How much did one’s career dictate which meal times have been observed and when? All these questions and more are answered on this illuminating historical past of food and cooking in Victorian England. This is a brilliant, dazzling, fabulously eclectic assortment of details about what we eat. Did you understand that the cell partitions of mushrooms aren’t made up of cellulose, like crops, but rather of chitin, the carbohydrate-amine complicated that makes up the outer skeletons of insects? Or that raw lima beans contain sugar-cyanide complexes that can shut down your respiratory system?

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