Dorothy Hartley

"[3] She was educated at a convent of French nuns at Skipton until 1904, where, she recalled, "the kitchen was alive with stir and bustle, the clatter of clogs and pails, and the aroma of breakfast coffee.

In 1919 she entered the Regent Street Polytechnic in London where she was, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a prize pupil.

In 1930 she published The Old Book, "A Mediaeval Anthology Edited and Illuminated by Dorothy Hartley" with an introduction by Professor George Saintsbury.

A tour of a slightly different kind was one she made of Ireland, retracing the steps of the mediaeval prelate Giraldus Cambrensis who had accompanied Prince John there in the twelfth century.

[2] It was there that she began work on the book for which she is best known, Food in England, with its chapters on kitchens, fuels and fireplaces, meat, poultry, game, eggs, mediaeval feast and famine, fish, fungi, Elizabethan households, the New World, salting, drying, preserving, dairy produce, bread, the Industrial Revolution, and "sundry household matters", all written from the viewpoint of an historian and also a practical and old-fashioned cook.

The Manchester Guardian called it "fascinating…unusually readable";[10] Harold Nicolson in The Observer said, "it will become a classic", though he made gentle fun of the combative Englishness of Hartley's culinary pronouncements.

[11] The Sunday Times, reviewing the seventh edition of the book later wrote, "For food scholarship at its best see Dorothy Hartley's robust, idiosyncratic, irresistible Food in England... As packed with diverse and fascinating information as a Scotch bun with fruit, this untidy bundle of erudition is held together by the writer's huge enjoyment of her subject, her immense curiosity about everything to do with the growth, preparation, preservation and eating of food in this country since the Middle Ages.

In 1964 she published Water in England, of which the ODNB writes, "This remarkable work is full of valuable information on all manner of related phenomena such as holy springs, well digging, leather jugs, spa hotels, and suchlike.

"[2] Her last work, "The Land of England", was published when the author was 86, but as The Times commented, she could "still depend on her excellent memory rather than on notes and filing cabinets.

"[12] In her later years she wrote occasionally for The Guardian, on topics including wool and traditional sheep-shearing; the British Museum; "funeral biscuits"; apple-scoops made from sheep's bones; tame slugs; donkeys; a fourteenth-century feast; and mysterious old culinary terms (such as "pestils of pora", "mortrews" and "mawney").