Food in England: The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley

"Fire is elemental and primitive,

"the most miserable situation clears up when somebody gets the fire going.

"It should be lit, burn up and boil a kettle within 20 minutes."

Well, it's taken me a bit longer than 20 minutes

but I didn't write those words.

They come from Food In England,

published in 1954 by Dorothy Hartley

and I use this book the whole time

in my work as a historian and a curator. It's just brilliant.

It's packed full of the most extraordinary, intriguing,

fascinating little things you didn't know about history.

Food In England was the product of more than 30 years of research.

Its 600 pages are fabulously well-written.

They describe how food and kitchen utensils and cooking techniques

were central to the lives of every single person in Britain,

rich and poor.

And the book's also full of Dorothy's own lively illustrations.

I've been a big fan of Dorothy Hartley's best-known book

for a long time

but I have to admit I don't know much about the woman herself.

In this programme, I'm hoping to find out

who this elusive and eccentric author really was,

and what she achieved in her life.

To do this, I'm going to meet some of her many and fervent admirers.

Look at all the detail, it's just so remarkable.

-Don't tell anybody this, will you?

-LUCY LAUGHS

I forged her signature and posted it off.

THEY BOTH LAUGH

-Let's go!

-ALL: Yes!

I'm going to recreate parts of the lost world

she describes so well in Food In England.

Oh, he's opened his little eyelid!

Oops!

BLEATING

I haven't finished, come back!

And I'm going to follow in her footsteps, from the Yorkshire Dales,

all across the Midlands to her final home on the borders of Wales.

I can't promise you

that I'm going to sleep in the hedgerows like she did,

but I AM determined to discover who she was,

why she wrote this book and to pinpoint

just how big a contribution it makes to the history of what we eat.

Food In England is a treasure trove, it's a reference book

but also a thoroughly good read.

It ranges from Saxon cooking, to the Industrial Revolution

with chapters on everything from seaweed to salt.

But to me, it's not a conventional history book.

It hasn't got proper references to source material or footnotes

and historians like me worry about things like that.

Does this really matter, though, when the heat's on in the kitchen?

I'd like to know what cooks think about Dorothy Hartley.

To find out, I've come to ask the award-winning chef

and food writer, Rowley Leigh.

I'm interested in Food In England because of what it tells us

about the history of food, but what interests you in it as a chef?

I love her concentration on what the food means.

Not in terms of mythology but in its place in the culture and...

When she talks about mutton, for example,

she talks about half a dozen different types of mutton,

when they're at their best, where they come from, what they feed on,

what gives them a different flavour.

And the cooking element is just how to exploit that.

What sort of impression has Dorothy Hartley made on you

and your cooking?

I think she's reinforced, really, my ideas about food.

I bang on about seasonality and context.

I want to eat asparagus in May, for example,

not because that's the best asparagus - although it is -

not just because it's English and not French - although it is -

I want to eat it then because that's when it feels right

as part of that rhythm. It's spring, it's a shoot

and it comes after the deprivations of Lent and everything else.

It's that celebration.

If you have asparagus at Christmas, you've just lost that.

You know, that's an integral part of her thinking, I think.

Rowley is demonstrating that very principle.

He's cooking two dishes that Dorothy reckons are perfect in spring -

red mullet and roast duck with fresh peas.

-Phwoar, it's pretty hot.

-It's quite warm.

What I like is although this is a hugely hi-tech thing, actually,

Dorothy shows a picture of meat

-being roasted in exactly the same way.

-Absolutely.

-With a vertical wall of flame.

-This is what roasting means.

When people put something in an oven, it's sort of baking with steam.

This is proper, old-fashioned roasting,

where it's only cooking in its own fat,

you just get the flavour of the meat itself on an open fire.

The duck will take another hour but the mullet's ready.

Wrapped in paper with butter and seasoning

and baked whole for just 30 minutes. Dead simple.

-Do you want to give it a go?

-Yes, please.

Wow, that's really salty and anchovy-like. Bleurgh!

That's not what I was expecting at all.

Mmm, that is super-delish.

-And you did hardly anything to it at all?

-I've done nothing, yes.

It's a respectful way to treat a beautiful fish.

-Absolutely.

-Yes.

-Yes.

What would you say to Dorothy Hartley

if she were to walk into the room now?

"Have some of the mullet, lass."

Ha! Very good.

"Please consider this book as an old-fashioned kitchen,

"not impressive, but a warm, friendly place,

"where one can come in any time and have a chat with the cook."

This book is an amazing treasure trove of information.

Not only history,

but tradition and anthropology and culture in society.

And it's also a book about Dorothy herself.

It's quite autobiographical.

Here is a picture of her own grandfather's egg cosy,

with its knitted pom-pom on top.

She said it was "just like a woolly nightcap."

"The breakfast egg was a Victorian institution.

"Really nice homely families kept their eggs coddled in hot water

"under a china hen."

"According to superstition, empty eggshells

"should always be broken up, lest witches make boats thereof."

The first chapter is her memory of all the different kitchens

that she's used throughout her lifetime.

The earliest of them are in Yorkshire.

She was born in Skipton, so that's where I'm off to now.

Skipton is a busy market town

at the southern end of the Yorkshire Dales.

The Hartley family were based just up the hill from here.

But they didn't live in an ordinary house.

This is the place where Dorothy was born.

It's a pretty gloomy and austere-looking place

for a little girl to grow up.

It was and it is the local boy's grammar school.

Her father was the headmaster.

He came here in 1876,

and his third child, Dorothy, was born in 1893,

probably in his own private rooms, part of the main school building.

Today, some of the boys are going to have a go at recipes

Dorothy would have eaten here at the school in the 1890s.

And, at lunchtime,

'the rest of the pupils are going to try what they've made.

To be honest, I'm not sure how well it's going to go down.

-What are you going to be making?

-We're making stargazy pie.

Now, what is that? People won't know what it is.

It's basically herring pie,

but you've got the herring heads sticking out the sides.

The heads are sticking out.

-Do you think this is going to go down well in the canteen?

-No.

Go!

'All these recipes come from Food In England.'

-I think it'll taste better than it looks.

-I think you're right.

'The desserts are oatmeal pudding...

'..and that's semolina.

'That's mutton broth made of sheep's' bones,

'a staple here in Dorothy's day.

'And this is the dough for Yorkshire teacakes.'

'And finally, stargazy pie.'

Why do you leave the heads on them?

-If we cut them off and we cook them, we'll lose all the oil.

-OK.

That's what it's going to look like.

While the students are cooking,

I'm going to find out what late Victorian life was like

at the school for Dorothy and her family.

So this room that we're in, now it's the library,

it used to be The Big School, it's called in 1896,

What went on in here? Is it a big classroom?

Yes, it's really the main teaching room.

How many boys are we talking about?

You're talking about 80 boys overall, of whom about...

never more than 30 in this period would've been boarders.

So here is Dr Hartley, the headmaster,

Mrs Hartley, the Hartley kids

and that's little Dorothy there.

What sort of a man was he?

He looks very respectable here in his mortarboard.

Yes, you have to remember

the headmaster of the grammar school had a real status.

It was a minor squirearchy, so there was that sort of distance

and respect, in a way.

I have to say, Dorothy, in all these pictures, looks a little bit grumpy.

-Yes.

-Would you like to share your childhood home with 80 boys?

-I'm not sure I would.

-I don't think so, I don't think so.

Dorothy's mother, Mrs Hartley,

she was involved in the running of the school, wasn't she?

She was, I think pretty well the sole runner of the school.

There's nobody but a matron, which they can't always afford,

-plus a sort of odd-job man...

-Oh.

-You see.

So, Mrs Hartley, she's essentially the head of catering.

I think she's probably the only caterer, really, most of the time.

-Oh, golly.

-From the finances,

I can't see how it could've been run in any other way

without her doing almost all the work herself.

Producing food for 80 boys.

And this made an impression on Dorothy. She remembers it.

She describes the school kitchen here.

She said it was "masculine and enterprising."

I guess they had to be enterprising to feed all of those boys.

She talks about home-made bread,

"Rising each week in a huge tub set before the fire."

And, "Piles of Yorkshire teacakes came daily from the baker."

DOROTHY: "It was here that I first realised

"the specialities of England...

"bilberries from the mountains in leaking purple crates.

"From the east coast, came barrels of herrings.

"Oxfordshire sent crates of wonderful fruit.

"From the north, came sacks of oatmeal."

Roll up, roll up, get some stargazy pie.

Fish heads! Fish tails! Herrings!

-Do you have to eat the head and the tail?

-No, you're not,

but they're there to give it extra flavour.

OK, can I have a bit, please?

Which one would you like, sir?

I don't even like fish!

Get some stargazy pie.

-Can I have some of that?

-Get it whilst it's warm.

-Going to eat it all? Promise?

-Yes.

'They'll eat anything you put out for them.'

They like to come to school, have a bacon sandwich

and then, at break time, they come out with big slices of pizza,

then they come and have big bowls of pasta and home-made cake.

And then they go home and eat again.

Imagine Mrs Hartley, then, the headmaster's wife,

catering for 80 growing boys. How did she do it?

I don't know.

She must have worked from five in the morning till ten at night.

It's nice.

Yeah, it's nice.

Normal food's nicer.

Normal food is nicer. Oh, OK.

Verdict on the semolina?

-Good.

-Good.

THE BOYS CHATTER

The Hartleys ate pretty well at the school.

Not so, people in the poorer farming communities nearby.

'In Food In England, Dorothy writes of families in the Dales,

'whose diet depended on what they could produce

'from the land around them.'

'If you came here 100 years ago,

'you would've seen a different sort of farming.'

It would've been more of a mixed farming.

There would've been sheep and cattle,

but there would've also been crops, particularly oats

and a variety of barley that does well at this altitude called bigg.

You're about 800 feet above sea level here.

Wheat is just not going to succeed.

Most villages were surrounded with oat fields.

