The essays presented in Not just Porridge address both the scholar and the bold, adventurous cook. They offer the crumbs of what might be found in great and famous works of literature. Concocted in Italy by scholars of English and sifted through the judgement of the English editor, this volume traces a curious history of English literature, from the tasty and spicy recipes of the Middle Ages down to very recent times, threatened as they are by junk food and microwaved dinners. The authors of the essays have lingered on the threshold of the kitchen rather than in the library. Each chapter provides the recipes that best describe the writers involved, and their culinary times.
Francesca Orestano, Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan, works in the areas of landscape aesthetics, garden history, Victorian and Dickens studies, art criticism and John Ruskin, the gothic and the baroque, and children’s literature.
Michael Vickers is Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, and former Curator of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum. He was co-director of the joint British-Georgian Pichvnari Expedition 1998–2010 and co-director of the survey and partial excavation of the Roman circus at Leptis Magna in 1974.