During the late Georgian and early Regency periods, good hostesses were faced with the never ending problem of how to ensure they had enough ingredients to put together a suitably impressive meal or dinner party.
During the summer and early autumn fresh fruit and vegetables could be plucked from the kitchen garden. A nice piece of meat might be freshly killed. More challenging was making sure what she had to hand was still good enough for her guests in the middle of the winter.
The food writer Hattie Ellis showed Anna McNamee how to make ginger beer, a favourite tipple of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Recipe for Ginger Beer More Jane Austen recipes The Jane Austen Cookbook by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye is published by the British Museum Press
