Jan Ondaatje Rolls's Bloomsbury Cookbook is a revelatory collection of art, history, photography and literary memoir of the Bloomsbury Group, as seen through recipes culled from the culinary archives and personal cookbooks of its members. Rolls has assembled more than 170 recipes spread across seven decades, starting with Bloombury's beginnings in the 1890s through the group's most artistically ripe period in the 1920s and 1930s, and ending with the 1940s.
Rolls invokes Charleston, the cottage where Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant resided and the source of many of the ideas that came to define the Bloomsbury circle, to provide insight and context for her meticulous selection of recipes. Among the must-try recipes are a simple beignet by Lady Gage, a hearty Hunter Chicken by Frances Partridge and a delicious and healthy Andalusian vegetable paella. Reproductions of Vanessa Bell's and Duncan Grant's still lifes add vibrancy to the narrative, while the words and thoughts of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Frances Partridge, Lytton Strachey and many others provide perspective about critical literary and historical events in the early part of the 20th century.
Rolls's scholarly collection of ephemera carries general appeal to all who share an interest in the details behind England's celebrated collective of writers, artists and intellectuals, and who like a cooking challenge, since many of the recipes rely on intuition rather than exact measurement. But they are worth the work; as Virginia Woolf noted, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant