From craft beers and sourdough bread to kimchi, coffee, tea, and cheese, fermentation is a popular topic in both food and health circles. In Our Fermented Lives, food historian and fermenting expert Julia Skinner explores the fascinating roots of a wide range of fermented foods in cultures around the world, with a focus on the many intersections fermented foods have with human history and culture, from the evolution of the microbiome to food preservation techniques, distinctive flavor profiles around the globe, and the building of community. Fans of fermentation, chefs, and anyone fascinated with the origins of various foods will enjoy this engaging popular history, which is accompanied by 42 recipes adapted from historic sources, including sauerkraut, corn beer, uji (fermented grain porridge), pickles and relishes, vinegars, ketchup, soy sauce, Tepache (fermented pineapple drink), vinegars, beet kvass, and more.

Gervase Markham's The English Housewife was the first important mass-market cookbook and housekeeping guide in the English language. Bridging the manuscript and print eras, Markham's work had a much larger reach than previous works on the home. Julia Skinner takes Markham's work across the centuries into current new media, translating Markham's recipes and ideas into a blog and back into a book again. Even if you don't know a conserve from a wet sucket, Modernizing Markham is a fun and eye-opening look into English kitchens of old.

Afternoon Tea: A History explores the development of the afternoon tea meal, diving deeper than the popular tale of the Duchess of Bedford's afternoon gatherings to find the meals that inspired those early afternoon teas. Julia Skinner carefully separates the fact and lore around the meal and sets the story of afternoon tea within its historic contexts. Recognizing that a meal's birth and life never happen in a vacuum, the book sets aside the already well-documented conversations surrounding tea etiquette, instead exploring the social contexts that made the meal possible and popular, moving it from one small subset of the population to a widespread and beloved phenomenon, one that nearly died out at the end of the 20th century before experiencing a resurgence in the 21st. Afternoon tea is a meal that came of age during the British Empire's most aggressive expansion, and as such became a meal that was transported to new continents with colonial forces. The book explores how this movement took place and uncovers the different ways tea and colonialism intersect in both the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It also looks at afternoon tea in America, a country that broke from the Empire before the meal was established as a set ritual, but which still has its own complex relationship with the beverage and a continuing fascination with the meal. The book concludes by looking at afternoon tea today, including a handful of interviews that show the range of perspectives about the meal and its place in society, as well as its resurging popularity in the last decade.