Country cooking: Cookbooks and Counterculture in the 1970s

This article discusses the underlying reasons for rise in popularity of country cookbook – a genre that reflects rural cookery practices, using locally-available, seasonal and foraged ingredients 1970s Britain. Despite cookbooks being styled along traditional lines, their increased very much drew upon unconventional, countercultural movements communal living, self-sufficiency folk feminism. Country can be seen as direct response to troubled decade, expressing desire an alternative life away from work-consumption cycle longed-for dissent agri-politics industrialized food, but without unconventionality commune, hard graft self-sufficiency, or media-fueled mockery The was also height Women’s Liberation Movement UK women’s work kitchen highly politicized. Amidst these debates, through its comforting, sometimes old-fashioned, recipes advice offers imagined return psychological shift capitalism limitations modern life. By adopting narrative structures writerly tone which emulate life, emulates mindset draws countercultures, proffers security accessibility.