Borough Market: Edible Histories

A short history of Britain's favourite food and drink; from strawberries to spaghetti, tomatoes to tea, and how we have enjoyed them over the centuries

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One of The Times Books of the Year 2020
Shortlisted for The Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2021, Debut Food Book
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'Fascinating and entertaining - a pleasure to read.' Claudia Roden


Have you ever stopped to wonder how our most beloved foods came to be the way they are now? As a nation of food-lovers we have been munching on fruit and veg, drinking tea and coffee and adorning our dishes with oils and spices for generations, but how did this happen? What is the history of our favourite foodstuffs?

In this series of enlightening and highly entertaining essays, award-winning food writer Mark Riddaway travels back through the centuries to tell the fascinating, surprising and often downright bizarre stories of some of the everyday ingredients found at London's Borough Market.

Discover how the strawberries we eat today had their roots in a clandestine trip to South America by a French spy whose surname happened to be Strawberry, why three-quarters of Britain's late-18th-century intake of tea was sold on the black market, and what Sigmund Freud found so fascinating about eel genitalia.

From the humble apples and onions that we've grown on these shores for centuries, to more exotic ingredients like cinnamon and bananas that travel from across the world to finesse our food, Borough Market: Edible Histories offers a chance to digest the charming stories behind every last morsel.