Goodreads asked Martine Bailey:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Martine Bailey An historical writer must love research - and I do! Learning about how cooks prepared food in the past has been a fascinating area. First I looked at how ordinary folk cooked, boiling and frying over a fire, boiling puddings in a cloth in a cauldron, for example, and dangling food like bacon on a string to fry crisply.
Later I studied how the top chefs and confectioners worked, creating the most extraordinary sugarwork such as edible tableware, silver webs and vast palaces and temples made of sugar.
It has been a privilege to learn about such talented people from their handwritten recipes, many of them passed down the generations.

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