A useful reference that both inspires and informs readers’ imagination and understanding of Victorian foodways, Broomfield's text marshals an impressive command of statistics, dates, and archival research, offering readers a clear picture of Victorian life through the food grown, imported, produced, and consumed by Victorian families. Perhaps best described as a cultural history of food, Broomfield's highly accessible work has a wide and general scope. Although her focus is on the Victorian period, Broomfield frequently refers to the eighteenth century and even the medieval period to describe the origins of food trends, traditions, and preparation styles. As she states in her preface, “While I attempt to offer readers a history of food production, cooking, and diet in England from roughly 1830 to 1900, I also explore what Victorian cuisine tells us about the Victorians themselves, including their class structures, intergenerational and gender relationships, national and regional identities, customs and values, and their economy” (xi). Broomfield focuses on the cultural and economic significance of industrialization, showing how the technologies of food production, transportation, and preparation reflect broader social and cultural changes.

Organizing her study by meals—breakfast, dinner parties, tea, and holiday food—Broomfield takes readers on a sweeping, ambitious journey, connecting food and its cultural history to its legal, economic, and commercial importance, touching on industrialization, the Corn Laws, the East India Tea Company, the potato famine, the adulteration of food, the temperance movement, and the dangers incumbent with lack of food or food of poor quality: scurvy, rickets, cholera, and malnutrition. The book offers specific prices of products, as well as dates of availability and popularity, and is seasoned with references to food in literary texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry Mayhew, Harriet Martineau, and Edith Nesbit.

In her research, Broomfield draws on published cookbooks, etiquette guides, periodicals, and Parliamentary reports, as well as family recipe files, diaries, and journals to fill in the gaps in the transition between agrarianism and industrialization. Her work bridges the preindustrial food traditions of a self-sufficient, agrarian economy in which rural peoples raised most of their own food, supplementing their diet with imports such as tea, coffee, or sugar bought in the markets, with the changes wrought by an industrialized Victorian society in which urban dwellers depended on developing technologies to locate, prepare, and serve elaborate dinners, the constituent ingredients of which were sometimes available canned or premade, thanks to changes in refrigeration technology that sent food across oceans to the breakfast tables of English families. Broomfield exposes how these technological innovations along with land enclosure and the explosion of urban centers resulted in a loss of self-sufficiency and the knowledge of how food could be most efficiently prepared and used.

One of Broomfield's key arguments is that the accompanying effects of industrialization led to a homogenization of national culture and the consolidation of what Benedict Anderson has referred to in his work as nationalist networks or imagined communities. Expanding railways transported food easily, and “as a result, the same name-brand, factory-produced biscuits, jams, tinned meats, canned fruits and vegetables, and custard powders thus made it to grocery shelves nationwide” (74). However, Broomfield maintains that in the face of increasingly homogenized eating patterns and mass-produced foodstuffs, regional cuisine like the Cornish pasty or the Yorkshire spice cake became more important. Holidays like Christmas as well as the daily ritual of tea became occasions on which regional cultural traditions were celebrated.

Another of Broomfield's key points is that food, in addition to uniting people of common regions into one nation, also presented the middle classes with a way to indicate “social and economic status via the stomach” (24). The middle-class dinner party became the stage on which the bounty, wealth, and progress of the nation were displayed, arranged, and presented in a meaningful tableau that made the family's own prosperity, domestic economy, understanding of gastronomical trends, and management of servants evident. In short, “dinner epitomized what it meant to live in the world's most powerful nation” (101). Dinner parties and dining trends throughout the Victorian period reflect the changing values and technologies of an industrialized economy.

Painting a full and detailed picture of Victorian eating practices at all levels of the social-class spectrum, Broomfield usefully contrasts the dining options of upper- and middle-class men (e.g., clubs, chophouses, taverns, shops) with the limited choices of laborers, who often ate, standing up, whatever food they could afford from stalls and street vendors on the way to their fourteen- to sixteen-hour days. Yet the type of food available to this economic class was not immune to global changes; in fact, improvements in the diet of this class were tied to the Corn Laws, the potato famine, and even advances in “deep-sea trawlers that caught loads of cod in North Atlantic waters and brought them to market at a cheap price” (57).

Broomfield's skill is exhibited in the careful distinctions she makes in her terms: wage versus salary, dinner versus lunch, dinner a la Française versus dinner a la Russe, black tea versus green tea, and “corn” (depending on the region, “corn” could indicate wheat, oats, or barley). The resulting work is carefully researched and nuanced, providing the scholar, the student, and the period enthusiast with a handy reference and a useful meditation on the growth of industrialization, nationalism, and the preservation of regional identity. Broomfield's work will take its place alongside Mitchell's Daily Life in Victorian England as an essential volume for understanding the way this culture conceptualized and consumed food.