Country cooking: Cookbooks and Counterculture in the 1970s

Abstract

This article discusses the underlying reasons for the rise in popularity of the country cookbook – a genre that reflects rural cookery practices, using locally-available, seasonal and foraged ingredients – in 1970s Britain. Despite country cookbooks being styled along traditional lines, their increased popularity very much drew upon unconventional, countercultural movements of communal living, self-sufficiency and folk feminism. Country cookbooks can be seen as a direct response to a troubled decade, expressing a desire for an alternative life away from the work-consumption cycle and a longed-for dissent from agri-politics and industrialized food, but without the unconventionality of the commune, the hard graft of self-sufficiency, or the media-fueled mockery of feminism. The 1970s was also the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK and women’s work in the kitchen was highly politicized. Amidst these debates, the country cookbook through its comforting, sometimes old-fashioned, recipes and advice offers an imagined return to country living, a psychological shift away from capitalism and the limitations of modern life. By adopting narrative structures and writerly tone which emulate rural life, the country cookbook emulates a mindset that draws from countercultures, but also proffers security and accessibility.

Keywords:

• Cookbooks
• country cooking
• countercultures
• self-sufficiency
• folk feminism
• cookbook narratives
• British Cookbooks

Introduction

Steak and kidney pudding:

This is traditionally served in its basin, with a napkin tucked round it, and a jug of plain hot water to accompany – a little is poured into the pudding when cut, and mixed with the rich gravy. Some old recipes include oysters, which used to be cheap. A few mushrooms go well instead. (Parker 1979, 77)

At the end of a long, angry decade in Britain where political dissent and wide-spread discontent had been expressed through strikes, protests and public marches, Audrey Parker, English cookery writer, produced a slim volume called A Country Recipe Notebook (1979), illustrated with simple line drawings by Sally Seymour. Given the largely urbanized population of England, increased numbers of working women arguing for equal rights at work and at home, the rise of the supermarket, and ubiquitous advertisements for ready meals and frozen foods, Parker’s cookbook was an intervention at variance with protests of the decade and increasingly industrialized foodscapes. This article explores the foundations of 1970s “country cookbooks” through their complicated relationship with countercultural movements. Communal living, self-sufficiency and folk feminism all had approaches to food that provided a landscape for the country cookbook. The lure of country cookbooks in Britain in the 1970s derived partly from the traditional, even old-fashioned recipes themselves, and partly from the countercultural zeitgeist and anti-consumerist mindset that such cookbooks offered the urban cook. Country cookbooks expounded food choices and approaches that enabled domestic acts of resistance from the home kitchen, offering a context for dissent from the increasing agri-industrial control over foodways in the Western World.

Parker’s Recipe Notebook is not a regular cookbook, listing ingredients then instructions, just as the example quoted above is not a regular recipe. The book offers fragmentary advice on country-style food preparation, with mention of rural habits and serving tips, in this case a traditional savory pudding, with a “napkin tucked”, for an audience assumed not to practice such techniques at home. The recipe note harks back to “old recipes” with forgotten ingredients such as “oysters, which used to be cheap”. It simultaneously adapts to a more accessible ingredient: “mushrooms go well instead”. Rather than presenting detailed recipes, Recipe Notebook works to recover food history and remember bygone food habits, all preserved and made relevant to contemporary readers. By accessing the cookery habits of older generations through old-fashioned dishes and techniques, Parker invites her readers to emulate rural life through their cookery, and absorb a comforting solidity of the bucolic through their food habits.

Country Recipe Notebook attempts to fill a void in the knowledge-set of the cook of 1970s Britain; its purpose is to mend urbanized loss of memory. Food historian Nicola Humble, in discussing 1970s cookbooks, has remarked upon “the fashions for rural self-sufficiency and the old-fashioned ways that were to dominate the next decade” regarding the 1970s as the “moment when cookbooks started to be overtly political” (Humble 2005, 184). The present discussion argues that this political turn in cookbooks emanated from the countercultures of the 1960s and early1970s.

Political issues concerning food have long been addressed through individual food choices regarding purchase and consumption–processes which have wide implications for agriculture, commerce and health. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed consumers attaining political, social and personal agency through their food choices (Belasco 1989). Political opposition to the global industrialization of food in the 1970s in the form of non-capitalist foodways, was attempted by back-to-the-landers and freegans in the US (Gross 2009, 58), and communards and self-sufficiency enthusiasts in the UK. New social systems were envisaged as alternatives to capitalist systems, with local and understandable economic structures, and lower-key social interactions. Personal philosophical needs, such as avoiding the loneliness of modern life and having productive work, were addressed through a healthy diet and increased awareness of food. Discussing Frederic Jameson’s notion of alienation in the age of late capitalism, the “waning of affect”, Gross (2009, 75) suggests that:

In the realm of food, the waning of affect might translate as the consumption of calories to create human energy (fast food and nutritional supplements), rather than having a personal relationship with where your food comes from, how it tastes, and whom you share it with.

Parker’s Recipe Notebook encourages readers to reclaim their relationship with food, through respect: “Dark green outer leaves are rich in food value and should not be cast aside unless unusable” (35), and personal engagement, where the best fish pie is the one the cook develops herself, combining her preferred ingredients (44).

In the countercultural moment of the 1960s and early 1970s, food politics highlighted how the capitalist-driven industrial complex had commodified the lives of individuals. Maria McGrath, literary critic, has considered how countercultural cookbooks of the natural food movement fueled social awareness: “These books detailed recipes for a new world – serving up social prescription and cooking instructions on the same page” (McGrath 2019, 60). Some cookbooks implored women to use their kitchen decisions to create a better future world, as argued: “It is only you and I who can create the demand for plant food and thus make it commercially feasible to gear our vast American acreage to feeding people instead of animals” Frances Moore Lappé (1971, 148). This implies that home cooks, usually women, could effect social change from their private kitchens by changing the family’s food consumption habits, and the cookbook is key to reeducation and change in lived practice. Warren Belasco, food studies critic, has argued that in the face of “‘plastic’ supermarket food” and in support of the “craft” of preparing food, “writers of the countercuisine called for a deliberate slowdown” (Belasco 1989, 38, 50, 52). Even recipes themselves, it has been argued, offer opportunities for resistance and activism (Marek 2022).

The British 1970s country cookbook proffered a means of arguing with industrialized food systems, a way of opting out of unknowable food processes and a harking back to a more secure and personal relationship with food. It did so by creating an alternative food sensibility, becoming a vehicle for argument without rebellion, a radical response from the bourgeois kitchen, and an emotional response to the anger of the 1970s. While activist groups and countercultures attempted to recreate a direct, personal relationship with food eaten, the country cookbook, targeted at mainstream populations rather than minority groups, provided a mediated, textual access to that relationship with food, through an imagined rurality.

The present discussion seeks to deepen understanding of the rise of the 1970s country cookbook in Britain by considering how wider debates about food, countercultures, and women’s intentionality in the kitchen, were all heightened issues in the decade of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain (WLM). Close readings of country cookbooks demonstrate how contemporary debates were assimilated into an alternative framework for home cooking. The discursive elements of country cookbooks, particularly introductions, expound philosophies and intentionality, illustrations provide reinforcement, and the recipes themselves are instrumental in giving the reader-cook opportunities to resist industrialized foodways. Other primary sources, including countercultural periodicals, self-sufficiency manuals, testimonials and magazines, evidence the zeitgeist.

British country cookbooks, prominent in the 1970s, sprang from a range of origins. Some came from writers already immersed in rural writing, such as Alison Uttley, an English author best known for her mid-twentieth century children’s books about animals and rural life. Her 1966 Recipes from an Old Farmhouse, possibly started the trend for country cookbooks (Humble 2005, 194). Another is ‘Miss Read’ (Dora Jessie Saint, 1913–2012), famous for her postwar social comedies about English village life. Her Miss Read’s Country Cooking or To Cut a Cabbage-Leaf (1969), advises that, “there are many snippets of country wisdom which present-day cooks would do well to heed” (Saint 1969, 13). While Uttley and Saint’s cookbooks leaned on rural writerly reputations, other books emerged from cooking features on television. Mrs. Daynes Country Cooking (1964 Anglia Television), for instance, was based on Marjorie Daynes’s early television appearances, but drew upon her cooking expertise accumulated since the age of fourteen as the scullery maid in a grand country house. Similarly following a cooking spot on regional television, Look East (East Anglian TV), the renowned English cookery writer and broadcaster, Delia Smith, published two early-career booklets of country recipes (1975; 1976, London, BBC). Smith offered the rationale that: “Living and working in the country is, I think, conducive to good cooking: one is closer to nature and more aware of what the changing seasons have to offer” (Smith 1975, 4).

Other country cookbooks situate their rural authority in more precise ways, through local history or the farming community. For instance, Mary Chafin’s Original Country Recipes, is a work of recovery drawing upon the seventeenth-century papers of a Dorset wife (1979, London, Macmillan). The recipes have been adapted for contemporary ingredients, but medieval references are retained through illustrations, such as boiling pots over open fires. In Oxfordshire Kitchen (Rewley Press, 1977), a fund-raiser by the Council for the Protection of Rural England, foodstuffs native to the county of Oxfordshire are emphasized. And The ‘Farmer’s Wife’ Cookbook, produced and sponsored by the Unigate doorstep delivery food brand, ‘Farmer’s Wife’, comprises recipe content from British farmwives, with each winning entrant rewarded with a color photograph of their farmhouse in the book (1973). In these various ways, British country cookbooks draw on local, rural knowledges to present images of country living. By the end of the decade, Mary Norwak, prolific English cookery writer of over a hundred cookbooks, including Farm House Cakes and Home Baked Bread in 1966, a spin-off for the well-known farming magazine Farmer’s Weekly, brought this trend into the mainstream and produced two country cookbooks in one year: The Best of Country Cooking (Norwak 1979a, London Dent) and The Farmhouse Kitchen (Norwak 1979b, Penguin). Norwak laments that, “A generation ago, few people in Britain were more than a step removed from their country backgrounds”, noting that some town-based readers want to retain links with the “long-lost countryside” (Norwak 1979a, 7, 8).

A British country cookbook of the 1970s, then, as a receptacle of tradition, recalls ‘country’ habits, claims ‘country’ wisdom, and contains recipes which draw upon rural cookery practices now lost to urban dwellers. More specifically, these books evoke an unchanged rural way of life, from folklore to foraging, which has maintained a dependence upon the land, a slower pace and a more cerebral approach to food. Country cookbooks are replete with powerful images of comfort, security and rootedness, sometimes envisaged as emanating from a farmhouse kitchen: a trope which resonates across British literature and culture. In diverse ways, they suggest the possibility of a return to less commercialized, less pressured lives through a more direct relationship with food. The titular language of these cookbooks conveys this significance (Symons 2009). Titles that include ‘country cookery’ or ‘farmhouse’, foster the dream of a life where the natural world remains prominent and influential, and where food is wholesomely and ethically produced. Adopting country cookery was a means of disassociating from modern, processed foodways and eschewing dehumanizing practices of acquiring food, such as shopping at the supermarket – the scourge of many countercultural writings. This essay will now discuss three settings in which countercultural discourses mobilized food as a means of rejecting cultural norms, through the interest in communal living, self-sufficiency and folk feminism, before returning to the influence of these countercultures upon country cookbooks.

