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Annie Gray: “Through food, you can go almost anywhere”

ByTeja Lele
Jan 10, 2025 09:21 PM IST

The author of ‘The Bookshop, the Draper, the Candlestickmaker’ and’ The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook’ on her dream project, and why food is the best way to explore history

Why do you think food is a good lens to look at history?

British historian Annie Gray (Courtesy anniegray.co.uk)
British historian Annie Gray (Courtesy anniegray.co.uk)

Because we all eat, and in such seemingly everyday activities as preparing and consuming (and disposing of) food, we show who we are as individuals, and we reflect the societies and cultures in which we live. Through food, you can go almost anywhere. I’m a social historian, so I don’t tend to look much at diet and nutrition, but I do look at class and status and how it is expressed – or imposed – through food. Food is a structuring principle in how towns are planned, or landed estates, or working class housing. National tastes reflect global trade, and the decisions we make – or governments make on our behalf – reflect changing notions of morality and what is important to us at any given time.

Tell us about The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker. Why a book focused on the British high street?

This came out of two places: one was an awareness that a lot of people really don’t know how we procured food in the past. I am a consultant for English Heritage’s very successful The Victorian Way videos on YouTube, and have worked in costume a lot myself in the past. One constant question is on how cooks obtained goods -- there’s this idea that there weren’t any shops until maybe the late Victorian period or so or even the 1950s. I’m forever getting told that we did not have things like food colouring, or daily deliveries, and that somehow everyone was self-sufficient (spoiler: not true). The other impetus came out of the lockdown, when I saw people standing in supermarket queues or shopping online while simultaneously bemoaning the decline of the high street. I went to look for a book on the topic so I could be more informed when I wanted to debate with them. It turned out that while there were some excellent books on architecture, or specific themes, there wasn’t a narrative history – still less a really accessible, immersive one. So I wrote it.

How has the high street evolved, according to you?

Well, 400 years ago we barely had a high street, in the sense of fixed shops around a given point, where leisure was as important (or more so) than shopping for quotidian essentials. The market was where we all shopped. Gradually, fixed shops opened up around it, then away from it; they aimed at a more monied type of shopper, one who wanted to browse and interact with shopkeepers and feel a bit cosseted – all of this out of the rain and away from other people. The most important shops then were china sellers, jewellers and cloth merchants, and then booksellers and pharmacists, confectioners and grocers. At first, the market drew people in and they then turned to the shops. By the nineteenth century, shops themselves were the draw. But it was never just about retail – the high street was also where you went to eat and drink, or meet people, window shop, or watch parades or demonstrations – or, indeed, to protest or perform yourself. It was – and remains – the central focus of a town.

495pp, ₹1995; Profile Books
495pp, ₹1995; Profile Books

How has holiday feasting evolved? What did you find while researching your Christmas feasting book?

Christmas food for most of the past was really just seasonal food. Back in the Middle Ages, Christian cultures fasted for the whole of Advent, so till December 25, and then feasted for the 12 days of Christmas. Feast foods centred on meat, which was unaffordable for most of the population. The wealthy ate things that showed their status – so spices, wine, cream, sugar, and dishes that took a lot of time and skill. Birds such as swan, goose and, later, turkey, were popular both because they were in season and because they looked spectacular on the table – served with heads and legs on, or in a pie with the head, neck, wings and tail taxidermied and put into the pastry on spikes so the pie looked like a strange, edible hybrid. After the Reformation in Britain, and then the Civil War, both the Advent fast and the 12 days dwindled, and Christmas was seen as quite a plebeian festival. The Victorians revived and reinvented it, and all the foods that had once been winter feast foods became rebranded as Christmas foods – plum pudding became Christmas pudding, Twelfth Cake (eaten on Twelfth Night) became Christmas Cake, etc. The British also took their ideas of what Christmas feasting meant across the world as they colonised great swathes of it. In India, they employed native cooks, but had them make British Christmas foods; the cooks then adapted these to their own food traditions. In New Zealand and Australia, people insisted upon having a massive roast dinner on December 25 despite the heat of an Antipodean summer.

If you had to choose one of your favourite works, which one would it be?

That is a very difficult choice. I’m really proud of my latest book – The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker – because I think I’ve really found a voice. It’s the most immersive book I’ve written and really pulls the reader in. On the other hand, I genuinely loved writing the Christmas book because it meant I could be quite subversive. And both, The Greedy Queen (on Queen Victoria through her food) and Victory in the Kitchen (on Churchill’s longest serving cook – but really the story of domestic service in the twentieth century and a hoorah for working class women) are close to my heart because I was able to give a new perspective to historical figures we all think we know.

What would be your dream project?

I’d quite like to write a novel about a crime-fighting kitchen maid, one that weaves food and social history [and involves] killing off unpleasant men. Kind of redress the balance in crime fiction, which always seems to involve murdered nubile women, and, yes, also talk a lot about jelly. But, then again, I’d also like to write a really meaty history of domestic service. If we’re talking dreams, all of that would be done beachside, somewhere in New Zealand, with an endless supply of wine and really good cheese.

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.

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