Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Neil Buttery and British Food History
33 Plays1 month ago
A content warning. Please note that this episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.
In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Neil Buttery, a historian of British food. He is an award-winning author of several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Neil blogs at British Food: A History, is the host of The British Food History Podcast, and collaborates on another podcast, A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. Follow Neil Buttery on Bluesky and Instagram for updates.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
Recommended
Transcript
Eels and Culinary Preparations
00:00:00
Speaker
A content warning, please note that today's episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:17
Speaker
This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I'm your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Season Two Theme: Making
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to season two, dedicated to making. In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them.
00:00:47
Speaker
For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.
Meet Dr. Neil Buttery
00:01:11
Speaker
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Neil Buttery, a specialist in British food history. He has extensive experience cooking food from the past as a professional chef.
00:01:22
Speaker
He is also an award-winning author, blogging at British Food, a History, and writing several books, including a Dark History of Sugar, Before Mrs. Beaton, Elizabeth Raffeld, England's Most Influential Housekeeper, The Philosophy of Puddings, and Need to Know, a History of Baking.
00:01:40
Speaker
Neil is also the host of a very successful podcast, the British Food History Podcast, and has even been collaborating on a new one, a is for Apple, an encyclopedia of food and drink.
00:01:52
Speaker
I am so excited to speak to Neil today about his wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about British food history. Neil, thank you so much for joining me today.
From Science to Culinary History
00:02:03
Speaker
thank you very much for asking me to come on. You have ah very interesting background outside of food history. In many of your podcast episodes, you've talked about your life as a scientist and a secondary school teacher.
00:02:17
Speaker
What inspired you to to switch gears and delve into British culinary history and start cooking historic recipes and start blogging about British food? Well, yes, I had been a secondary school teacher, science, biology specifically. So nothing really to do with...
00:02:35
Speaker
food or history. um But I did want to go back to university. I got interested in evolutionary biology and ecology, conservation biology and things like that. So I went back, i did a master's and then I was very lucky and very pleased to get on a PhD course.
Blogging and Inspiration from Jane Grigson
00:02:53
Speaker
But then i was terrified of having to write. You know, the fear of the flashing cursor in the and the top corner. I so I thought, well, how can I practice doing this? And it being something that's got nothing to do with the new day job of being a PhD student, because I knew that's going to be quite intense.
00:03:17
Speaker
So i wanted something that was going to be a bit lighter. A friend of mine had bought me Jane Grigson's book, English Food, and it sat on my shelf for a few years, unread.
00:03:28
Speaker
okay ah But I was looking through it and I thought, Brainwave, thinking I was being very original, I hadn't heard of Julie and Julia. Oh, I know, going to cook every recipe in this book. It'd be a good de-stress, good project. I've always been a hobbyist.
00:03:46
Speaker
then a friend of mine says, oh, well, why don't you blog each one as you go? And then you're practicing the writing. And of course, knowing that you're putting it out there onto the internet, I wasn't expecting very many people to be reading it, but I thought, well, that's just upping the ante. It's going to make me try a little bit harder.
00:04:04
Speaker
So that's how it started. I didn't know what the blog was going to be. It was just me basically cooking the recipe and saying what I thought the recipe was. A couple of paragraphs and it developed from there. And without realizing it, I was popping in more history.
00:04:17
Speaker
I got more interested people who were writing the recipes because drain Jane Grigson always provides lots of information in her cookbooks. and it And it went from there really. And I became obsessed. I ended up getting a postdoc position after the PhD in the US. I was in Houston, Texas.
00:04:35
Speaker
And then I was a little bit further up in St. Louis in Missouri. And I was continuing cooking all this English food for my American friends who had ever eaten the jam roly-poly pudding or something before.
00:04:47
Speaker
And it all went down really well because we eat weird food, right? We Brits, going to America without toad in the hole and toast. Turns out not that weird. um And that's really when the penny dropped. and i moved I basically resigned from my job in the sciences because I like got a little bit disillusioned with it.
00:05:05
Speaker
And yes, two weeks after I moved back, I did my first artisan market stall because ah I hadn't realised. I'd taught myself how to cook all this traditional stuff.
00:05:16
Speaker
That was 2012. And I kind of haven't stopped since, really. Do you think that your your background in the sciences has shaped how you approach these recipes and looking at food in a certain way?