Countercultures and food: Served three ways

Communal living – Rethinking foodways

Once we have turned our back on the supermarket culture, the way is open for a remoulding of our society and we can go a long way towards creating the community that we want. […] In our ideal community work will be unpaid, for a member’s every need is provided for by the community from food, accommodation, insurance, care of children and private income, enabling him to express his individuality. (Selene Community “Selene Screed”, Gandalf’s Garden 4, 27)

Gandalf’s Garden (GG) (Selene Community: ‘Why Intentional community?’ 1968–71) complete with psychedelic covers, was the printed journal of an alternative mystical community which promised to explore the “magical garden of our inner worlds” (Murray 1968, 1: 2). It was part of an articulate British underground press, which expressed countercultural dissatisfactions with capitalist power (Nelson 1989). Although short-lived, Gandalf’s Garden enthusiastically supported alternative philosophies and ways of living. The article emphasized living in harmony with land and nature, and argued that, “Man is isolated and without root or purpose. In community we will recover a unity of purpose which will slay the stark figure of loneliness which is stalking our barren civilization.” (4: 27) At the heart of this vision of communal life lay passionately-held beliefs about individuals’ relationship with food, a relationship undermined by the damage supermarkets caused to agricultural systems: “Farmers are at the mercy of the supermarkets” (GG 4, 28). Resistance to supermarkets was a feature of American countercultures too: “If you’re tired of plastic supermarket chow and you’d like to grow at least part of your food … but you live in a fifth floor walk-up or on board a pirate radio ship … keep the faith, baby” (Mother Earth News 1970, 42). And even from a Brownstone in Brooklyn, the Commune Cookbook, Crescent Dragonwagon (Ellen Zolotow), US writer, describes communal living grounded in group shopping and cooking rotas. Food quality and the food-politics paradigm are paramount: the group rejects supermarkets in favor of an organic collective, even while understanding that: “The answer is not really organic food, but revolution. Poisoned food is the symptom of a poisoned society” (Dragonwagon 1972, 52). Communal living offered resistance against the “poisoned society”. Social change was hoped for by bravely focusing upon the inner life and “natural drives” as a route back to sentience (GG 4, 27). Part of this change was to hark back to a less mechanized, slower pace of life in order to “do something of real value”, while lamenting that “hands without power tools on the end of them have become almost redundant” (GG 3, 24).

Communards sought authenticity and traditional life-values through increased harmony with nature and a strong emphasis on inner consciousness. If authenticity was understood as a search for the, “unspoiled, pristine, genuine, untouched and traditional” (Handler 1986, 2), then communal living proposed pursuit of a revolutionary path away from the ‘rat race’ toward the recovery and realization of the self. Communal living was not without its critics, however, and concerns around gender inequality were expressed by sociologists Philip Abrams and Andrew McCulloch, who noted that men tended to prioritize pursuit of self-realization over practical help with chores, leaving women to deal with the more mundane aspects of communal life (Abrams et al. 1976, 144). Supermarket culture as the means of acquiring food, was viewed negatively, both as an acquiescence to industrialized mechanized food production processes, and in depriving individuals of any immediate connection to the food they ate. However, neither an anti-supermarket stance against commercialized food production, nor a profound journey to the inner life, in themselves, put dinner on the table. Production of food requires a practical approach.

Self-sufficiency – Home-produced food

[I]t is a fine thing if, when a man bites into a piece of bread, he can think to himself that he knows the name of the farmer who grew the wheat, the name of the miller who milled it, and the name of the baker who baked it. That is the kind of self-sufficiency that I wish to discuss, and to advocate (Seymour 1977, 8–9).

John Seymour, the father of British self-sufficiency, earned this title through his forty-odd books on the subject, some illustrated by his wife Sally Seymour, and through the example of his self-sufficient family life. Alongside his million-seller, The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency (1976), Seymour broadcast programmes for the BBC and ran self-sufficiency training schools which attracted worldwide attendance. His books combine practical and technical self-sufficiency know-how, with a commune-influenced emphasis on bygone skills, and philosophical rationale. His ethos, with himself as a “word monger” and Sally an “artist and a craftsman” (1961, 154), emphasizes the family unit working a smallholding to produce bounteous food and drink, enjoying the dignity of laboring on the land, perhaps trading with local families, and truly appreciating the food produced. His writings led the countercultural trend in 1970s British self-sufficiency, and are important to the present discussion because he made self-sufficiency seem achievable: he made country life accessible, even for urbanites.

Borrowing clarity of purpose from the commune movement, Seymour’s rejection of mass-produced living offered an alternative to what he perceived to be the dehumanization and disillusionment of modern life. He expounds a purposeful existence, centered upon a renewed relationship to food: a philosophical and physical escape route for those who wanted to withdraw “from industrial, high technological society”, because it is, “ugly, boring, polluting and dangerous” (1978, 104). He responded ideologically to commercialized food production by designing his own style of self-sufficiency, producing food, eschewing supermarkets, and living a pared-down, independent family life, at a remove, he perceived, from the world’s concerns: “If the rest of the world blew itself up tomorrow we could go on living quite happily here and hardly notice the difference” (1961, 9). His writings evoke an imagined pre-industrial existence, where individuals have more control over the things which affect them, more complete emotional lives, a more understandable social milieu and a direct relationship with food eaten. A society where the eater of the bread is familiar with the farmer, miller and baker who produced it.

Similarly to some early agri-food movements (Gross 2009, 58), Seymour’s writings combine productive work with local economic and social structures, at times borrowing from the work of others such as Ernst Schumacher (1973), an economist known for his human-scale economic proposals. Of particular influence was the American couple Helen and Scott Nearing, whose self-sufficient way of life in Vermont, led them to experiment with new foods like rose-hips, an adventurous “exclusive apple diet” cleansing programme, and non-Western ways of eating with wooden bowls and chopsticks (Nearing and Scott 1954, 159). Two decades before Seymour’s own best-seller, the Nearings were ahead of their time in structuring their lives differently, making a “living with our own hands, yet with time and leisure for avocational pursuits” (ix). Self-sufficiency accounts are not regular cookbooks, but they are dominated by the growing and attaining of food, often with food-gathering instructions and recipes appropriate for homegrown or foraged ingredients. Seymour’s influence resonates across many texts, ranging from the practical, with diagrammatical plans for constructing a long bow or fishing boat (Allaby et al. 1975), to the testimonial, with proud lists of home harvests: “4 cwt potatoes, 27 lb of swedes … 12 bottles of gooseberries” (West 1977, 81–83).