Mmm. It's kind of got more boring, in a way, hasn't it?

Well, we had to be self-sufficient and, of course, we aren't any longer.

-Yes, no, no.

-And that's really what this sort of food was about, really.

-Self-sufficiency.

-Yes.

-Northern grit.

Survival.

'Dorothy visited the Dales regularly as a child.

'Later, she described how oats

'were the basic ingredient of meals up here.'

Oatcake and porridge were the two staples of this region

and every farmhouse, every village,

every area developed their own ways of making various oatcakes.

They often went by their Norse name,

they were sometimes called "haver-carke," or "have-a-cake."

Does it not mean, "Have a cake, help yourself"?

No. The word "hafer," or "haver," is a Norse word meaning oats,

so haversack is a bag for putting your oats in.

Ah, so it is.

-I've already made some batter.

-Batter. What's in the batter?

It's a mixture of very, very fine sifted oatmeal,

milk, water, a little bit of salt and some yeast.

-Easy-peasy then?

-Yeah. If you bring the bowl over

and get as close as you can without burning yourself...

OK? I'm going to ladle that on to the girdle like that.

And I get the scraper and I...

go like that with it.

There you go. We just let that cook.

This is really food that has absolutely vanished and disappeared.

You dip it in your soup, for your evening meal,

you'd wrap up cheese in it.

It's very nice. Really good stuff. Well worth reviving, I think.

-Don't burn yourself.

-Thank you.

Yes, that's it. Use your fingers. That's it, perfect.

-OK? Shall I hang that up for you?

-Er, I can do it.

-Ooh!

-Brilliant.

What do you think of Dorothy Hartley?

Where does she fit into the history of food for you?

Dorothy is part of a group of people who started to actively

try to investigate disappearing customs.

People like Cecil Sharp, who was collecting folk songs

and folk dances in the early 20th century.

There was also a contemporary of Dorothy Hartley called Florence White

who was a founding member of the English Folk Cookery Association

and I think all of them realised they were living at a time

when rural customs were vanishing rapidly.

And I think the whole point of their activities

was to try and record these things before they entirely disappeared.

-That's what's really valuable, her work as an oral historian.

-Yes.

That's the richest part of the book,

is where she actually talks to a ploughman or a shepherd.

It's when you hear the voice of a lady

who's describing how she scrapes the bristles off her pig

after she's killed it with a candlestick, you know.

It's that kind of thing that's so marvellous about it.

-That is the best bit of the book.

-That's the world we have lost.

-Yes.

DOROTHY: "In old-fashioned country houses,

"no housemaid's box was complete without a couple of goose pinions.

"Those strong, firm plumes which were so excellent for dusting ledges.

"A stiff, trimmed goose pinion is also kept by the lady's maid

"for taking the dust from velvet."

SHEEP BLEAT

Dorothy remembered the Yorkshire Dales

from her very earliest childhood.

But, at the start of the 20th century,

she and her family moved down to the warmer landscape of the Midlands.

By 1904, Edward Hartley was losing his eyesight.

He had to give up his job

as headmaster of the boy's school in Skipton.

Instead, he became a rector in Rempstone in Nottinghamshire -

quite a small parish - and the family moved south.

They ended up living here,

in this Elizabethan, rambling, impressive house.

And this is only the back!

DOROTHY: "A lovely old house, with every medieval inconvenience.

"The nearest shop was five miles away and we had no car.

"A butcher called once a week. A grocer, once a fortnight."

'Dorothy was 11 years old when her family arrived here.

'And now she had a room of her own at the top of the house.'

"It was a double turn of wooden stairs

"and a low door into a little room

"and a second door up wooden steps to a further attic.

"The old thatch was rotting and full of birds' nests

"and there, crouched and cold, I worked from dawn.

"I loved that room.

"It was my citadel against all the hard work of long days

"and, in it, I wrote my first book and got my Master's art degree."

So this is the very place that Dorothy would work,

between dawn and the time she had to leave to go to art school

and she used to feed the starlings out of the window here.

And we know that for a fact,

because, many years later, she wrote letters about it.

Do you think she's being a bit melodramatic here

when she talks about how the old thatch

was rotting up there in the attic?

-No, because it was very much like that when I bought it!

-Oh, OK.

It wasn't thatched, but..

'Felicity Fletcher-Wilson bought the rectory in 1999

'and, during renovations, she discovered a secret stash

'of Dorothy's letters, written to the previous owner.'

What's great about these letters is that they're very personal,

they're her reminiscences about her life.

I think that's what's nice about them,

because you read in the book about the house,

and it doesn't mention the name or anything,

but you can put the letters to the book

and come out with a completely different story

and something that's very, very personal, actually.

I like the description of how she prepares her workroom.

She scrubbed the oak beams in the wall with hot vinegar.

It's not what you'd expect a teenager to be doing -

-scrubbing old beams with hot vinegar.

-No, not at all.

Dorothy quickly became a professional artist, didn't she?

I think, at this time, she was already doing artwork.

I found some illustrations of Dorothy's

in a book by Geoffrey Henslow.

