ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical account of Food and Cooking Skills Education (FCSE) development, using England and Wales as a case study. For centuries throughout the world, food has been prepared and cooked in the domestic environment and, as with all practical skills, informal education, including cooking skills, especially in populations who lived and worked in the rural domestic economy. Consequently, there was a disinclination to cook, and it is unlikely that elaborate foods described and illustrated in contemporary cookery books were a regular feature of the meals of many well-to-do households. Beyond the often narrow educational debates at the start of the twentieth century were obsessions with Empire and national efficiency and concerns about the effects of population quantity and quality on the influence and success of these. The history of women's education and the construction of a domestic ideology had a significant impact on the development of curricula.
