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This dissertation explores the origin of the idea that English food is inherently “bad” and demonstrates that this perception developed in the mid-nineteenth century. While it is commonly assumed that the poor quality of English cookery developed after the Second World War, this dissertation demonstrates that English cookery was perceived poorly beginning in the nineteenth century. This dissertation brings together an analysis of Victorian values, gender, food adulteration, food technologies, and nostalgia to establish how the English criticized themselves and created the belief that English cookery is “bad.” By examining cookbooks and newspaper articles, this investigation illustrates how the English criticized their own cooking and developed a sense of anxiety about their perceived flawed cookery. In the nineteenth century, cookery was evaluated based on emerging Victorian moral values rather than taste. The emphasis on being economical, efficient, and clean meant that traditional English dishes such as roast beef and plum pudding were no longer celebrated, but instead, considered wasteful and monotonous. Increasing imports through advances in shipping, refrigeration, and canning decreased the production of English goods at home. The adaptation and absorption of new imported ingredients and dishes into English cookbooks created a cosmopolitan cookery by the twentieth century, but, at the same time, deepened confusion over what an English food identity was. By studying cookbooks, this dissertation uses an untapped resource to explore the perception of English cookery. Cookbooks, especially mass publications, helped further the belief that English cookery was wasteful and unclean, and prescribed countless remedies for readers. Cookbooks also offered another perspective for exploring gender and cookery, as middle class women found themselves multitasking as housewives, educators, and cooks. More than just a collection of recipes, cookbooks provide historians with windows to view ideas of food identity, community, and culture. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Although much has been written about the historical conditions of the manuscript culture in the English Renaissance, too little effort has been made to apply these insights to our understanding of the texts of the period. An author's choice of audience says a great deal about his/her own perception of his/her art, and that is particularly true of Sir Philip Sidney. The fact that he apparently shared his writings only with his younger siblings and very closest friends indicates a peculiarly high sensitivity regarding his literary efforts, a sensitivity that is ignored by readers who automatically presume that all written texts are "public" texts. It is the purpose of this dissertation to explore this sensitivity on Sidney's part by examining his written texts in light not only of his chosen audience but of a second, inescapable audience with whom he apparently did not choose to share his works but who nevertheless exerted considerable psychological pressure on everything he wrote. This second audience I characterize as Sidney's "father-figures": powerful men associated with Sidney through family or purely political ties who encouraged and trained Sidney to pursue a political rather than a literary career. Sidney's failure to satisfy these expectations was a source of continual and painful frustration for him, and this frustration finds its way into his writings at all stages. This frustration, however, is continually balanced by a defensive project in which Sidney seeks to outline a positive place for writing in his life in the face of the continuing failure of his political career. It is the contention of this dissertation that Sidney's revision of the Arcadia represents not simply one more stage in the lifelong exploration of the dialectics of frustration and exculpation but rather a turning point in Sidney's attitude toward his art. Taking as his theme the whole notion of fictions and fiction-making, Sidney offers a world in which the poet is hero. This dissertation, therefore, traces in Sidney's literary career a trajectory from frustration, doubt, and guilt to a final self-assurance, a final willing acceptance of his "unelected vocation."