Of course, the evidence for what much earlier people ate is not in tidy records such as recipe books, but the archaeological record and agricultural history. Colquhoun recognises this, and has a few pages on prehistory, a good deal on the evidence of diet in Roman times, and still more on that of the Middle Ages. Until the first real English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the cooks of Richard II, we can't, broadly speaking, really have a history of cooking, only a history of growing or importing food and its consumption.

Colquhoun comes into her own when the written record starts to include recipes. The spices that disappeared from the British diet when the Romans left returned with the Crusaders - and were used because of their flavour, not (in the long-discredited shibboleth) to disguise tainted meat. She says: 'If so much about the European Middle Ages seems bewilderingly remote, contemporary Moroccan food, robust and subtle by degrees, broadly unchanged for centuries, offers a hint of our own culinary past.'