lot of research in English literature. You can work on manuscripts in English literature, and that can get really interesting. But, actually, the interesting research in literature is really historical research—it’s just pretending not to be.

The political and military aspects are interspersed into the thematic coverage of the social as a sort of structural scaffolding, but not particularly systematically. Lieutenant-Colonel Cromwell, hardly gets a mention in fact. Part of my deduction of a star is due to the fact that these political-military aspects are included so haphazardly that no one seriously interested in that kind of chronological treatment would be much the wiser for having read this account. We get names, fragments of speeches, the occasional movements of troops, but all out of any overarching context. To me at least, the coverage of these aspects is so fragmentary that one has to ask why they were even included. Even if just as a structural context for the social themes, I can't help feeling it could have been done a bit better than this; a coherent high level view perhaps, rather than the interjection of decontextualized fragments. After a short essay on breakfast, Purkiss begins with bread. And where else should a history of food begin? The history of wheat is also the history of folklore, religion, magic, agriculture, boundaries, land control, plague, migration, politics and economics. Bread, which emerged from thousands of years of cultivation and experimentation, is the product of what Purkiss calls ‘microbe management’. The process of fermentation, which changes raw ingredients into preservable foodstuffs, she writes, ‘is almost a form of herding’. Fermentation turns milk into cheese and grapes into wine, and through the gathering of yeast found naturally in the environment, it transforms milled grain into bread. One of the staples of the Roman diet was garum, made from the juices of fish entrails fermented by salting. Garum was very similar to the fish sauces found today in Asian cooking. Bloaters (smoked herrings) were a mainstay of the British diet, eaten across the classes until the First World War brought an end to the British herring industry. Freezing has replaced salting and fermentation as the primary method of food preservation and our tastes have changed accordingly. Purkiss observes that modern frozen fish purveyors know that their customers prefer their products to be not too ‘fishy’: breadcrumbed fish fingers are more popular than kippers nowadays. Modern cooks tend to put the flavour into food, piling on spices and condiments, but Purkiss (in a characteristically entertaining digression on The Great British Bake Off and its participants’ experiments with such flavourings as sun-dried tomatoes) describes how a medieval cook – or perhaps a modern sourdough enthusiast – would know that fermentation, in all its minute variations, is the flavour of bread. If you want a history of the battles of the English Civil War, this is not the book for you. If you are interested in the human side of this horrific period, then this is a book for you. While the battles are mentioned, they are placed in a much broader context. And with England about to crown a new king, it tells the story of how this conservative nation was radicalised in the 17th Century and how it came to be that a republic was established and a king executed more than 100 years before the great revolutions in France and America.

When published, Neil’s blog post with a recipe for sago pudding, will be found at www.britishfoodhistory.com There is no counsel for the defence. If you are found guilty, you could become one of the 30,000–60,000 people who were executed for witchcraft in the early modern era. It’s the end of the current run so that means it is time for the now traditional end-of-season special postbag edition. In this delicious history of Britain's food traditions, Diane Purkiss invites readers on a unique journey through the centuries, exploring the development of recipes and rituals for mealtimes such as breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to show how food has been both a reflection of and inspiration for social continuity and change. Kevin’s Food and Foodways paper: https://napier-repository.worktribe.com/output/3133885/accompanying-the-series-early-british-television-cookbooks-1946-1976

The Gold Top selection stands for premium quality and superior taste, it is this quality, alongside our high end service, which makes us stand out from our competitors. The original Gold Top Milk is made the traditional Guernsey and Jersey way with the cream on the top, and tastes delicious, the luxurious Gold Top Smooth is a variation whereby the indulgent cream is blended evenly throughout the entire bottle. The Gold Top family includes, butter, cream, ice cream amongst others. Even if you can make sense of the general story, it is massively let down by the abrupt end upon the execution of King Charles I. Now clearly this is a major milestone that drew the civil wars to a close, but a lot of the revolutionary thinking and historical developments are yet to happen: the Instrument of Government is still to come, as is the rule of the Major Generals with the legacy of distrust of state control, and the various twists and turns endured by England as she wrestled with the alien concept of government without a king. Those events left a significant mark on society which, barely twenty years later, would be establishing the earliest forms of modern government as we recognise today.

I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. Whilst our product sits in the premium food category our message for the UK public is to eat more British fish and support the British fishing industry, try something different and enjoy the simplicity of a good can of fish.