Shilling finds this "an impressive tour" from a well-stocked mind, her approach being "a firmly chronological line across the landscape of culinary history, pausing at intervals to examine objects of interest." She agrees that the book is " opinionated and wildly idiosyncratic", in the tradition of W.N.W. Fowler's "gin-soaked" "Countryman's Cooking" and Rupert Croft-Cooke's "English Cooking: A New Approach". The book gives, Shilling asserts, a "glorious sense of the continuity of English cuisine from the Middle Ages to the present", making it an "engaging, funny and admirably entertaining history." Fay Maschler, writing in "The Spectator", calls the book a "less stringent, more capricious, generously illustrated account" which gives "a magical sense of almost having been there at every twist and turn, such is her passion for livestock, animal husbandry and cultivation of the edible." There are few "revelations, although plenty of engaging detail. There are too many suppositions and fancies." But she feels that Dickson Wright brings the book to life when she speaks from knowledge to compare " because she has eaten them, the taste of swan, moorhen and rook, praise the unexpectedly white meat of beaver tail and draw on a childhood .. when local sturgeon were for sale, rough boys sold live eels along Hammersmith Mall". Rachel Cooke, reviewing "A History of English Food" for "The Guardian", writes that she feels "pretty cross. All of the information in this book can be found elsewhere, and much better done, too." She compares the book unfavourably with Kate Colquhoun's 2008 "Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking" and Dorothy Hartley's 1954 "classic" "Food in England". Cooke argues that Dickson Wright is "as particular as she is greedy", and "gruesomely snobbish", out of touch with "Other people", preferring therefore the overindulgent Georgians who could afford a suitable retinue of servants. "British Food in America" describes the book as "a stinker", substituting "speculation and snobbish reminiscence for any modicum of research or analysis."