Product Information

They Can't Ration These

Product Code: THERRUDY67

 

Before Furry Hugh Whittingstall and Richard Mabey there was the Vicomte de Mauduit, a true gentleman adventurer, who flew during WW1, and was believed to have been killed by the Nazis following the fall of France. In 1940 he published this, his last book, an amazing guide to finding and preparing 'Food for Free'.

With chapters such as: 'Foods from the fields, moorlands and marshes', 'Foods from the orchards, hedgerows, and woodlands', 'Growing, storing, and cooking our own vegetable supply', 'Dried foods - with methods how to dry foods and ways of cooking them', 'Substitutes', and even a chapter covering such things as making charcoal, plucking game and building a Romany clay oven, the book is, quite simply, a wild-gathered indulgence from start to finish. Each chapter is packed with practical recipes, including a good number with their roots in time-honoured peasant and romany practice; in fact, there's a remarkable sense of hard-nosed practicality throughout, and none of the substitute suggestions, for example, has that whiff of wild-eyed desperation that contemporary pundits' alleged 'advice' often had.

Recipes include: blackberry wine, romany oat crisps, grilled wood-pigeon, 'warmalade', bacon virginia, samphire spinach, pease pudding, ham and bacon from mutton, baked hake devon, and many more - including a few of more lurid interest to the modern eye, such as roast sparrows, stewed starlings, rook pie, and squirrel-tail soup!

"All those possessing a roof in the country together with the necessary sticks of furniture and apparels of clothing will be able, if armed with a copy of this book, to live in comfort, in plenty, and in health even if all banks, all shops, and all markets be closed for indefinite periods."

A quite remarkable piece of work, truly interesting and useful - and with a foreward by none other than David Lloyd George, it comes on very good recommendation into the bargain!

171pp softback Persephone reproduction of a book first published in 1940, illustrated, with endpapers and matching bookmark taken from a c.1940 potato-print fabric design.

 

£12.00

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All Content © Claire Leavey 2014-18

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