We all eat and enjoy food. It is enmeshed in the social and official histories of many countries and someone who knows that better than most is UK food historian Annie Gray.

Not only has she written books about it, but she has also featured in many TV and radio programs with an emphasis on food, how it has been prepared and eaten down the ages, and its importance to societies around the world. This latest book ostensibly is about Georgina Landemare, cook to Winston Churchill’s household during World War II, but Gray has used Georgina’s life as the lens through which to view the food history of Edwardian and then modern England and France.

Born the daughter of a coachman in 1882, Georgina went into service at a young age, the lot of many girls of her class. By opting for kitchen work, she set the path for the rest of her life, rising through the ranks of major private kitchens to become a cook. Marriage to a French chef in 1909 completed her education and, even though he was decades older, the pair made a formidable team.

Gray has done an enormous amount of research into the lives of the upstairs and downstairs staff of the great houses of England in pre-World War I times, quoting memoirs from other servants as well as employers, and menus prepared for staff and diners upstairs. That detail continues as the background to Georgina’s story, especially concerning her husband, Paul, and his life, training and career in France before arriving in England in the 1880s. In 1958 she published Recipes from No 10, with a foreword by Clementine Churchill, and each chapter of this book is headed by one of Georgina’s recipes.

How Georgina came to work for the Churchills, her continued relationship with them after she left their kitchen, and how she managed wartime food rationing makes fascinating, informative reading.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville