Food & Drink

Volunteer rationing in the First World War depended on patriotism, but that could only go so far.

Medieval understanding of the soul and the body meant that a saintly life was a life of physical restrictions. Katherine Harvey explores the extreme suffering bishops put themselves through, from weeping and celibacy to starvation and, sometimes, death.

As politicians consider the introduction of a sugar tax to improve the nation’s health, Harry Cunningham recalls a tragic incident from 1858, which forced the British government to rethink its regulation of pharmacists.

There was no period in the past when people did not try to manipulate nature in order to provide a more varied and nutritious diet, argues Annie Gray. We will need similarly ingenious methods in the future.

The turkey’s path to festive supremacy was much more unexpected – and glorious – than it might seem.

Olivia Williams takes issue with some of the wilder assertions and anachronisms contained in Thomas Maples’ otherwise engaging 1991 article on the 18th-century gin craze.

On the genial banks of the Thames, writes Barbara Kerr, an enlightened family of early industrialists poured forth an ocean of sweets and sours.

William Gardener investigates the history of American flora and finds among its contributions to the health and happiness of Europe the not inconsiderable commodities of maize, the potato, rubber, tobacco, and quinine.

For the English upper and middle classes, writes John Burnett, the nineteenth century was a period of huge and ostentatious meals; but “only during the last twenty years has the population as a whole been economically able to achieve an adequate diet...”

Joanna Richardson takes the reader on a culinary tour of the French capital, asking why, for several centuries, Paris has been the gastronomic capital of the Western world.