00:05:32
Speaker
Certainly from the
Science Meets Culinary History
00:05:33
Speaker
point of view of organizing myself. I can use a spreadsheet. That's very useful. Things like number skills is very useful. You know, there's all these weird conversions, different imperial measurements that change through the centuries. The size of pints change, the weights of pounds changes.
00:05:50
Speaker
So of course we go into metric only just recently really in Britain compared to the rest of Europe. So it really helps with that. And I convert everything into metric now because it's just so much easier to do, especially if you're multiplying up or if in some cookbooks you have to really reduce the size of the thing that you're cooking.
00:06:09
Speaker
So from that kind of sort of day-to-day skills, really useful. And then I suppose what when I started moving on to writing books, ah Writing papers really helped because there's usually a lot of information.
00:06:24
Speaker
you don't have many words to get that information across in, and it's usually a complex thing. So it's basically a storyboard. what What direction is all of this going in? And I could apply that organisation, really, especially when you're in the beginnings of writing a book and you're just overwhelmed with information. It can be overwhelming.
00:06:43
Speaker
I mean, the downside is being in the sciences. Well, I suppose it's the same all of academia, really. But being in sciences, everything you write has got to be so watertight. So I'm very used to be saying, oh, this is wishy-washy.
00:06:58
Speaker
This needs development. No, you can't say that conclusion. You can't say that. That hypothesis is true. What you found out isn't it actually backing it up. So I've learned, don't always get it right, but I've certainly learned to let the research determine what I'm saying rather than already deciding what I'm going to say and bend the research to fit my own hypothesis or idea or or sometimes misconception.
Filling Gaps in Historical Recipes
00:07:25
Speaker
When you are sitting down and tackling some historic recipes and you're deciding to cook something for the first time, how do you go about figuring out what you need to do to actually cook the recipe?
00:07:39
Speaker
Well, I rewrite the recipe usually and my own words in the notebook to say what I'm going to do. There's a lot of gap filling in. I think I'm lucky in that cooking through Jane Grigson's cookbooks, she's a fantastic recipe writer and she's very concise, but she wouldn't get away with those recipes today.
00:07:58
Speaker
It would not be detailed enough. But for me, it's the right amount of detail. I think more the problem with a modern recipe is where it says, oh, cook this for two minutes, this for three and a half minutes on on this heat. and It doesn't help you become an instinctive cook. You might have... um cook cooked the food and eaten and it was nice, but you probably really haven't learned anything.
00:08:19
Speaker
It's bit like when you've got a sat-nav, ah satov ah GPS telling you where to go. You often don't remember the route because it's just telling you what to do. You learn the route when you've got a map.
00:08:31
Speaker
So it's helping you get to where you're going, but you have to fill a lot of it in yourself. And I'm very lucky in that with Jane Grigson, I had to fill in a lot myself, didn't realize I was doing it,
00:08:43
Speaker
But now when I went to older cookery books, it's the 19th and 18th centuries, the gaps were bigger, but it didn't seem ah so scary a task to fill in the gaps.
00:08:55
Speaker
Makes total sense. Since your initial foray into food history was through cooking, and then you got interested in bigger themes and bigger ideas and topics, I think you're in a really great position to talk about this. ah What role do you think food plays in how we understand history and connect
Food as a Reflection of Contexts
00:09:15
Speaker
with history?
00:09:16
Speaker
Well, from the basic point of view, everybody eats. Simple as that, really. And of course, it's it's not just keeping us alive, although sometimes when there's not enough food, it's just as interesting as when there's lots of food.
00:09:30
Speaker
But it tells us so much about the social standing, age, gender. Was it a good harvest year? In the case of Britain, of course, it's a lot about empire and how that empire was functioning, how prices change. All this stuff that's kind of boring when you start in a history class. lot i don't want i don't care about how expensive corn was in the early 19th century. You don't when you were a kid.
00:09:51
Speaker
But suddenly when you're actually are having to research this for a reason, suddenly it all becomes very exciting. So it is important. The problem is it's fine if you are looking at things like corn or tea or sugar, which is really, well, the commodity products now, but you know they they are run, they're a good measure of how well a country is doing.
00:10:15
Speaker
what it's buying and selling, um how it's treating its customers, how rich it's becoming and or but but it's all kind of fits into economics and stuff about taxation and stuff like that, which are not necessarily interested in.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's much more difficult to find the minute details because no one bothered writing that stuff down. No one thought it was worthwhile writing down what servants were doing.