Alongside food production, self-sufficiency texts often present philosophical rationales for an alternative life, based in ecological and social awareness. Patrick Rivers, self-sufficiency practitioner, echoes Seymour in his observation of a “profound change” in his household’s attitude:

[W]hen we see the food on our table, we see also the work of many hands and we glimpse the many miracles which brought it to us. We see too – if we try – the sufferings of those who have too little of it and then we realise our good fortune (Rivers 1978, 96).

Such mindful relationship to the everyday consumption of food, it has been argued, acts as an introduction to ecological consciousness (Curtin 1992, 138). Consciousness-raising was key to countercultures: the WLM held special groups and communards concentrated upon spiritual and emotional satisfaction. The self-sufficiency movement, following Seymour, reconceived the individual’s relationship to food, understanding growing and cooking processes anew. This intensified awareness – the feeling for the food on the table – is a fundamental to the genre of country cooking.

However, new relationships with food did not, for John Seymour at least, permit shortcuts in the kitchen:

But those of us who are privileged to live in a home where the ancient skills of preparing and cooking food are still carried out often wonder if the time saved by the ‘modern’ housewife is really worth it. For my God, what a world of difference there is in taste between the heated-up instant meal and the meal carefully cooked from fresh ingredients (Seymour 1987, 15).

Criticisms of the slapdash “modern housewife” were not restricted to Seymour, nonetheless, the endpoint of all his activity was the delicious, homegrown, ethical food on the table.

As with the conduct of communes, gendered labor in the self-sufficiency kitchen is problematic. The burden of broader housewifery was remembered by children of self-sufficient households as being shouldered by their mothers.¹ Even women who opted for women-only self-sufficient communities spent much time gardening and cooking, “potatoes, carrots and beets” (Cheney 1985, 64). John Seymour, whilst full of praise for his wife’s wide-ranging domestic skills, from wallpapering to butchery, admitted to his own boredom of the hard physical toil and sixteen-hour days (Seymour 1961, 40). One biographical account suggests that: “John was very good at thinking and writing, but Sally was the one who did all the work. She was largely in charge of the farm while John was interviewing and writing” (Peacock 2005, 108). Tensions between Sally’s artistic work in illustration and pottery and the domestic work of producing meals and homemaking within a self-sufficient household were evident in the relocation of her kiln (Seymour 1961, 65), with John writing that she was “too busy potting babies” (Seymour 1961, 157). Though undoubtedly there was drudgery, critic Lemke-Santangelo, discussing the rising feminist consciousness of “hippie women”, has argued that, “women attached political significance to their food-related work” (2009, 90), with new skills permitting the cultivation of, “a new social order” (2009, 159). Nonetheless, with Seymour’s extreme focus on domestic living, where “ancient skills” of cooking are prioritized over the shortcuts of a modern kitchen, it is little wonder that the Seymours had different views of sociability and that Sally would have preferred “fewer guests” coming over to enjoy evenings of song and beer (Seymour 2011, 75).

Folk feminism – Back to the kitchen

You will look in vain in our book for a section on time-saving tips, for one of our firmest beliefs is that we Americans wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re in today were it not for our burning desire to save time at any cost. So be prepared to spend more time in the kitchen than you might be used to, but go by easy stages. Don’t start making bread, yoghurt and sprouts the same week you plant a vegetable garden. (Robertson, Flinders, and Godfrey 1976, 67–8)

As with the Selene community and John Seymour, Robertson, Flinders and Godfrey (the authors of Laurel’s Kitchen) had nothing good to say about supermarket shopping or kitchen shortcuts. As McGrath explains: “at the end of the restless 1960s, when second wave feminists loudly petitioned against women’s homebound invisibility, the authors of Laurel’s Kitchen reinvested the kitchen and mother with moral and countercultural significance” (2019, 60).²

In the face of feminist argument against domestic labor and women’s housebound lives, Laurel’s Kitchen made a bold appeal for women to spend more time in the kitchen. This was political action and in Carol Flinders’ words, “taking seriously the role of wife, mother, homemaker”:

We can talk back firmly to those who would belittle the significance of our work; better yet, we can demonstrate by quiet personal example that no other job or career involvement can be quite so effective in bringing about the world we all long to see. (Flinders 1976, 60)

Within their domestic expertise, she argues, women have the power to make radical changes to existing and damaging food systems:

One of the best arguments for serving whole, fresh, unprocessed foods, like homemade, whole-grain bread, is that this practice conserves what is most precious in food – its nutritional value. […] Processed foods are not just unhealthy; they are wasteful, even before you consider the cost in elaborate packaging and competitive advertising. (Flinders 1976, 55)

In calling women back to the kitchen, Robertson, Flinders and Godfrey recommend a return to traditional roles as a power feminism. There is contestation and intentionality in the cooking role, and possibly a new mode of feminist politics (Bain 2016, 58). The philosophy of Laurel’s Kitchen (1976) and the later Bread Book (1984), proposes a new approach to exercising female power over the family’s food practices, a defiant spirit, a consciousness-raising, and a return to a deeper knowledge about food. Such self-determination echoes communal living and self-sufficiency countercultures by rejecting processed foodstuffs and consumer manipulation, and it anticipates the slow food movement: “To lead lives of artistry, we have only to slow down, to simplify, to start making wise choices” (Robertson, Flinders, and Godfrey 1976, 59).