And there are some 90-odd illustrations in here,

which goes to show what a busy girl she was.

They seem to just set up all the things

that she's going to be interested in.

There's a real attention to historical costume,

-and also there's a lot of landscapes and countryside.

-Yes, there are.

These are just the things that captured her imagination.

Now, this letter's really interesting because it's about food.

We've got a sort of edible history of Edwardian Rempstone village here.

Yes, we have.

I really like the fact that, in the cottages,

she says people don't have scales and they can't write.

So when she says "How much of that?"

They say, "About as much as Jim could eat at a meal"!

"That much!"

"After the bleak North,

"everything in the Midlands seemed warm, rich and ripe.

"The mutton was fat, the cakes full of eggs,

"and, in September, we made wonderful wines and jams and rich preserves."

By comparison with life in Yorkshire,

this village must have seemed like a living larder, really.

There's just so much food here.

And so much of it.

Just behind there were the pigsties, where Dorothy's pigs lived,

and they must have eaten these pears off this tree above me.

'Like sensible thrifty country people,

'the Hartleys wasted nothing when their pig was killed.

'Including his head!'

Follow the cut down the middle and split the head into two pieces...

'I'm helping pig keeper Tom to make a kind of pate called brawn,'

'in Dorothy's kitchen and using her own recipe.'

-SAW SCRAPES BONE

-Oooh!

Did you feel that against the bone?

I shouldn't have thought about cutting someone's leg off!

-I think you're going to have to give a demo.

-Right, I'll give it a try.

Going a little bit off course.

Yeah, it's not going down the middle, is it?

Should be OK, though. It's all going to end up in the same place.

That's it.

Yay! Well done! Look at that.

-I think I think we've got it.

-Oh, look at his teeth!

Look at his brain!

This bowl here, we'll put all the nasty bits in

like tongue, brain, eyeballs. Things like that.

Got to get the eye out next.

Best way to do that is if you feel around,

you can sort of feel an eye cavity...?

-Round the bone.

-Oh, he's opened his little eyelid!

Put the knife in and follow the bone all the way around.

Try and cut underneath the eyeball,

so you take the eyelid and everything out from underneath.

Oh, my goodness, that is so frightening and horrible!

There we are. Very good.

Oh!

This is a curious mixture of disgusting and wonderful.

This seems like a really horrible, alien, strange experience.

But I suppose that, as modern people, we're the odd ones out,

we're the ones who aren't familiar...

Ooh, there's his eye! ..with this.

But, for centuries, people would have just been used to doing this.

They would've been.

I think we've become quite detached in recent years

from how our food is prepared, made and where it comes from.

Killing the pig in the autumn, everybody did it?

Yes, everyone would club together,

and they'd have a pig processed in a day.

They'd do all the brawn, all the butchery, make sausages, cure bacon.

Everyone would club together and get it done really quite quickly.

So we boiled it for a couple of hours and then let it cool down.

And now we're picking off all the meaty bits.

I'm an natural scavenger.

There's something brilliant

about finding something that others have overlooked.

And then we're going to pour in that leftover stock,

and then, as it cools, it will form a solid jelly.

-Then we'll be able to make it into slices.

-Yes.

Then eat it - with mustard, very important. Must be with mustard.

That's what Dorothy says.

So I'm pouring in the stock. How long do we have to leave it?

I'd want to leave it in a cool place overnight for it to set firmly,

and then it'll be something nice to have for lunch tomorrow.

-It has set into a proper glistening jelly, hasn't it?

-It has, yes.

For you...

Now, I'm really torn. I'm actually quite hungry. It smells nice.

Mmm... That's all good!

But what's flashing into my mind

-is cutting out the pig's eye with the knife.

-Really?

-Yeah.

I think the best thing is to give it a try and see what it ends up like.

That's not bad. The mustard certainly helps.

Mmm, I quite like that.

-I've overdone the English mustard!

-THEY BOTH LAUGH

-You're wolfing it down here.

-It's quite nice. I'm quite enjoying it.

I'm sorry, I don't like it.

That's all right.

I'm sorry to say, I think it's really disgusting!

I've done my best to try and like it.

Why doesn't anybody eat brawn these days(?)

-There are reasons - it tastes awful.

-LUCY LAUGHS

Dorothy left the rectory in the early 1920s, and moved to London.

The capital gave her room to develop her talents as an artist and writer.

She gave art lessons at Regent Street Polytechnic,

but spent her spare time in the British Museum.

She was exploring the whole world of medieval England.

I've come to meet the food writer and journalist Adrian Bailey,

who met Dorothy in the late 1960s.

I'm hoping he can shed some light

on her fascination with medieval history.

Dorothy's father was a Chaucerian

and that was very likely where Dorothy's interest

in the medieval world and the 14th century came from.

What was she really like?

She was very hospitable, quite funny,

very elegant, in fact.

She used to write to me and she would sign it,

"Yours truly, D Hartley (Miss)"

Just to establish the fact

that here was a spinster you don't mess around with.

SHE LAUGHS

She was extraordinary.