00:10:40
Speaker
It happens behind the closed doors. we're We're not interested in that and servants, usually are either too busy to write any of that down, and why would they even bother writing it down anyway?
00:10:51
Speaker
Possibly some of them couldn't read anyway. And a lot of the skills we've lost, especially when it comes to dairy, yeah it's very different in Britain compared to to France, where Everything's meticulously written down over there. People can trace that their cheese recipes centuries and centuries, whilst we can look back about 150 years, because everything before that was done by illiterate young women.
00:11:18
Speaker
And it's just lost. So going back to your question about filling in gaps, sometimes you have to go, OK, I'm going to make an educated guess here because I've done this kind of thing before.
00:11:30
Speaker
And sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and going, do you know what? I'm just going to do this. I don't know if it's going to work. So therefore, at the end of your bit of bit of research in the kitchen, the thing that you've made might not be very much like the original thing. you And you'll never know that.
00:11:48
Speaker
ah But I try not to get too worried about that. Whether that's a ah problem or not, I don't know. Some people would say it is. i I think if you're honest about it and, you know, saying you're not entirely sure if this is how it was or not, then that's that's totally fine and appropriate.
00:12:06
Speaker
But I think sometimes it in the fact that it isn't valued um maybe at that time or sometimes by academics today tells you a lot in itself, tells you lot about the attitude. So sometimes um a lack of information actually tells you quite a lot.
00:12:25
Speaker
As you have continued to to cook and prepare all these different historic recipes from a wide range of different time periods in Britain, how has that impacted ah what you decide to write about and what you decide to talk about on your podcast?
00:12:43
Speaker
When it comes to the podcast, I really like to get... Actually, I suppose when it comes to research, especially on the blog, because if I wasn't doing the the blogs, I wouldn't be doing what I am today.
00:12:54
Speaker
I very much like to fill in the the gaps in my knowledge. That's what I find most exciting. I start getting a bit tetchy if I'm staying in the same place for too long. So I like to learn about a wider variety of things as possible.
00:13:11
Speaker
And the same, to some degree, goes with the books as well. Of course, they're bigger topics. so you have to know a bit more because you have to write book proposal and things like that. too But usually the reason that I've got interested in them is because I didn't know much about it.
00:13:26
Speaker
And then the penny will drop. Usually be because, oh, I want to find something out more about whatever it is that i'm reading and find, oh, nobody's written a book about it, which is what happened with the Elizabeth Raffel book.
00:13:37
Speaker
I assumed somebody would have written a popular history book about her and there wasn't anything there. So um yes, it comes from a place of not knowing.
00:13:48
Speaker
And I quite like that. I like that journey. It's a little bit like, what what's I saying? yeah it's It's more about the journey than the destination. So once I've arrived at the end of a project, ah yeah, it's time it's time to um move on to a completely other subject.
00:14:05
Speaker
Understood. I think we all get that feeling once in a while. This ties in rather nicely to one of the next things I wanted to ask you, which was how has your understanding of
Value of Process Over Authenticity
00:14:15
Speaker
British culinary history evolved as you've gained more experience cooking and researching?
00:14:21
Speaker
Have you just become more and more interested in filling in all those gaps, as you've said, and trying to understand the entirety of it? Or has this just been leading you in in different, more distinct directions?
00:14:35
Speaker
It's kind of a mixture of all those things. It's the great thing and it's the bad thing about looking to food history, because largely anyway, apart from a couple of maybe master's degrees across the world, there are no, there's no course, there's no one-on-one food history course that you can do. There's no textbook.
00:14:53
Speaker
There's no curriculum or anything like that. So you have to come from your own direction. So it means you've never been told how to think about something like we are when we're in a classroom.
00:15:05
Speaker
You know, but we haven't been taught how to answer exam questions on this subject or or anything like that. So we're we're always learning because, at least from my point of view, even if it is a subject I know something about,
00:15:19
Speaker
It's always useful to see other people's perspective. I don't think you can be an expert in anything until you've heard everybody's perspective. You can learn the facts, fine, but but that's not the interesting stuff. It's assembling it all and interpreting it.
00:15:34
Speaker
And different people do that in different ways. So, yeah, it doesn't matter whether I'm broadening my knowledge and skills or whether I'm focusing on one very small, tiny thing.
