Disappointing - Rated 
With its fine illustrations, this volume promises much food for thought, but lacks enough clear historical analysis to add much to the existing literature. You'd be better off buying Reay Tannahill's History of Food.
Entertaining and interesting - Rated 
If you're interested in cooking and eating this makes an interesting and entertaining read. The book is not just about tastes in food across the ages, but also weaves in technological changes that affected cooking and refers to the influence of political and religious factors on food habits and availability of products.
There are lots of facts about how names of dishes arose and how sayings connected with food came about. One is reminded how recently some of our familiar foods were introduced and how food fads and avoidances are not new. The author, quite rightly, emphasizes the huge gulf that existed until well into the 20th century between what the well-to-do were eating compared with the majority barely keeping body and soul together. The book is thus, inevitably, also about social history.
I finished the book very grateful to be cooking in the modern era and with enhanced respect for those who cooked in the past.
We are what we've eaten - Rated 
"Taste" by Kate Colquhoun tells the story of Britain through what Britons have cooked and consumed through the ages. It begins with a prehistoric rubbish heap and ends with the flashy cuisine of the 1980's; this is a fast-paced and wide inquiry. Along the way the author unearths plenty of weird facts and anecdotes - washers-up protecting their hands with mutton fat, how Henry VIII accidentally changed our relationship with fish - but the story is what sweeps you along. New foods are imported, like the pineapple, or come back into favour (the tomato - people used to think they were poisonous). Different techniques and gadgets make you wonder how people lived without them in the first place. No refrigerator? Either dig a thirty foot hole and fill it with ice or rub salt into meat to stop it going off. No microwave? It's a charcoal brazier or nothing. This book doesn't just tell you about how people used to live, cook and eat, it makes you re-think how we do these things now. It's a fascinating story, and almost makes you want to cook the stuffed cow's udder on page 203. Almost.
Taste: a disappointing turkey - Rated
Though it is beautifully illustrated and the cookery texts which are its main basis are carefully considered and explained, the usefulness and value of this book are terribly undermined by the limits of its author's grasp of British history.
There's a hint of the nature of the difficulty in the oddly separated bibliography. The books used by the author are separated into so-called primary and secondary sources, a fashionable thing for a historian to do. But the primary sources quoted are, for the most part, not so much primary as modern editions of primary sources, and a good number of the secondary sources are so out of date that they are better treated as primary sources for their own period than as reliable interpretative sources for a new history.
The weakness in historical interpretation is clearest in the first part of the book, where an old-fashioned and out-of-date account of Britain's early history--apparently rooted in fairly random dips into Romano-British archaeology--encourages the author to guess and make judgements about her subject when a better informed writer might have been more cautious and less judgemental.
There is no evidence here that Ms Colquhoun has come across Colin Renfrew's revolutionary redrawing of Europe's (and Britain's) ethnic and linguistic map ('Archaeology and Language', London, 1987) or Julian Richards' 'Blood of the Vikings' (2001). Between them, these advances in our understanding of the origins of English and the people who spoke it draw a very different picture of southern Britain before 1066, one in which the speakers of early English (including the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who arrived from the European coast from Denmark's Jutland peninsula and south) were by no means the caricature barbarians she represents.
The usual old clichés about the words for cooked food being French, as opposed to the `old English' (that is, Scandinavian-related) words for live animals, are trotted out--but Ms Colquhoun doesn't recognise that the Normans themselves were Scandinavians--Norse-men--settled in France for only a relatively short time, even less that the battle for control of England was something of a family feud between Scandinavian cousins.
It would appear that Ms Colquhoun has been encouraged to stray beyond the safety of more recent times, where she knows and understands more, in order to provide her publisher with a book which has been written to order, to fill a niche in the market which Bloomsbury hope to address with the cash they've acquired so magically in recent years.
But good cookery books come from committed, dedicated authors writing about subjects they know and love, not from commissioned writers, however conscientious and well-meaning. Much of this book may be better than some of it--but I don't trust it at all.
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