This is a historical cookbook combining recipes and anecdotes from the Greeks to the 16th century to modern times. It touches on the bygone 'servant question' and the iniquities of Cook ('The majority of those who set up for Professors of this Art are of mean ability, selfish and pilfering everything they can and are too often either ridiculously saucy or insatiably thirsty.'); the ancient approach to food and its preparation (to make Portable Soup: 'stir constantly for eight hours.') and the various ideas, through the ages, about the connection between cookery and health and the impact of culinary practices on the well-being of society. It contains a number of recipes from Apicius' way with a pig, through Mrs A.B. Marshall's method of preparing larks and the Chinese dish of baby mice in syrup, to Spam curry, and ranges from the Greeks to the Greasy Spoon.