The author is grateful for permission to quote from letters and other materials held by the following: The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere; Nancy Roosevelt Ireland and the literary estate of Eleanor Roosevelt; Justice Michael A. Musmanno Collection, University Archives and Special Collections, Gumberg Library, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA; the Estate of Barbara Pym; the papers of Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (1913–80), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Julia Child Materials © 2016; Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts

Photo credits: Dorothy Wordsworth: Artist unknown. Photo by Hugh Thomas. This image has been reproduced by kind permission of the Wordsworth family, direct descendants of William Wordsworth and owners of Rydal Mount. Rosa Lewis: Granger, NYC. All rights reserved. Eleanor Roosevelt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. Eva Braun: Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann. Bavarian State Library Munich/Hoffmann collection. Barbara Pym: Photo by Mark Gerson. Helen Gurley Brown: Photo by John Bottega. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress.

Portions of this book have appeared, in different forms, in The New Yorker and Food and Communication (Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2015) and on the website of the Barbara Pym Society.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008281106

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008281083

Version: 2018-06-08

Dedication

For Jack

How many things by season seasoned are …

—William Shakespeare,

The Merchant of Venice

Epigraph

Many a non-Chinese has come away from a meal cursing the “inscrutable” Chinese for saying nothing but bland, polite phrases, when the meal itself was the message, one perfectly clear to a Chinese.

—E. N. Anderson and Marja L. Anderson, in Food in Chinese Culture, edited by K. C. Chang

Contents