Folk feminism, an early strand within the WLM, has been defined by Joanne Hollows as where: “‘authentic’ feminine cultural forms and practices are privileged over commercially-produced popular culture and an attempt is made to unearth a women’s cultural tradition which has been hidden, marginalized and/or trivialized by a masculine cultural tradition and/or an ‘inauthentic’ women’s culture” (2000, 29). Notwithstanding Hollows’ criticisms of folk feminism as nostalgic, class-based, and excluding male culture (2000, 29), folk feminism may be understood as a return to traditional, even feminine, roles, perhaps emerging out of women’s participation in the counter-cultures. Elizabeth Wilson, cultural historian, has noted how early feminists adopted the “counter-cultural look” of the late 1960s (Wilson, 2007 (1985), 240), and the feminist magazine, Spare Rib’s earliest issues also acknowledge a folk feminism with regular articles for cookery using alternative and natural ingredients (Forster 2003, 155–7). Folk feminism implies a middle-class domestic focus, paying little attention to collective action or demands for equal rights, however it does problematize the relationship between feminism and femininity. Critic Anthea Taylor has argued that: “Girl(ie) power can be seen as a form of ‘power feminism’”, where, “embracing femininity becomes an act of defiance against both feminism (which rejects it) and patriarchy (which trivializes it)” (Taylor 2003,188). In a similar vein, other critics have made direct links between women, food and power. Arlene Avakian, has suggested that, “the work of cooking is more complex than mere victimization” as it offers opportunities for artistic expression, sensual pleasure, resistance and power (Avakian 1997, 6). And Carole Counihan (1999, 12), anthropologist, has argued that through control of resources and influence, women have, for centuries, “used food in symbolic ways as a path to power.”

Women’s power emanating from the kitchen is layered and complex, with domestic power-relations long being central to feminist debate (Johnson and Lloyd 2004, 7–18). Women’s cooking has been critiqued variously: as a basic task forming part of the inequitable social role of the housewife (Oakley 1974, 58–59), and part of long-running campaigns for Wages for Housework and alternative food provision methods in feminist magazines Spare Rib and Trouble and Strife (Forster 2003). Alternatively cooking has been embraced as a collective feminist political act (Williams 2014, 61), and desired as resistance in an independent home kitchen (Gvion 2015). Certainly, women’s and feminism’s relationship to food is complex and varied (Orbach 1978; Williams 2014).

As a political act, family cooking contests the damage caused by commercialized food practices, and simultaneously improves family food health. It incorporates women’s traditional domains and skill-sets and simultaneously anticipates new, perhaps vegetarian, foodways requiring time, energy and devotion. Such political change rooted in women’s domestic agency and power is not borne out of protest marches, the mobilization of mass media, or nationwide campaigns, (although it does not exclude these), but is premised upon individual actions of women in domestic kitchens, exerting influence over family habits and consequently the foodways of the world. This combined sense of identity and food-agency also underlies the surge in interest in country cookery

Imagining the country cook

This attitude towards the ‘humble housewife’ makes this housewife feel far from humble, so I have listed some of the skilled jobs one has to do in the course of a normal day. Apart from the supremely important roles of wife and mother, one has to be cook, kitchen maid, washerwoman, gardener, chauffeur, nurse (when anyone in the family is ill), and as a farmer’s wife, possibly also dairy maid, poultry girl and anything else that is needed (Farm Women’s Club Magazine Winter 1973, 64).

Objecting to the trend for ‘Belittling the Housewife’ and responding to feminist arguments for women to either get out of the kitchen and pursue careers, or demand payment for housework, Mrs M. West of Craigmoston, Scotland, wrote to the Farm Women’s Club Magazine (FWCM), expressing pride in her duties as a farmer’s wife. Her letter also addresses the standing of farmwives generally: “most farmer’s wives are much too busy to take on other jobs” (64), a sentiment echoed in further magazine correspondence. In a moment of great challenge and change for women within the WLM, the expression of such certainty of identity, rooted in place and community, is exceptional.

Despite the complexities and pluralities of women’s rural contexts (Chamberlain 1975; Pinni, Brandth, and Little 2015), and diverse definitions of farmwomen (Gasson 1980), and 1970s feminist research into the working lives of female farmers (Machum 2015, 39), the apotheosis of a country cook in country cookbooks remains a farmer’s wife in a farmhouse kitchen. Other expressions of female rural competence or independence: the female farm laborer, the self-sufficient wife, the women in separatist-lesbian communes who rejected all they knew to fight patriarchal oppression, do not appear. Rather, the country cookbook, whilst declaring its credentials variously, addresses its reader by encouraging her to construct a persona, rooted in her home, secure in her position as the feeder of the family, close to her food sources. By identifying a country cooking genre of 1970s cookbooks, and arguing this was entwined with countercultural discourses, I suggest country cookbooks of the 1970s approached a troubled decade anew. They express the desire for an alternative life, a longed-for dissent from the work-consumption cycle, but without the unconventionality of the commune, the hard graft of self-sufficiency, or the media-fueled mockery of the women’s libber. The country cookbook offers the possibility of a new respect for country living, and a psychological shift away from industrialized food, capitalism, and the limitations of modern life.

Country cooking was communicated visually by the hugely popular Yorkshire Television programme Farmhouse Kitchen (ITV 1971–1990), broadcast on national television for about twenty years.³ From a farmhouse kitchen setting, this programme framed a homey approach to thrifty cookery, where baking bread, making cheese and butter, bee-keeping and country crafts, were broadcast to an increasingly frantic urban population. Its popularity was not diminished by the inherent contradictions of an audience whose working lives necessitated dependence upon the ready meals and supermarket food so disliked by John Seymour.

