If you think Virginia Woolf’s novels are good, you should try her bread

I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their cooking. During the course of her research for this book I met, got to know and became friends with Jan Ondaatje Rolls. She has certainly chosen a novel way to portray that well-known group of friends about whom so much has been written that it’s hard to imagine there could be anything more to unearth. Hers is a sprightly approach. By defining them through their dinners, she makes us see the Bloomsberries from another, more domestic, more gleeful point of view: the kaleidoscope is twisted again.

This is not a cookbook tout court, for although it includes workable recipes, some of which are extremely good, ranging from ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Dinner’ to ‘Vanessa Bell’s Loving Cup’, it also contains some of only historic interest: Dora Carrington’s nectar of cowslip wine; William Cobbett’s loaf. It is more of a social history, witty and erudite, of the Bloomsbury Group seen through the window of their cookery and eating habits. And it may come as a surprise for some to learn what gourmets this gang of intellectuals could be: ‘A good dinner is of great importance to good talk,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’

Ondaatje Rolls presents the recipes chronologically, which not only makes sense but shows us the dramatic social and domestic changes that occurred between the two world wars. As time progressed, there were fewer servants but more machinery — refrigerators and pop-up toasters — and improved plumbing.