I'm an ex-history student (if one ever truly stops being a student of history), but my current bent has me stumped for resources! As an English Brit, and intrigued by the questions of identity which plague myself and my English ilk as well as a lover of food I'm keen to dig into the culinary past of my lot.
Are any among you able to point me to any decent resources around which might shed some light on the kinds of foods that the majority of people would have eaten in any given period (as opposed the menus of royalty and high society etc which are much easier to come by)? From bibliographical pointers to primary sources such as they exist, I'm open to any and all suggestions!
There are two books that reference the same source material that you may find interesting:
America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food by Pat Willard
The Food of a Younger Land: A portrait of American food by Mark Kurlansky
Both books use WPA archives to look into how people in the US ate in the wake of the Depression. The WPA--Works Progress Administration--was a New Deal initiative that largely did public works, but one of the other things it did was employ writers of all stripes to catalogue various things in the US. The two above books mined the reports of these writers and present them in a coherent narrative that I found to be endlessly fascinating. One of those things was culinary history. Now, this is American rather than British, but it still might be of interest to you.
Another book with a wider scope is Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas. I find the book to be far too preachy regarding current politics, but the culinary history bits are pretty interesting. The authors give an interesting argument regarding how food has been the underpinning of different empires throughout history.
If biographies are of interest to you, the aforementioned Kurlansky has a surprisingly fascinating biography of Birdseye (the frozen food magnate) that held my interest throughout. His empathy for Birdseye's worldview keeps the work grounded (in my humble opinion).
What an apropos username! :) /u/agentdcf studies British food in the 19th century, he knows a lot about bread, but apparently he does not have an AskHistorians profile, so shoot him a PM if he doesn't see this.