But some of these papers ARE old love letters.

They contain clues about one quite serious relationship

with a man called Mickey.

He, though, was a heavy-drinking, elusive loner,

who worked as a ranger in Africa.

Marriage was never on the cards and he died young.

He says, "I will never settle now

"and the next time I go home back to England,

"I shall wander all over the British Isles with a toothbrush."

..which is what she would do.

Which is what she would do, so they're two of a type, really.

Absolutely, yes.

I think that, deep down in her heart,

she didn't really want to be married.

She didn't have time for a domestic life.

She fought off proposals.

There was one Mr Barham.

-He proposed to her by letter...

-Mm-hmm?

..and she replied with a long discourse on Viking burial customs

and said, "That'll see him off."

-She put him off with the Viking burial customs?

-Yes.

-That's one way of doing it.

-That was typical of her.

I rang her one day and she picked up the phone and,

without asking who it was, said,

"Can't talk to you now, I'm in the 14th century,"

and put the phone down. It could have been anybody.

But that was her, she was like that.

Somebody that had a great love for what she did

and she wanted to convey that to her readers

and greatly succeeded, because here we have Food In England.

What's your opinion of the importance of this book?

It is the product of a lifetime's experience.

It is a history book. It isn't a cookery book.

And she goes back in history to the Victorian period

and then back through to the...

ending up in the Tudor world, which she loved.

Dorothy's engagement with history bore fruit in 1925,

when she published her first book -

Life And Work Of The Peoples Of England.

While researching it, she came across a writer

who was to have a profound influence on her life...

..a Tudor farmer and poet called Thomas Tusser.

Thomas Tusser keeps cropping up in Food In England.

Dorothy was clearly very interested in him.

He spent his life in 16th-century Suffolk

and she tracked him down there.

This photo shows her standing up to her ankles in a bog

and it says on the back,

"Me on Tusser's marsh."

Well, I think I need to visit Tusser's marsh

and Tusser's landscape

to see what they might tell us about Dorothy herself.

This is the spot, in what's known today as Constable Country,

where Thomas Tusser's house once stood.

He was born in Rivenhall in Essex in about 1524.

A Hundred Good Points Of Husbandry

is his rhyming book about agriculture.

HE GEES THE HORSES

Good lads. Right...

'Tusser was one of the first writers

'to record the experience of ordinary tenant farmers.'

Are you going to go each side of the sticks?

Yeah, those should straddle. Get up!

'Suffolk farmer Roger Clark works land very near to Tusser's farm

'and does it in a way that Tusser would have recognised

'five centuries ago.'

Tell me a bit about Suffolk Punches, then,

these enormous horses. Are they especially for ploughing?

Yeah, because if you look at the legs

and you compare them with the Shire Horse,

which has a mass of feather, you'll see how clean they've kept

and that's why we call them clean-legged.

So the Shires get all muddy when they go up and down,

and that's no good?

The Suffolk Horse was bred as the...

Well, the perfect agricultural horse.

-He is a human tractor.

-Yeah.

Not a human tractor, an EQUINE tractor.

Absolutely, yeah.

I have the oldest recorded pedigree, bar the thoroughbred.

-Going back to...

-1750.

-Wow!

I've always tried to keep Suffolk Horses,

because they are an endangered species.

In fact, there's more giant pandas about than there are Suffolk Horses.

-No, really?

-Yeah.

But not only, I think,

it's important to maintain the horse as a breed,

but to maintain the skills that went with it.

I can see that this is an art.

Yes, yes, and it would be tragic if all these things -

like ploughing, like harness making and all things like that -

were finished.

Thomas Tusser was ploughing with oxen.

How do you think that would have worked?

Well, you'd...

As I can see it, you had the oxen,

but you also had a boy with a sharp stick to poke them along.

To poke them along?

With these, you don't need that.

THEY LAUGH

Tusser tells us, "Look well to thy horses in the stable, thou must.

"Let not your hay be foisty or your chaff full of dust,

"nor stone in their provender or feathers or clots,

"nor feed with green peason for the breeding of bots."

So, don't let the hay be foisty...

..which was mouldy.

-He doesn't eat foisty hay.

-No, he certainly doesn't.

-No stones in the food.

-No. No dust in the...

-No dust.

-What are bots?

-Bots is the larvae of a gadfly...

-Ah!

..and they attach themselves to the stomach

and then they come out through the skin.

I mean, today, we worm horses in November,

because that gets rid of the bot larvae.

-Now, I'm worried about Jester getting cold.

-That's it.

-Do we need to warm up, do a bit more?

-Yeah, well done.

-Right, OK.

HE GEES THE HORSES

Having visited Thomas Tusser's home and learnt a bit more about him,

I can see why Dorothy was so attracted to him.

He was like the Tudor version of her.

In 1931, Dorothy published her edition of Thomas Tusser's poem,

it's called Thomas Tusser And His Farming In East Anglia.

Both of them were interested in crops and the land

and seasons and how things were done

and both of them had the ability to express it

in really simple language.

