Hard Times and Hardtack

 As some of you may have noticed, I occasionally write about Georgian era food. This is not solely because I write novels set in the mid-eighteenth century. My fascination with the history of food began when I was nine or ten.  

My father was an excellent and imaginative cook, and should probably have been a chef instead of a rate and tariff analyst. Even so, I might not have caught the culinary research bug but for two things. The first was that he began bringing home Gourmet Magazine. The other...