Neil Buttery
102 episodes listed below
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Welcome to 'The British Food History Podcast': British food in all its (sometimes gory) glory with Dr. Neil Buttery. He'll be looking in depth at all aspects of food with interviews with special guests, recipes, re-enactments, foraging, trying his hand at traditional techniques, and tracking down forgotten recipes and hyper-regional specialities. He'll also be trying to answer the big question: What makes British food, so...British?This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Neil Buttery connects recipes and ingredients to the technologies, places and memories that shaped British eating.
Neil Buttery treats British food as historical evidence, moving easily between kitchen practice, archival questions and guest conversation. The recreation of a 16th-century beer brings malting, fermentation, hops and laboratory testing into the same discussion.
A 16th-century beer goes to the lab, and your inner food nerd gets the tasting notes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Christmas bird with a long British history and a grounded farming angle.
Turkey is treated here as both a food story and a farming one, and that split gives the piece room to breathe. It starts with the long British history of turkey, from Tudor times to the 20th century, then moves into a farmer’s account of slow-grown, high-welfare birds for…
A grounded medieval-ale discussion that makes fermentation feel practical.
The episode stays with medieval ale and keeps the modern home fermentation angle close at hand. Neil Butchery and Alison Kay move from malted grain-to-water measurements and wild yeast to the practical question of cleaning versus over-sterilizing, which gives the conversation a…
A practical look at black pudding, white pudding, and making use of bacon trim.
Black and white pudding are handled as a real food-history topic, not as simple breakfast filler. Neil talks with Matthew Cocking and Grant Harper of Fruit Pig, the last remaining commercial craft producer of fresh blood black puddings in Britain, and the focus stays on how the…
A cheese manuscript opens into a rich argument about milk, fasting, and early modern food culture.
A rare early modern cheese manuscript gives this episode its hook, but the stronger draw is how Alex Bamji and Neil Buttery use it to open out into larger questions about dairy in the 16th and 17th centuries.
A season wrap that turns listener mail into food-history housekeeping.
Neil Buttery closes the ninth season with a familiar postbag, letting listener questions and comments draw the series back over its recent detours.
A sharp rethink of Fanny Craddock as a performer who built a memorable TV persona.
Neil Buttrey and Kevin Geddes revisit Fanny Craddock with a useful corrective to the usual caricature. The best material is about how she sold a television persona: the fixed look, the firm delivery, the cooking as lifestyle pitch, and the sense that viewers were meant to read…
Burns Night, The Globe, the distillery, and the people keeping the legacy in view.
Burns comes through here less as a statue than as a legacy tied to places, objects, and tastes that still need looking after. Neil Buttery moves from Burns Night into Dumfriesshire with Jane Brown, then Teresa Church and David Thomson, and the best stretches are the practical…
The season ends with listener questions, Yorkshire puddings, and a warm, easy catch-up on food history.
The season-closing postbag lets the British Food History Podcast do what it does best: take listener questions and comments and work through them with Neil Buttery's easy curiosity.
Quiet adventures in the British countryside.
Movie history with a widening lens.
California, explained through consequential conversations.
Neil Buttery talks with Paul Crane, a Museum of Royal Worcester trustee and descendant of Dr.
The British Food History Podcast brings back a vaults conversation while Neil Buttrey is away on a break.
Neil Buttrey reaches into the vaults for one of his favorite episodes.
This special bonus episode on the Serve It Forth Food History Festival 2025 lays out the online event on 18 October, how the day will run, which sessions and guests are lined up, and where Tom Parker Bowles fits in.
Neil opens season 9 with a conversation about black pudding.
The British Food History Podcast closes season nine with its sixth postbag edition.
Neil Buttery speaks with Christina Wade, author of Filthy Queens: a history of beer in Ireland, and Wade explains why she wanted the book to read like a story told “over a pint at a pub.” The episode traces ale and beer in Ireland from early medieval references to 17th-century brewery ownership, including women brewers who still dominated parts of the trade and Barnaby Rich’s insult “most filthy queens.” Wade also discusses Irish rebellion, the 1641 depositions, porter competition in the 18th century, and the way the Great Hunger and railways reshaped brewing and distribution.
Neil Buttery speaks with baker, writer, and teacher David Wright about Breaking Bread, How Baking Shaped Our World, a book he says mixes history, memoir, and journalism.
The British Food History Podcast episode on Bronze Age Food & Foodways with Chris Wakefield and Rachel Ballantyne focuses on Must Farm near Peterborough, a late Bronze Age settlement built on stilts above a palaeochannel and preserved after a fire about 9 to 12 months after construction.
The British Food History Podcast episode on Welsh sheep and cattle features Dr Neil Buttery with guest Carwyn Graves, author of Welsh Food Stories (2022, Calon).
Dr Neil Buttery opens in December.
Mark Truesdale, author of The King and Commoner Tradition: Medieval and Early Modern Literature, traces 15th-century King and Commoner tales back to Robin Hood texts, forest law, and “politicised feasting.” He explains that these stories use a fixed plot of a king lost in the forest, a disgruntled commoner, and a feast that moves from ordinary food to pheasant, heron, swan, and poached venison.
Neil returns from holiday with a new conversation about making medieval ale at home with Alison Kay.
Neil Buttery welcomes Alex Bamji to talk through a newly discovered early modern treatise on cheese.
Dr Neil Buttery welcomes Jenny Linford for a regional food tour across the UK.
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Food historian Jenny Hood traces the surprising history of haggis from its 1430 English manuscript origins through its transformation into Scotland's national dish, driven by Burns' 1786 poem and the first Burns Supper organized in 1801.
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Neil Buttery wraps up the season with the familiar end-of-season postbag episode, reading listener comments, answering questions, and mulling over what people have sent in.
Dr Neil Buttery welcomes Michelin-starred chef J.P.
Dr Neil Buttery welcomes Mark Dawson to talk Derbyshire oatcakes.
Robert Burns gets the Burns Night treatment.
Food historian Kevin Geddes joins Neil Buttrey on the British Food History Podcast to discuss the fascinating and misunderstood legacy of Fanny Craddock, Britain's first celebrity TV chef who dominated screens from 1955 to 1975.
Dr Neil Buttery visits Netherton Foundry to explore the revival of spun iron cookware in Britain.
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Dr Neil Buttery announces the upcoming ninth season of his British food history podcast, teasing topics like bread, pudding, and Bronze Age food.
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Dr Neil Buttery explores the history and cultural significance of crisps in Britain.
Neil Buttery discusses a sponsorship by Fruit Pig black pudding and promotes his upcoming book on sugar history, with a brief personal update.
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