00:15:45
Speaker
It always feels diverse because like i said, you're not done learning until you've heard everybody's opinion and you've and you can never achieve that, which I think is an amazing thing. That really explains quite a bit about your approach, I think, to the podcast in particular and how you how you structure some of your seasons.
00:16:04
Speaker
you You choose a range of guests and they're often getting at the same kind of topic from a lot of different approaches or or you're asking their opinions on the same sort of ah theme or idea. so that's that's really interesting that that's filtered into so many different aspects of your of your work.
00:16:22
Speaker
Well, but my favorite question is, ah guess, something that we've sort of been getting at today is I love to ask people how important authenticity is. And usually I'm met with them rolling their eyes at me.
00:16:35
Speaker
Oh, this question again. Because it's funny, I never care about authenticity. I think even if you get 20% of the way there, you're going to learn something really important. Usually something you weren't expecting. Maybe it's just something as simple as a flavor combination or a technique that you've ever used.
00:16:52
Speaker
I don't worry about getting 100% of that because that's not achievable. So some people I speak to, and this is very broad brushstrokes here, i guess they had to fall into my category of, oh, just have a go, it's fine. So you'll you'll learn something. Whereas some of the people go, no, there's just no point in doing it because the animals are different. They're found in a completely different way.
00:17:15
Speaker
It's not comparable. There's no point in doing it. So they' they're never going to get more than 0% then in their score, authenticity score. Well, I'd rather spend um a whole day wasting my time making something inauthentic that just gets me 10% of the there. Because you're going to learn something.
00:17:32
Speaker
and the And the thing that i most commonly use is, especially when it's something that sounds a bit strange, is, oh, that's quite nice. yeah Food from the past is actually really quite delicious. And food today, it's a shadow of its former self, really.
00:17:45
Speaker
we Yeah, we think the food of the past is awful. It's probably moldy or rotten or gross. It's all eyeballs and pig's tails. All this kind of stuff, you know, stuff we wouldn't eat. and We've progressed so much, but it's not the case at all.
00:17:59
Speaker
I would actually love if you could delve into that a little bit more.
Memorable Culinary Experiences
00:18:03
Speaker
Could you talk about some of your favorite or most memorable maybe ah cooking experiments with historic recipes?
00:18:12
Speaker
you' You've mentioned a few and throughout your podcast, and yeah I would love to hear more. The memorable ones are ones that fall into two categories. One is a bit like what was talking about before. something i was expecting to be awful, but was delicious.
00:18:27
Speaker
But, you know I'd signed up to cooking all these book all all these recipes in this book by Jane Grigson. So once I say I'm going to do something, I do it. But it did mean I was going to have to have calves' brains. And it did, i wasn't very good with shellfish, with seafood, anything bivalvy, like mussels and oysters. not So I really had to get over a bit of a mental hurdle with a lot of this stuff.
00:18:49
Speaker
And this is when I realized, oh, the food of the past is amazing. And the first time that happened was when I made the steak, kidney and oyster pudding, because not only does it take forever to make, not only is it a steamed pudding, which I hadn't really made much in the past, it had oysters in it, which I'd never eaten because they looked terrifying.
00:19:07
Speaker
And it was absolutely delicious. I just thought, oh, this is a thing. And going back to podcast, actually, because done all this on my own with my mates from work or whatever and friends.
00:19:18
Speaker
It was just so nice. It's so nice to do the podcast because I get to meet with the other people, which I hadn't previously done, which is does the probably the best thing about the podcast, really. So, yes, and so there's that there's that first category of stuff, the penny dropping.
00:19:33
Speaker
Game is another one, especially Woodcock and Snipe and things like that, you know, things that I would just never have dared try and absolutely delicious. So those are the memorable ones. And then the other memorable ones are the Disasters.
00:19:45
Speaker
Or things that wouldn't necessarily be disaster, but there was some kind of trauma attached to it. And the one that stands out is the first time I cooked freshwater eel, because that was just traumatic for everyone involved.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, because I remember asking the the fishmonger for some eels, and he just said, nobody eats eels anymore. But he says, oh, I'll see what I can do. phoned me back about 10 days later saying, I've got a friend who's caught some eels.
00:20:14
Speaker
I'm going to collect them. So I went to collect them. And when I arrived, he said, um and know I'm a fishmonger, but everything arrives dead. I've never actually had to kill anything.
