This is the most gorgeous book to browse and flick through - but I don't think I've ever read less enticing recipes! (The author warns that results can't be guaranteed!) To be sure, the famous boeuf en daube from To the Lighthouse sounds mouth-watering - 'its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and its wine' - and I'd happily lunch off soles and partridges and fine wines at a Cambridge men's college, if not off plain gravy soup, beef and yellowed sprouts and prunes and custard as offered to Virginia Woolf at Newnham in 1929. The Bloomsberries were a greedy lot - but this wasn't a high point in our national cuisine. I've a soft spot for a suet pud - made with proper butcher's suet - and I've no qualms about offal ... but Lydia Lopokova's boiled beef and brain in a wine sauce didn't have me running to the butcher (maybe I'm being unfair as I've never tasted brain) - and so much aspic and bechamel sauce with everything. I felt a longing for colour and crunch. Chocolate and Chivers' strawberry jelly mould, anyone?