Yorkshire Television produced many cookbooks from this series from 1975 onwards. Amidst a rural narrative, these cookbooks adapt country cookery for an urban readership, comprising traditional and local recipes. One compilation, The Complete Farmhouse Kitchen Cookbook (1984) gathered over a thousand recipes from earlier editions, and was reprinted twenty-four times in eleven years. Some recipes have explanatory sentences giving their historical background:

Sussex Shepherd’s Pie

A 19^th century Sussex Pie said to have been a traditional favourite of shepherds tending the Southdown sheep. (108)

Welsh Cakes

These are cooked on a bakestone, as it is known in Wales, or a girdle, as used in Scotland. A heavy-based frying pan gives best results if you have neither of these. [Girdle is Scots for griddle.] (312)

Kentish Apple Chutney

Traditionally made late in winter with stored apples. A mild, sweet, firm chutney, quick to make. Allow to mature 6 weeks before eating. (378)

These short introductions locate the recipes geographically up and down the United Kingdom, reminding the nation of its diverse food histories. Recipe titles such as “Kentish Hop-Pickers Cake” (344), “Country Loaf” (28) and “Farmhouse Crumble” (260), reinforce the rural emphasis. While the layout is modern, with lists of ingredients followed by numbered instructions, some recipes reveal their historical provenance. “Loaf Cake”, for instance, has the subtitle “Teisen Dorth”, the unusual southern Welsh name for the cake more commonly known as “Bara Brith”, a fruited loaf, literally translated as “speckled bread”. Alongside acknowledgement of the ancient Welsh language and culture though, is a contemporary choice of flours and the useful modern hint that it “freezes well” (298).

The astute television producers, Graham and Mary Watts, identified a need in their viewing and reading publics to engage with narratives of home, comfort and tradition. Mary Watts outlines this in her introduction:

It was when Graham Watts and I walked down the long corridor to our office at Yorkshire Television and counted not one or two, but ten, twelve, twenty sacks of mail every day that we realized just how much our audience wanted this kind of programme, these every-day recipes, this matter-of-fact advice, homeliness and a reminder of how things used to be (Complete Farmhouse Kitchen Cookbook, 1995 (1984), 7).

Farmhouse Kitchen identified the need for a different register, an escape from the difficulties besetting Britain, where history, customs and tradition still had meaning:

You will discover many traditional country recipes which I began to collect on extensive and most enjoyable, if waist-expanding, tours of Women’s Institutes about ten years ago. Recipes like Sussex Bacon Roly Poly have been skilfully updated: gone is the old pudding cloth, from the days when many people had only a boiling pot and very few an oven, and in its place is a crisp, golden, appetizing roll of bacon, onion and sage in a light suet pastry crust. If you find the quantities of ingredients for Yorkshire Parkin [ginger cake] very odd, this is because Mrs Nan Morgan of Addingham in Yorkshire always put together the recipe with the aid of an Edward VIII coronation mug and a very old, half burnt away, wooden spoon. The result, nevertheless, was an excellent parkin (or ‘moggy’ as it is described in the West Riding) (8).

Although few would be familiar with a boiling pot, its inclusion here, along with Mrs Morgan’s idiosyncratic measuring cup, sets a tone of historical and personal rural kitchen competencies. Nicola Humble has remarked upon the “expressive power” of cookbooks (2020, 212), and upon the active construction of a narrative:

The persona of a cookbook is the product of narrative devices, but it is also constructed through active reading, reading between the lines and the recipes, hearing a tone of voice through the directions, building a continuous narrative through the discontinuities and hybridities of the form. When people remark (and many do) that they read cookbooks like novels, it is this process to which they are referring: the construction of a narrative personality through the reading between the lines and gaps of discontinuous text. (202)

In “reading between the lines” of a country cookbook, the urban cook might “build a continuous narrative” of a farmhouse kitchen, homegrown produce and even a community close to the land. In a decade of uncertainty for women, the imagined farmwife, positioned securely in her domestic and familial role, was evidently appealing. Such a narrative contributes to the sudden popularity of the country cookbook in this troubled decade.

Narrative devices of country cookbooks

My mother cooked without a cookery book, but some of her recipes were written in her thin delicate sloping handwriting in a book I now possess. The recipes vary from cakes and meat to cough mixtures and syrups, and drinks for the hayfield and for the horse.’ […] There always had to be a good supply of food because nobody who came so far could be refused, and even the gypsy with her basket of clothes-pegs and the pedlar with his tinware were regaled with a piece of cake and a cup of tea to cheer them on their hungry way. There was poverty, and we were reminded of this every day. (Uttley 1966, 10)

This introduction purposefully immerses the reader in a narrative of times lost to industrial progress. The “gypsy with her basket of clothes-pegs and the pedlar with his tinware” are characterizations from a previous era. Despite this being a personal history of a country childhood in a remote farmhouse, such characters are recognizable from within the British nineteenth-century realist novel tradition too, which also registers poverty, class, charity and the self-reliance needed to live a remote country life. Framing personal reminiscence as a narrative of an earlier literary period, side-lines contemporary 1970s industrialized foodways. Such books, Humble has suggested, expressed a “desire to get off the treadmill, to reject the rampant consumerism of the postwar period” (2005, 186).

Marika Hanbury Tenison adopts the narrative device of a conversational tone of voice to impart country cooking knowledge in Recipes from a Country Kitchen (1978). Tenison, who co-authored The Survival Handbook with Allaby and Seymour, was a well-published cookery writer, journalist and television presenter. Although she was well-travelled, and married to an explorer, Country Kitchen reflects Tenison’s life in a fourteenth-century farmhouse on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. It focusses upon West Country regional produce and draws recipes from countrywomen, old manuscripts and generations of local memories. Country Kitchen imparts advice through rural capabilities: “Country women know how to make ends meet and leftovers are put to delicious advantage” (106). Her tone suggests proficiency, yet also carefully anticipates differences between country and urban kitchen knowledge: “Unlike other game, rabbits should not be hung before being skinned and paunched, [gutted] and in fact, the sooner you deal with them, the better” (137). Whether or not an urban housewife, in truth, produced many game suppers, is largely irrelevant, Tenison achieves Humble’s “continuous narrative” of country kitchen sensibility.