00:20:27
Speaker
And he pointed to three eels swimming around in a sort of polystyrene box. So I had to take those home with me. I didn't drive. So i was in a taxi on the way home with this these eels on my lap, but sloshing around. It didn't even have a lid.
00:20:44
Speaker
sloshing around in this taxi. They can't believe they let me in. My friend came round earlier in the day to dispatch the eels and friends were coming around later to to eat them and they would they just wouldn't die.
00:20:58
Speaker
It was awful. it was We were crying. It turns out later actually, because I thought, got to be humane about this. i i did my research. Nothing told me, oh, when you whack their head, they carry on moving for a couple of hours.
00:21:13
Speaker
So I thought we were whacking them and weren't dying, but I think they were dead. They just move around because you take the skin off, you take the guts out, you take their head off and they're still swimming around.
00:21:25
Speaker
Oh my goodness. It was awful. Yeah. After you had that experience, have you like paid particular attention eel recipes when you've come across them to see if they talk about this at all?
00:21:39
Speaker
I did find it. And you know, what I did find them after the event, but not in the places you would expect. And this is about what i was saying before, actually, about coming from different everyone coming from different directions.
00:21:51
Speaker
So I relatively recently found out that there's a quote in, I think, King Lear, Shakespeare, by Shakespeare. And there's a line in there about um people making eel pies and the fact that the eels are still moving under the pie when they put it into the oven.
Discoveries in Historical Food Practices
00:22:09
Speaker
so there were little references there but for some reason not in the cookery books where they should have been but it was a thing where that people did know about it because obviously ah Shakespeare's plays going be watched by everyone so it was going to be something that everybody could understand and you know know what it meant by a phrase so yeah the the wriggling eels yeah that's mean that was a thing that everybody knew but we don't we don't kill things anymore or most of us don't kill things anymore and none of us really eat eels in this country anymore either so but now I do know and and and that's the other the amazing thing is you you're learning these tricks and I guess hacks you'd call them now that people have passed on orally throughout the generations that have just vanished and I like to think I'm doing my little bit anyway in trying to um
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, just try and have us reconnect with the food of the past because the route the food to the past is delicious. It's it's not weird. it's It's great. And it's our problem that we think it's weird. The people buying the cookery books and and and eating the food from those cookery books um ate that food because they liked it.
00:23:17
Speaker
They weren't doing it because it was weird. They werere doing it because they liked it. In fact, cookery books a few hundred years ago were very expensive. So this was good food. And you got to get over that mental hurdle. If you went to a a different country...
00:23:29
Speaker
and reacted in the same way as people do to historical food or what they think historical food is going to be like. I mean that would be so offensive. yeah And I think we should apply the same rule in time as well as in space. That's very Doctor Who.
00:23:42
Speaker
I mean, mostly I don't think about It's only because you're asking me these questions, I think about it. So there's there's not some philosophical. I'm not sat in my ivory tower they're doing some kind of food philosophy. It's just, I'm just doing the stuff that I find is interesting at the end of the day. And that's,
00:23:58
Speaker
that's what informs me what
Listener Contributions Enrich Knowledge
00:24:00
Speaker
I'm doing. Do you find that a lot of your readers and your listeners get in touch with you with their own hacks and and tips and things that they've have been passed down in their families after they've heard episodes with you? i i know occasionally that's referenced in the post-bag editions that you do, but um does that happen and on a fairly regular basis?
00:24:26
Speaker
People send things in all of the time, sometimes whole ah handwritten book, manuscript books that they've scanned in for me or just book ideas, things that their parents did all the time. And those are the things that are really interesting because um especially when it comes to people's own household that they grew up in or.
00:24:48
Speaker
things their parents or grandparents told them and little tricks they were doing or recipes they were doing that have just completely died out now and we wouldn't necessarily know anything about. It's just so interesting.
00:25:02
Speaker
it's still It's the minutiae. I guess, you know, if you are looking at the history of corn, like the corn laws, no one cares about the minutiae of what was going on in the kitchen, but that's what I find really interesting because it helps you imagine what it was like for those people to be in that house, whether it was good or bad.
00:25:22
Speaker
And if you can somehow recreate it, I think that's closest you can get to being in some kind of time machine. Now there are cynical people who go, no, that's not true because you can't control everything.