Dorothy clearly shared Tusser's interest in everyday things,

and she did probe really deeply into his life and work.

I'm beginning to realise her research into Tusser's world

shows that despite my earlier misgivings,

she really was becoming a serious historian.

In the 1930s, she travelled the country,

documenting and illustrating rural ways of life

in three books and a regular column for the Daily Sketch newspaper.

I've come to visit someone who's spent many years

researching this period of Dorothy's life -

the potter and artist Mary Wondrausch.

And she's making me lunch.

We're not cooking it, because it's already been smoked,

and that is in a sense cooking it.

-How do I get it out, like this?

-No, you don't.

No, there's a trick.

The trick is this.

Oh, look at that! It lifts up.

'Mary's warmed up some Arbroath smokies,

'smoked haddock from northeast Scotland,

'which Dorothy describes in one of her Daily Sketch articles.'

So there's our lovely smokie,

and I'll tell you what it's supposed to be like.

It's supposed to be "a gold bronzed fish,

"smoke-dried, redolent with the savour of the peat."

-And mind the bones.

-Mind the bones.

Mmm. That's very good.

-You certainly need the butter with it.

-Mmm.

-It's delicious.

-What do you think?

Mmm, very nice. It's delicious, but I don't think

we should be eating it in your lovely, warm kitchen.

We should be in a smoke-filled cottage in the middle

of a peat bog in Scotland.

I can see you're a romantic, Lucy! Yes.

Because you're an artist, what do you see in her as a fellow artist?

Well, really, I see her

more as an illustrator than as an artist,

and her drawings are so wonderfully accurate,

so what really fascinates me

is the way she makes it absolutely clear

what everyone or everything is doing,

how it's made, the detail.

And despite from being so accurate,

they're not boring at all.

They're all lively,

and her observation is acute.

Look at all the detail,

the tool you're using, and the plaiting, and...

It's just so remarkable.

What do you think is the most important

thing of all about Dorothy Hartley?

Well, it's the breadth of her interests.

She was really a very adventurous woman,

and very hard-working,

and one of my theories is

this was because she wasn't married,

didn't have children, or some fractious husband,

and that whole focus went on

whatever she was researching at the time.

"By the time coal cooking came into fairly general usage,

"the fireplace had moved

"from the middle of the room to the side wall.

"Chimneys had been built climbing up the older houses

"like hollow caterpillars clinging to a leaf."

Tell me a bit about your amazing cottage.

How long have you been living here?

Well, I bought the house in 1955.

My husband...I was going to say "buggered off",

-but you can't say "bugger", I believe.

-I think you can!

-He went off.

-I think if you want to.

-Yes.

And so I was left with two children,

and my third child was born here,

but I'd never lived in the country

so I had to learn about how to do it,

and it was reading Hartley

that I began to get some idea about cooking on the fire and so on.

So the chapter in here about fuels and fireplaces,

for you that was like an instruction manual to your cottage?

Absolutely. It really was, yes.

I was fascinated to see all her wonderful illustrations

of the different ways of cooking on the fire.

Dorothy devoted no less than 30 pages

to fuels and fireplaces in Food In England.

She researched the book as she roamed the countryside,

sometimes by car, sometimes by bike.

Sleeping rough under the stars, she relished the hardships.

"I was freezing on the Pilgrim's Way.

"My fingers were claw-curled with cold inside my gauntlets.

"Almost, I could hear the ghosts of Chaucer's riders,

"their horse bells tinkling down the path like melting ice."

Throughout her travels, Dorothy made connections

between the past and the present.

When she saw canal workers, or bargees,

cooking a one-pot meal on their barges,

she recognised how closely it was related to the medieval cauldron,

and sure enough, there it is,

in the chapter on fuels and fireplaces.

The food writer Rose Prince is going to cook the bargemen's dinner,

just as Dorothy described.

It's ancient, this dish is.

I love the cross-section in her drawing

where you see all of the vegetables with the meat on top

all layered up, and look above and you see the cauldron

and there are pieces of meat and fat wrapped in cloth.

So much of what she saw had to be taken from history books.

This was the real thing.

Right, turnips first?

Turnips at the base for sweetness.

Fresh belly of pork.

A little bit of smoked salt pork to add flavour.

On top of that, carrots and parsnips. Now, she says water.

Just gain a little bit of extra flavour

if you have some nice gelatinous broth like this.

On top of that, a huff paste, which was a suet crust, essentially,

acting as an insulating layer.

-On top of that, some sliced potatoes. More huff paste.

-OK.

-On top of that, some apples.

-Apples!

-If you're going to have a pudding.

-Yeah.

-That will fuel the bargee.

It's such a simple but powerful idea, isn't it?

Once you've made that preparation, it cooks itself.

Great!

-Into the water, do you think?

-There we go.

The brilliant idea here is that the one pot

will cook the main meal and the pudding

and anything else you want slowly in the boiling water.

It'll be ready to eat after about two hours,

or you can just leave it to bubble away all day

until the boatman, Tim here, gets hungry.

-Oh, they're cooked! It's worked!

