The True History of English Food

Clarissa Dickson Wright has written a new book in time for the Christmas season and it is a stinker. A History of English Food is in reality nothing of the kind, but instead substitutes speculation and snobbish reminiscence for any modicum of research or analysis. Judged by her memoir, Spilling the Beans, Dickson Wright is a mean old bird intent on settling scores, dropping names, taking credit and boasting. Even worse, she would appear to be one of those reformed alcoholics who rattles on, and on, about AA and is insufferable on the subject of booze.

She has had a difficult life and recounts the many "dreadful" things she has experienced, but both before and after drinking herself into homeless destitution following the death of a lover she had been quite the barrister, at least in her telling. It therefore is a bit of a surprise that the brief she has written extolling herself is so unconvincing.

Dickson Wright did not much like the law, an understandable enough sentiment, but her resentment at dealing with money strikes a discordant and whiny note. We learn that she possessed sufficient intelligence to be "the youngest woman ever called to the bar," but displays an astonishing lack of common sense in recounting that "nobody told me I had to record every billed hour and I soon ran into problems making up the bills. I hadn't really expected to have to tackle this area of the work and tempers frayed." (Spilling photograph caption between 120-21, 198)

Commerce of course is distasteful, but because Dickson Wright realized that "after all I owed nothing to anyone but myself" and did need money, which after all comes in pretty handy down here, bub, she quit the law and returned to a prior job with an Edinburgh bookstore: "It is generally agreed that it was me who turned Books for Cooks into a household name worldwide." (Spilling 198) Perhaps the Editor alone had missed that phenomenon.