00:25:34
Speaker
But I think it definitely is true. Although I'm as authentic as I can be, I don't sit there, try to source the equipment for years. But if somebody does tell me some information,
00:25:46
Speaker
then I can integrate it in and be more authentic. I'm just really interested by this idea of you have become this receptacle in a way, I guess, for other people's historical food traditions.
00:26:00
Speaker
And I wonder if you've thought of doing anything with that beyond integrating certain things that are applicable to whatever you happen to be working on. yeah is have. It's one of those things where what What I really like to do is essentially write a book, but certainly not like a memoir, but I've been sent such a rich amount of stuff or I've been told such a rich amount of stuff that I feel like, you know, taking the of the best of what I've learned in the podcast or being sent by listeners or readers of the blogs to try and assimilate that together into something.
00:26:40
Speaker
It is something I thought about. But it's so big and sprawling. I'm not quite sure how I would tie it all together. It would be really nice to revisit things in maybe a book form where there's more space. I restrict my blog entries no more than a thousand words, which is three pages of handwritten. I write everything out longhand because I'm from the past.
00:27:08
Speaker
So it's three pages of A4. That's the amount of space I have to write a blog post. So it would be nice to go into things in ah in a bit more depth. And a lot of the stuff i wrote 10 years ago, i know so much more now. So it would be nice to bring back a kind of maybe like a best of the blog or ah an elaborated version of some elements of the the blog.
Future Projects and Audience Contributions
00:27:30
Speaker
I suppose with one thing, I mean, I am working on book ideas at the moment and One of the things from doing the blogs, one thing I've really become interested in is the lost course of the savoury, which used to happen after the main course, but before dessert, or sometimes instead of dessert. And it's completely died out now. Although some of the foods we do still eat, but in a very different context.
00:27:52
Speaker
That particular strand is something that I think could become a book. And there's lots of people who have sent information to me on savouries. And it's one of the most popular episodes that I've made for them. cast was the episode and savor it so it's something that people are interested in so I think taking separate strands might be the way to go maybe this would be a good place to kind of wrap things up a bit do you have any projects in the works that you would like to talk about well I'm doing season nine of the podcast so that's exciting a nice good um varied package I'm very pleased with the
00:28:26
Speaker
group of people that I've got to come and come and talk on it this year. i think it's the most varied one I've got so far. We're going very posh porcelain in one episode to Bronze Age, Tudor cheese, really all over the place. Very eclectic. So it's been really good fun putting that together. and We're between seasons for A's for Apple, but really, well,
00:28:49
Speaker
I'm working on a new project with the Museum of Royal Worcester. We've done a couple of projects together now, which we've completed. So yeah, lots of things that are maybe going to happen. We're planning some new projects.
00:29:02
Speaker
Like say, I've got six book ideas at the moment. I'm trying convince people are good ones. One is about wild fermentation, which of course is very trendy, live ferments.
00:29:15
Speaker
Over in Britain, certainly in England, there's a lot of people saying, This is weird foreign food. We don't like it. It turns out that we used to eat wild fermented foods all of the time. We've just forgotten that we did.
00:29:29
Speaker
So that's one of the books. that' That's my main idea at the minute. I'm sort of punting around the different publishers. So hopefully that will happen. I've got a few ideas. Some of that just straightforward popular history books and some cookbooks. I've never actually written a cookbook.
00:29:42
Speaker
I'd love to write a cookbook. You should. I hope that book idea gets through. Hopefully. Hopefully.
Ongoing Projects and New Ventures
00:29:48
Speaker
Oh, and also, oh I forgot to say, i'm also involved in a food history festival, online food history festival, October 18th.
00:29:57
Speaker
It's called Serve It Forth. We thought that was an appropriate name since end of it. Every single historical recipe ends with Serve It Forth. Yes. So we're very excited about that. We're still working out exactly who our guests are going to be for that, but I've been doing that with Alessandra Pino, Sam Bilton, who are my co-hosts on A's for Apple.
00:30:14
Speaker
but also Thomas Dinas, who's the host of the Delicious like Legacy podcast. And we're really excited about it. So keep an eye out for tickets and things. Of course, with it being online, of course, anybody in the world can come. Absolutely. well We'll definitely put a link in our show notes to that.
00:30:30
Speaker
Great. Well, thank you so much, Neil, for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it. thank you for having me. It's been fun. Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode.
00:30:45
Speaker
I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.