English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but also shares much with wider British cuisine, partly through the importation of ingredients and ideas from the Americas, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.
A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something, especially a dish of prepared food.
Isabella Mary Beeton, known as Mrs Beeton, was an English journalist, editor and writer. Her name is associated with her first book, the 1861 work Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. After schooling in Islington, north London, and Heidelberg, Germany, she married Samuel Orchart Beeton, an ambitious publisher and magazine editor.
Shepherd's pie, cottage pie, or hachis Parmentier is a ground meat pie with a crust or topping of mashed potato; it is most likely of English origin.
A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes.
Bakewell pudding is an English dessert consisting of a flaky pastry base with a layer of sieved jam and topped with a filling made of egg and almond paste.
The book best known as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, also published as Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book, is an extensive guide to running a household in Victorian Britain, edited by Isabella Beeton and first published as a book in 1861. Previously published in parts, it initially and briefly bore the title Beeton's Book of Household Management, as one of the series of guide-books published by her husband, Samuel Beeton. The recipes were highly structured, in contrast to those in earlier cookbooks. It was illustrated with many monochrome and colour plates.
Jane Grigson was an English cookery writer. In the latter part of the 20th century she was the author of the food column for The Observer and wrote numerous books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes. Her work proved influential in promoting British food.
Eliza Acton was an English food writer and poet who produced one of Britain's first cookery books aimed at the domestic reader, Modern Cookery for Private Families. The book introduced the now-universal practice of listing ingredients and giving suggested cooking times for each recipe. It included the first recipes in English for Brussels sprouts and for spaghetti. It also contains the first recipe for what Acton called "Christmas pudding"; the dish was normally called plum pudding, recipes for which had appeared previously, although Acton was the first to put the name and recipe together.
A collop is a slice of meat, according to one definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. In Elizabethan times, "collops" came to refer specifically to slices of bacon. Shrove Monday, also known as Collop Monday, was traditionally the last day to cook and eat meat before Ash Wednesday, which was non-meat day in the pre-Lenten season also known as Shrovetide. A traditional breakfast dish was collops of bacon topped with a fried egg. At Christ's Hospital, which was founded before the reign of Elizabeth I, the word collops was used on the menu to mean stewed minced beef.
Pickled walnuts are a traditional English pickle, made from walnuts. They are considered a very good accompaniment for a plate of cold turkey or ham, or a blue cheese. There’s a reference to ‘a mutton chop and a pickled walnut’ in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and a mention in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
A New System of Domestic Cookery, first published in 1806 by Maria Rundell, was the most popular English cookbook of the first half of the nineteenth century; it is often referred to simply as "Mrs Rundell", but its full title is A New System of Domestic Cookery: Formed Upon Principles of Economy; and Adapted to the Use of Private Families.
Maria Eliza Rundell was an English writer. Little is known about most of her life, but in 1805, when she was over 60, she sent an unedited collection of recipes and household advice to John Murray, of whose family—owners of the John Murray publishing house—she was a friend. She asked for, and expected, no payment or royalties.
Modern Cookery for Private Families is an English cookery book by Eliza Acton. It was first published by Longmans in 1845, and was a best-seller, running through 13 editions by 1853, though its sales were later overtaken by Mrs Beeton. On the strength of the book, Delia Smith called Acton "the best writer of recipes in the English language", while Elizabeth David wondered why "this peerless writer" had been eclipsed by such inferior and inexperienced imitators.
The English Bread Book is an English cookery book by Eliza Acton, first published in 1857. The work consists of a history of bread making in England, improvements to the process developed in Europe, an examination of the ingredients used and recipes of different types of bread.
Elizabeth Goodfellow (c.1767–1851), generally called Mrs. Goodfellow, started one of the first cooking schools in America. She taught classes for thirty years, and her recipes and techniques were passed on for generations in the cookbooks of one of her students, Eliza Leslie. Goodfellow also ran a renowned bakery and confectionery in Philadelphia during the first fifty years of the 19th century.
Leeds University Library's Cookery Collection is one of the five Designated collections held by the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. It comprises an extensive collection of international books, manuscripts and archives relating to food, cooking and culinary culture.
Cucumber sauce is a type of sauce in English cuisine that can be made in several different varieties, both hot and cold.
China chilo is a dish of stewed mutton from 19th-century English cuisine. Stewed with onions, peas and lettuce, the mutton is served in a dish surrounded by a border of rice. Scholars believe the term China in the name alludes to this oriental ingredient, but the meaning of term chilo remain a mystery. The dish is said to be based on a Chinese dish that 19th-century sailors described upon their return from the China Seas. Food historians speculate whether creative Victorian cooks substituted lettuce for bok choy and peas for bean spouts.