Boiling pots and paunching game, reminiscent of bygone eras, are far removed from the pilloried ready meals of the feminist kitchen (Williams 2014, 59), but through carefully-constructed narratives and modernizing of ingredients and equipment, writers of country cookbooks connected with contemporary audiences. Country cookbooks, by appropriating the past, also address the present. This forms a creative site of two time zones where: “nostalgia is paired with an incessant movement forward” (Kelting 2016, 365). Kelting argues that cookbooks blend past with present: “The creative space of the cookbook, with its ability to stand between the authority of the written history and the movement of bodies in kitchens and communities, harnesses this paradox within its own medium” (377).

As creative spaces, country cookbooks of 1970s Britain address this paradox. They permit resistance to urban and industrialized foodways by drawing upon older food narratives, and encourage contemporary activism through individual cooking practice. They recall a collectively-imagined past of a slower and more authentic approach to food through the suggestion of bygone calm, time-rich female kitchen competence, of discernment over foodstuffs coming in and accomplished, home-cooked meals going out. In country cookbooks, a rustic nostalgia encourages readers to imagine escaping the stresses of urban life and a secure female identity allows women to imagine having a degree of self-sufficiency and control in their kitchens.

Audrey Parker’s Cottage and Country Recipes (1975) and A Country Recipe Notebook (1979), demonstrate the country tone, its creative poetry and the paradoxes of this genre of cookery. Together, these two slim volumes bring together country habits with contemporary foodways. Parker worked in publishing and her “Cottage and Farmhouse Detail” for The Beatrix Potter Society (1993) reveals her interest in Yorkshire and the Lake District. Both books are illustrated by Sally Seymour, and the links to self-sufficiency are evident. Parker offers practical advice and a creative space for the cook who aspires to country cooking. Cottage and Country Recipes opens with a carefully-framed introduction which evokes the literary modernist moment of individual imagination and creative consciousness:

‘Tea was laid in the dining-room – farm butter, honey in the comb, home-made cakes and jam and currant loaf, served in a pink lustre tea-service.’ […] From other accounts, the kitchen itself was often chaotic, Carrington’s rabbit pie almost lethal, and her painting sadly neglected; but the poetry made its mark – ‘The poetry of cottage and farmhouse life’, as her visitor saw it, in the chosen style of her housekeeping, its individuality, and its feeling for country ways (1975, 11).

Parker explains the essence of this poetic feeling:

Country cooking – and all the detail surrounding it – has always caught the imagination; perhaps mainly because it is so realistic. In essence it stands for so much that is both ideal and yet real: the rhythm of the year, home and hearth, the magic of ordinary everyday things, the links with the past, but still more the needs of the present (11).

The natural, the domestic, the magical and the ordinary are all ingredients of the “living tradition” (11) of country cookery, where “Part of the charm of this kind of cookery is its idiosyncrasy” (11–12). This feeling of idiosyncratic country charm influences the book’s contents: “As country cookery largely depends on homegrown vegetables and fresh local produce, the book begins here” (15).

Parker acknowledges the renewed interest in country foodways by looking at country dishes afresh. For instance, she implores her reader not to disparage countrified salads, even though “they can be somewhat jumbled and messy, especially if the eggs and tomatoes are cut in delicate slices that soon fall to pieces, or because of insistence on beetroot”, suggesting a different mindset: “with the right touch they do have their charm” (16–17). Changes in language are also addressed and Parker recovers “the savory” for the country meaning of a “well-flavoured supper dish, made with minimum trouble”, rather than its more formal interpretation as a dinner-party “delicate morsel” (25). Country traditions are referenced, with “Shin of Beef Mold” an “old-fashioned harvest-time mold, made to set overnight so that it can be served the following evening after everyone has been out in the fields” (54–5), and “cakes for mid-morning, after an early start and a good deal of hard work in between” (79). A continuous narrative of uncomplicated food, traditional cookery and a busy life in the country is maintained for the reader to assimilate.

Line-drawn illustrations, one per chapter, are not of techniques, food-preparation stages or finished dishes, but of scenes where an open door or window permits a glimpse of hens, cows, or vine-ripening tomatoes, or where a black cat or Welsh dresser reinforce a farmhouse setting. These illustrations, stylistically similar to Sally Seymour’s earlier self-sufficiency work, represent an imagined abundance and old-world charm of rural, even self-sufficient living and encourage participation in country life’s poetry by cooking the recipes. They invite the reader to explore country foodways without radical departure from everything already known.

A Country Recipe Notebook (1979), discussed earlier, makes Parker’s intentions clear: “This book is mainly for incidentals, background, hints, customs, words and phrases, materials, methods, ways of adapting and ways in which ideas from the past tie up with modern research” (11). It modernizes the tradition of country cooking through explanations, interpretations and selections. The “special ways” of cooking vegetables, and the responsibility of “the baking of bread for the family”, invite appreciation of the world of country cooking (35, 145). Chapters are organized by food type, including: “Herbs, Leaves and Flowers”, “Eggs”, “Honey Treacle and Sugar”, “Country Baking” and “Drinks and Remedies”. Country cooking notes and knowledges are bestowed upon the home cook. “Apple Cakes”, for instance, are introduced as a “special feature of country cookery” with versatile uses for an abundance of apples: cakes made with pastry, or batter, spiced, or without eggs, for tea-time or pudding, etc (157). Only one recipe is actually printed, leaving creative space for the cook’s ownership of, and experimentation with, her personalized apple cake. Such an education permits the reader to add country cooking methods to her repertoire for, “when we collect country recipes we usually need to collect many extra details as well, and these notes are for filling in some of the gaps” (11).

