Dr. Andrea Broomfield's book, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History, serves up tea and toast as accompaniment to the main entrée - an examination of the culture of middle- and working-class English families from 1830-1900. Broomfield is an associate professor of English at JCCC.

"What people ate, how they procured it, how they cooked it, and how they served it offers us insight into Victorian culture," Broomfield said. "Victorian cuisine tells us about the class structure, intergenerational and gender relationships, national and regional identities, manners, values and economy."

Published by Preager Press in 2007, the book has a winning recipe, which is Broomfield's scholarly-but-accessible writing combined with the ever-popular topic of food.

Broomfield's research consisted of studying hundreds of novels, essays and diaries from the Victorian era; handwritten recipes; English cookbooks; and etiquette guides, including rare manuscripts housed in special collections at U.S. university libraries.

While always interested in Victorian fiction - Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot - Broomfield's interest changed from fiction to nonfiction during her PhD studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, where she inadvertently enrolled in a seminar about Victorian women periodical writers. Broomfield wrote her dissertation on 19^th-century British women periodical writers who were advocating causes like women's trade unions and suffrage.

"I really became interested in culinary history because of issues of domestic economy," Broomfield said.

A point of pride for Broomfield is the book's focus on average Victorian men and women, given that much of what people know from literature and film is about aristocrats or the abject poor.

Broomfield immersed herself in the book for three years. At the Living History Farms, Urbandale, Iowa, she learned the intricacies of hearth and closed-range cooking. Broomfield begins each chapter with a recipe or a menu and includes updated versions of each in the appendix. She prepared each of these dishes, even steaming a Christmas plum pudding for three hours on a 98-degree summer day and tracking down suet from a local butcher.

"The book was an obsession," Broomfield said. "I fell asleep in a Victorian world wondering ‘How do you lard a roast or truss a chicken?' After cooking the foods myself, I revised the narrative making it more sensitive to how difficult it was to be a Victorian housewife or servant."

For Broomfield, recipes are an entry to examining Victorian middle-class issues, issues that parallel contemporary society - an onslaught of new inventions in industry, agriculture, transportation and technology - changes that affect options about what and how people eat.

"We have a lot more in common with the Victorians than we think," Broomfield said.

Broomfield's interests remain with food history, but she has recently turned specifically toward dining at sea. Her article, "The Night the Good Ship Went Down: Three Fateful Dinners Aboard the Titanic," has just been published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (Nov. 2009), and she is currently at work on a new book, tentatively titled Dining in the Age of Steam: Food and Cooking Aboard the Transatlantic Steamship, 1840-1914.