-They have cooked.

-That is true cooked food.

-And look, the pastry's cooked.

-Oh, it looks cooked. It looks like a suet pudding.

-Yeah.

The apples have kept their shape nicely, haven't they?

Needs a bit of custard on there, I think.

There it is. Bit of turnip.

-Now then.

-Great!

Thank you very much. Smashing.

You got a fork there?

That warms the cockles of the heart, doesn't it?

Well, I think it's great.

Just the sort of thing you need at the end of a day.

What are your final thoughts, then, on Dorothy, Rose?

What does she mean to you?

I think she's the most interesting writer

to have covered British food

for a simple point that she is the person

who found out what everyone is eating.

-So often we know what kings ate.

-Yeah.

And we know what ladies in Tudor households

prepared for their big kitchens, but we don't know what people ate,

and through her very forensic investigation

into all the equipment and the animal breeds and the landscape,

she found out, and that marks her out above everyone else.

I agree with Rose.

It's Dorothy's interest in ordinary people that's really extraordinary.

And I'm beginning to appreciate

that she was a chronicler of her own times.

Food In England isn't just a history book.

It also paints a picture of the England

she criss-crossed between the wars.

In her newspaper articles and photographs, her fascination

with the way people lived and worked on the land is plain to see.

She devotes no less than 29 pages of Food In England

to the very mundane subject of sheep.

"An old shepherd and myself spent one summer mapping the moorland.

"It was a curious piece of work,

"and very enlightening as to the mentality of mutton."

Dorothy writes really romantically and evocatively about farming life,

but she also includes lots of utilitarian information too,

like absolutely everything you can do

with absolutely every single part of a cow or a sheep.

She brings to life the annual spectacle of the sheep-shearing.

This is Manor Farm, a hill farm right up above Wharfedale,

and it's a good day to be here, cos it's shearing day.

Chris Akrigg's family came here as tenant farmers

in the Yorkshire Dales just after the Second World War.

These days, Chris runs the business with his three sons.

'My turn now.'

First we're just going to practise cuddling a sheep...

Just grip it well. That's it.

-I've got him. Got him.

-Excellent.

I love sheep. I love you!

No, don't pull the wool. Always pull the thing back, that's right.

-I'm so worried about hurting him.

-No, you're not hurting.

That's it...

There you go, you're done!

Ooh, dear. That's not brilliant, is it?

-It's not too bad, actually...

-I haven't finished! Come back.

We don't need a dog when we have Lucy.

-It's pretty good.

-No, it's dreadful compared with the others!

-Distinctive anyway, isn't it?

-Yeah.

So what was it like in Dorothy Hartley's childhood, then,

in the late Victorian times? What was the sheep shearing like?

Traditionally, people would help each other do it.

And, of course, it was much quieter.

I remember an old chap telling me once that he was the very first one

to take a machine round to one of these parties.

You'd do it with your neighbours

and perhaps invite some other people to come,

and they'd have a clipping session. He went with his machine.

The others couldn't hear each other talking,

so they never asked him again.

-That's modernity for you!

-Exactly.

Farming in the Dales has changed beyond all recognition

since Dorothy Hartley's day.

Over the years, Chris has had to take on more and more land

to make a decent living.

He now farms around 2,000 acres.

It's not just us that's done this,

lots of farms in the Dale have all expanded

and taken over another farm, and it's a shame,

because it's depopulated the Dale.

On the social side especially.

There aren't as many jobs, though, for human beings.

No. My grandfather milked ten cows, kept poultry,

a few turkeys at Christmas, 20 pigs and a few sheep.

And employed a man and a boy. And made a good living.

But that would be a sort of part-time job today.

That's the difference, you just need so much to make a living nowadays.

"At sheep shearings, baskets of beef sandwiches were carried around.

"Each with a mustard pot tied to the handle.

"No-one eats mutton at a sheep shearing."

-Right, I'm having mustard.

-I'm going to have onions, I think.

Go on, then.

Any excuse to eat beef!

'Dorothy's writing is so compelling -

'partly because she's capturing a world

'just on the cusp of destruction.

'She described the lifestyle of Chris Akrigg's grandfather

'and others like him even as it began to fall apart,

'with mass production and mechanisation.

'Two generations and a World War later,

'it was a way of life that would be lost for ever.'

"Bracken used to be cut for bedding for farm animals,

"for covering in root crops, and for weaving into shelters and hurdles.

"Quantities were used by the slate and heavy earthenware industries

"to pack their ware for road transport.

"Now, it is not cut,

"and has become a desperate weed instead of a useful growth."

Most of the research for Food In England

was done during her wandering years.

But after 1945, Dorothy settled down here in North Wales

and this is where my journey ends.

She lived in the village of Fron

in a house she'd inherited from her mother

overlooking the Llangollen Canal.

'It was here that 30 years of painstaking observation

'came together in her magnum opus,

'the book that's her greatest achievement.'

'Food In England was published in 1954. Reviewers loved it.

'Harold Nicolson, writing in The Times, said,

'"Miss Dorothy Hartley's Food In England will become a classic".