Sometimes these country food notes incorporate the historical alongside the contemporary, as in the discussion of herbs, now used for flavoring, but with important older uses, “linked with health and well-being for good reasons, as modern research bears out” (15). Parker explains that, “Fresh bunches of mint used to be hung in a kitchen or a larder to keep the flies away; which is also an old fisherman’s trick and still used sometimes by fishmongers” (20). Fading traditions are brought to attention: “Patterns are changing and various skills and customs have been slipping away, including many that went with pig-keeping, once a major cottage economy” (75). Homegrown food and some small measure of self-sufficiency is assumed: “Fresh vegetables, morning gathered ideally, are best prepared just before use” (35) and “all eggs for cooking should be not less that 24 h old, or the whites will not set properly or whip” (92). Happy memories may be built in “Jams and Jellies”, where connections are drawn between the inner life and country food: “Preserving preserves happy days: the memory of a particular garden or hedgerow, wherever the fruit was gathered, at a particular time of the year.” (162)

These extensive “supplementary notes” (73), sometimes have no ingredients, techniques, cooking time or temperature. As in “Steak and kidney pudding” (77) which, as argued earlier, is not a recipe, but rather a sketch of traditional country kitchen know-how. The urban cook is invited to imagine presenting this savory pudding at a farmhouse supper table. In adopting this narrative strategy, Parker closes a knowledge-gap for those who have not benefited from techniques passed between generations of country women or may not assume the country identity of the farmwoman. It has been argued that cookbooks not only reflect culture but also “contribute to the construction of culinary knowledge” (Ransom and Wright 2013, 671), and most important in Parker’s Country Recipe Notebook is the notion of knowing country food and country ways. There are few recipes, because “Nearly everybody can find a recipe for a good steak and kidney pie” (45), however, what is explored, linguistically and behaviorally, through words, phrases and narratives, is how readers may become country cooks.

This is a particular kind of “recipe language” (Cotter 1997, 52), employing a discourse of country cooking techniques, alongside assumed levels of food-consciousness and self-sufficiency, yet addressing an urban audience: “Our wild fruits are a most precious heritage […] all the more, now that so many hedgerow fruits are fast disappearing or being ruined by chemical spraying” (59). But readers are reminded to go picking in September because, “in October the blackberries belong to the devil” (59–60). Recipes and cookbooks, can of course be read with little intention of following through to the end product, and in this they provide a different function, appealing to the imagination and the emotions. Parker’s narrative stands against mass-produced food, encouraging a more direct relationship to food, embodied in country cookery. In this, her book closes the gap between the utopian and the quotidian. In words and images, Recipe Notebook takes the reader, a home cook in her home kitchen, to an inner world of imagined, if not actual, countrified self-sufficiency.

No such thin volume can teach someone how to live a country life, it cannot pass on generations of accumulated traditions, knowledges and rural ways. However, the work of a volume like Recipe Notebook is to give small clues, a flavor or illustrated insight, into how a farmwife might run her country kitchen. Most important is the implication that this is a preferable way of living, cerebral in its imaginative appeal and superior to low-nutrient supermarket food. The appeal of the kitchen as a haven of country-bound expression of mind and soul is not difficult to understand, and given the idealism of the commune and the hard labor associated with self-sufficiency, perhaps the folk feminist idea of the country kitchen was as far as many women were prepared to go.

Conclusion

The tone of country cookbooks anticipates an urban readership, not meant for actual farmwives already assumed to be knowledgeable about country food, or indeed for women who opted for separatist communes or who ran self-sufficient smallholdings, creating meals out of whatever was available. The country cookbook purveys an imagined countrified life, a notional rural turn, and as a manual for an approach to food, it may be adopted at will (Adorno 1964), and purchased for the price of the book.

This article has argued that the resurgence of the country cookbook and countrified cooking styles in 1970s Britain is the result of a number of related cultural circumstances, social responses, ideas and philosophies which responded to and embraced the contradictions of the decade. The commune movement and self-sufficiency in Britain focused upon food as a measure of authentic living and a rejection of industrially-produced, supermarket-sold manufactured food. Relationships to food production and consumption manifested in a variety of ways, through cookbooks, self-sufficiency manuals, and food writing that proposed positive action and hopeful expression, all advocating taking back individual control of foodstuffs. Communal living and self-sufficiency, however, with their focus on the anti-capitalist production of food and emphasis on alternative living, raise important questions for feminists as they bring women’s farming, rural life, gardening, cooking and home into a fresh framework for discussion. The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s highlighted housework and workplace inequalities, however there was less focus on other groups of women, rural and farmwomen, commune women and self-sufficiency women: those who lived or worked close to the land. Discussions of femininity and women and food have revealed new ways of understanding female power, and within the WLM, the notion of folk feminism, a search for female authenticity, has influenced women’s approach to feeding their families and managing their household’s foodways.

In these complex contexts, the significance of the country cookbook is apparent as an intersection of debates of the 1960s and 1970s, implying a return to the rural through nostalgic narratives and suggestions of countrified living, emphasizing local foodways, and privileging women’s food knowhow. The trope of the countryside, and its dreams of self-reliance, expressed in country cookery, is about control over a female domain, over the food a family eats and if not political engagement, at least political dissent. For country cookbooks may not appear to be radical, overtly feminist texts, however, in their rejection of patriarchal industrialization of food and rampant commercialization, and their adopting of a lifestyle seemingly closer to the land, they nonetheless make a political statement out of a personal choice.

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Notes

1 Self-sufficiency was remembered as being particularly hard on women by children of self-sufficient parents of the 1970s. BBC News. 17 April 2016. “The children uprooted to live the 1970s Good Life.”

2 Laurel’s Kitchen was first published by Niligri Press, California, the publishing arm of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, an independent non-profit publisher specialising in works of mysticism, however, when it was published in London for a British audience, it was with Routledge, a mainstream academic, even highbrow, press.

3 Farmhouse Kitchen, a weekly afternoon programme was first presented by Dorothy Sleightholme, who had previously been involved in a TV history programme, then from 1983 by Grace Mulligan, who had previously taught cookery at the Women’s Institute.