Before the Flood
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ppc.28008Keywords:
United Kingdom, restaurant reviewing, Fanny Craddock, public eating, menus, catering trade, social history, English hotels and inns, literary genre, culinary memoirs, mid 20th-century, early 20th-century, British catering historyAbstract
This article looks at aspects of "Around Britain with Bon Viveur" (1952), the first of several guidebooks to home and abroad written by Fanny and Johnnie Cradock under their joint nom de plume of Bon Viveur, assumed when they started writing for the Daily Telegraph (and later for the Daily Mail). The brand extended over the next few years into recipe books as well, mostly published by or for the Telegraph, although the first of 1955 mentioned no affiliation, and there was another that was put out by the Gas Council. The article concentrates on their account of meals consumed on their way round the country. The details are sparse, readers were not really interested in gastronomic discussions such as we seem now to require, but the catalogue is sufficient to catch something of the character of public eating in Britain in 1952 (when rationing was still partly in force). This is followed by observations about various recent memoirs about life in the catering trade published between the 1940s and the 1980s.