'He was right. Food In England has never been out of print.'

'By the time it was published, she was well into her 60s.'

'I've come to her house to meet four people who remember Dorothy

'from these last years of her life, including Malcolm Wiles,

'whose father, Teddy, helped her to move in.'

"Wiles, Wiles, Wiles," she used to call my dad, didn't she?

"I want you to go to so-and-so." Not "can you", "I want you to go."

'Malcolm's wife, Rosemary, still has the letter that Dorothy sent

'with instructions about moving.'

'This was just like Dorothy.

'Instead of listing her furniture, she draws it.'

First of all in her mind was her work desk.

This was where her writing was done and she had put that first.

-This is the most important item of all.

-That's what I thought, yes.

The desk where she does the writing?

-Yes, that's right. And herself last.

-Yep.

-With the cat.

The sewing machine, cycle, cat - there he is.

-Yes, Mark.

-Mark the cat.

And here's Dorothy herself.

She's carrying a packet of sandwiches,

a trifle cutter.

-And it also says she's carrying a small garden spade.

-Yes.

Would you describe her as easy to get to know?

-Well,

-I

-found her easy to get to know.

She didn't phone, she arrived by the door, didn't she?

The Welsh are...

Well, "Come day, go day."

That's the slang word, isn't it?

Anything will do, tomorrow will do, there's no rush,

but that wasn't Miss Hartley. It's now, isn't it?

-That was Miss Hartley. Now.

-Was she generous?

Money-wise, no, because she hadn't got any.

-But as I say, she'd do anything for you.

-Yeah.

-She'd never see anybody in trouble, would she, now?

-No.

-No.

Never see anybody in trouble.

And she didn't want the world to know

that she'd done this, that or the other for them.

-She asked me to type a letter for her.

-Yes.

Rickety old machine and she dictated it to me, you see.

She kept changing her mind. "No, no, no, cross that out."

So I'd cross it out. X it out, no Tipp-Ex in those days.

And ended up with a whole paragraph X-ed out.

I said, "I'll type it nicely for you." "No, no, no."

She signed it, "Just post it on your way home." So I thought...

So I'm afraid I stole a piece of paper from her study

on the way home and I typed it on my machine.

-Oh, you typed it properly?

-LUCY LAUGHS

And... Don't tell anybody this, will you?

I forged her signature and posted it off!

THEY LAUGH

What's the most personal item of Dorothy's that you own?

I think probably the most interesting one that came out

of all the boxes and files and papers

was her handbag, which I have.

Her handbag, look at this! The handbag of Dorothy Hartley.

It's more or less just as the contents were in there.

That seems to me exactly the sort of thing I would imagine her carrying -

something big that you could knock people on the head with

if you wanted to.

-Can I open it?

-Please do, yes.

-That such an intimate thing to do, to look into a lady's handbag.

-Yeah.

It feels wrong to look into somebody's handbag.

Oh, she wouldn't mind.

I guess she'd have done the same thing, wouldn't she?

If she found our handbags lying around, she'd be right in there.

If there was something hand-crafted in there, she would.

Now, here we've got a little knife.

Little horn penknife.

Oh, look, this is so characteristic.

It's her ticket to the reading room of the British Museum.

"Miss D Hartley, not transferable."

That's just the sort of thing I would have hoped to find.

Oh, and we've got another one.

The Departments Of Manuscripts at the British Library.

Here's something else incredibly characteristic.

She's carrying around an atlas.

It's an atlas of the British Isles,

-so she always knows where she is and where she's going next.

-Yes.

That really is the woman in a bag, isn't it?

-All those things together there.

-Yes.

I'll tell you now, Lucy, I walked in here today and it affected me.

I've not been in here since the day of the funeral

-and when I come through that door...

-And she's not here...

-..there was a lump in my throat.

-Mm.

We weren't close, not anything like that,

no more than doing things for her. But I still... But I still felt...

You know, as I say, there was a lump in my throat.

Having followed Dorothy's journey to its very end,

I'm surprised and impressed

to find a respectable schoolmaster's daughter

following such an unconventional course through life.

I've come to realise she's more than a great writer.

I think she's an admirable human being.

Dorothy died in 1985 and it was Malcolm

who brought her body up from the house here to the churchyard.

I was really moved by how much Malcolm

and her other friends still seem to miss Dorothy.

They regret the fact that she didn't leave any children

but, instead, she did leave us this amazing book.

And as I followed her up and down the country -

from Yorkshire to Leicestershire, to Suffolk, to Wales -

I've really come to appreciate

just how magnificently eccentric she really was.

She devoted her whole life to this mad quest, to capture a lost world.

And thank goodness she did.

The world needs these crazy, passionate people like Dorothy.

There's just one more piece to put into the picture -

a home movie showing Dorothy doing what she loved to do,

working in the garden and digging up potatoes for dinner.

"If everything I possess vanished suddenly, I'd be sorry,

"but I value things unpossessed -

"the wind, and trees and sky and kind thoughts - much more.

"What a poetic old party, eh?"

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