Thus you dredge with powders or spices to give flavour, or with acid juices, or chopped herbs, which the pouring fat washes down into the crevices of the roasting meat.

Thus in "Spice Sauce (sauce for fish or flesh)", Hartley directs "Take a quart of sharp cider, .... some mace, a few cloves, some lemon peel, horse-radish root sliced, some sweet herbs, 6 schaloys [shallots], 8 anchovies, 3 spoonfulls of shred red peppers..."[12] For baking, where exact instructions are needed, these are given in Imperial units, but the oven temperature and timing are again left mainly to the cook's experience.

Rub butter into flour; blend ... Set it to rise in a warm place, ... bake lightly and thoroughly till golden brown.

The Manchester Guardian called it "fascinating…unusually readable";[14] 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.

[15] The historian of food Bee Wilson, rereading "this endearing work" 58 years on for The Guardian, wrote that she had remembered it as a history book and an epic account of English cooking, "interspersed with recipes."

Wilson finds "Hartley's devotion to archaic recipes such as stargazey pie and posset ... mildly crazed."

"[4] The Historic Royal Palaces curator Lucy Worsley presented a BBC film, 'Food in England', The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley, on 6 November 2015.

She describes the book as "laden with odd facts and folklore ... a curious mixture of cookery, history, anthropology and even magic, ... with her own strong and lively illustrations."

In a year of filming Hartley's places and people she knew, Worsley discovered that "my frustration with her technique as historian was misplaced."

Hartley had travelled continually to gather materials for her weekly Daily Sketch column,[a] sometimes sleeping rough "in a hedge".

The work is thus effectively, Worsley argues, an oral history, as Hartley interviewed "the last generation to have had countryside lives sharing something in common with the Tudors."

It cites the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's entry on Hartley,[18] calling Food in England "Arguably her best work, and the one for which she will be remembered".