The Quizzing Blog: Review of “Insatiable Appetites”

Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London by Peter Ross

A Book Review by Shannon Donnelly

The quote on the back cover by food historian Dr. Annie Gray is that this book is, “Thoroughly satisfying and meticulously researched, whether nosing into shady corners or shedding new light on well-gnawed sources, this is a book you can both snack on—and savour.” She is quite right.

If you’ve ever wondered what the lower classes ate for breakfast, what a still drunken soldier or gentlemen might want as refreshment in early London hours, or what might constitute a mid-day meal for a merchant or shopkeeper in The City, this book can provide insights.

Ross has pulled from various sources, and all are included in the footnotes and the extensive bibliography. He has pulled from Proceedings of the Old Baily and period resources that range across the Long Eighteenth Century, so from early 1700s into the Victorian era. Ross kindly puts in dates, and also notes what eating habits held across the decades in London, as well as giving costs and how these relate to wages.

The details are excellent—the names of eating houses, some recipes, and a dive into the hard to find details of lower classes meal habits, even touching on those who basically lived on the streets.

Ross chose to present the information in the format of looking across the day.

The reader starts in the early hours with the saloop sellers, who might also be offering some bread and butter for an extra half-pence, or even gingerbread. The reader moves on to breakfast at various hours and places, and then a look at what he terms “The rise and fall of coffee (and chocolate)” across the Georgian eras. Lunch is dealt with as more properly dinner in the Georgian era, along with sweet things for the afternoons, what might be had for supper. He ends with the link between jelly houses and sex workers at the end of the day. You will need to read the book to understand that, and how jelly could be anything from savory to sweet, and was associated as being a cure for STDs of the era.

The book is dense with information, meaning a valuable addition to anyone’s research shelf. It can be read straight through, or browsed for specific information for there is an excellent index at the back. The notes also deserve their own browsing—Rose has an excellent writing style that makes the reading lively.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the stories pulled from criminal records, which give a clear insight into prices (the value of food items taken is then related to how this might affect wholesale or resale of that item). If you write mysteries set in Regency England, the book could easily inspire ideas for new crimes and criminal characters.

Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London came out in 2025 from Bodleian Library Publishing, and is available right now only in hardback. It is currently priced at around $40, and worth every penny. If you have an interest in food history, or need more details to build out characters in the lower classes in London, or simply enjoy reading about food of the era, this is a must have for your bookshelf.

Step into the kitchens, streets, and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, and countless appetites.

From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops, and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry “pigs,” and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots. After dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London’s first Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to Jewish fried fish, Italian boloney, and German sausages.

Through the course of a single day, Insatiable Appetites takes readers on a journey through breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper in Georgian London, drawing on contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life as they navigate the city’s diverse food landscape. It reveals not only culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and daily struggles that shaped life in the capital.

Shannon Donnelly

Shannon Donnelly’s writing has won numerous awards, including a nomination for Romance Writer’s of America’s RITA award, the Grand Prize in the “Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer” contest, judged by Nora Roberts, and others. Her writing repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: “simply superb”…”wonderfully uplifting”….and “beautifully written.” She has several times won the Indie BRAG Gold Medallion, including for her Regency romances Lady Chance and her most recent novel Lady Lost, set in Paris of 1815.

She is currently working on a Regency romance set in Yorkshire, and so can’t use any of the research in Ross’s book, but cannot resist a book about food that covers the Regency era.