📖 Blog Tour ~ The Language of Food by Annabel Abbs

 

Simon & Schuster
3 February 2022

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book
and to Random Things Tours for the invitation to be part of the blog tour

Eliza Acton is a poet who’s never boiled an egg. But she’s about to break the mold of traditional cookbooks and change the course of cookery writing forever. 

England 1835. 

Eliza Acton is a poet who dreams of seeing her words in print. But when she takes a new manuscript to a publisher, she’s told that ‘poetry is not the business of a lady.’ Instead, she’s asked to write a cookery book. Eliza is horrified but her financial situation leaves her no choice. Although she’s never cooked before, she is determined to learn and to discover, if she can, the poetry in recipe writing. To assist her, she hires seventeen-year-old Ann Kirby, the daughter of local paupers. Over the next ten years, Eliza and Ann change the course of cookery writing forever.

📖 My Review..

Despite their very different social backgrounds, Eliza Acton and Ann Kirby become friends and their shared love of food, and recipes, is what drives this wonderfully descriptive story and which lifts it from the mundane into something quite special.

The Language of Food speaks on any level both as a social commentary about the injustices of the mid-nineteenth century in terms of poverty and hardship, and also about the expectation placed upon women of any social class. What's so interesting about The Language of Food is the way both Eliza and Ann took themselves, by sheer hard work and determination, out of the place in which society had placed them. The alternate chapters of the story allow both Eliza and Ann their voice, just as their partnership in producing a cook book was, despite their differences, very much a joint venture.

Beautifully written and impeccably researched The Language of Food is a love affair to the glory of food is all stages of its preparation, and also testament to the tenacity of two women who were determined to succeed in a world, and culture, where women were seen as nothing more than an easily manipulated drudge, or a pleasing appendage on a gentleman's arm.

 

Best Read with...Eliza Acton's Chocolate Custards

About the Author

Annabel Abbs is the rising star of biographical historical novels. She grew up in Bristol, Sussex and Wales before studying English Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel The Joyce Girl won the Impress Prize and was a Guardian Reader's Pick and her second novel Frieda: The Original Lady Chatterley was a Times 2018 Book of the Year. She regularly appears on national and regional media, with recent appearances on Radio 4 Woman's Hour and Sky News, and is popular on the literary festival circuit. She was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award, the Caledonia Novel Award and the Waverton GoodRead Award. Annabel lives in London with her husband and four children. Abbs’s third novel, The Language of Food, the story of Eliza Acton, Britain’s first domestic goddess, publishes in the UK in February 2022 and is currently being translated into 14 languages.

Twitter @AnnabelAbbs #TheLanguageofFood

@SimonSchusterUK

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