Beyond the brassica

It is a tired trope to suggest that people didn’t eat vegetables in the past. Of course they did (most people ate little but). But cookery books don’t contain many recipes for them, and they don’t usually appear on menus or table plans. This was partly because they were included in other dishes, and partly because it was taken for granted that people knew how to cook them (boiled, mainly, to be served with melted butter sauce) and that they would be present on the table. It is also because until the middle of the nineteenth century cookery books were aimed at the middle classes and above, and the food of the poor was unrepresented.