LOCAL food has been on the receiving end of a lot of attention over the last few years. So much so that you could be forgiven for thinking that the county has only recently come into its own as a gastronomes' mecca.

But a flick through Jo Draper's updated book Dorset Food shows that our local ancestors' lives revolved around food just as much as ours do today. In fact, as the quote inset above, with which Jo begins her book illustrates, it was the same landscape then that still provides the foundation that makes the local, artisan food revival today.

For those who could afford to, eating was a lavish affair that would take hours, involve a number of courses and several different animals in one sitting. However, for those on the other side of the social divide, sustenance was a struggle. Although agriculture was the living of a sizeable chunk of the population, the book tells us they often did not get to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Instead, where the next meal was coming from was a constant concern.

Recipes in the book include dishes that still sound appealing to contemporary palates such as lobster pie, boiled lamb with caper sauce or pheasant with game sauce. Others nod at a definite change in times and tastes, such as Dorset Stewed Eel, carp and rabbit pasties, some of which are, interestingly enough, the subject of a renaissance today.

Jo, who lives in Dorchester, said: "I think food is a popular subject because it's universal. Everybody eats and they always have done.

"It's disappointing how little there is about those from below the middle classes throughout history, what they ate was not really recorded. They had a lot less variety and in the first half of the 19th century they had a job to get food at all. Dorset labourers weren't worried about fancy recipes, they just wanted to eat."

Despite a lack of information about local working class diets throughout time, Jo - a curatorial consultant at the Lyme Regis Museum - has still accumulated enough information to build up a good idea of the social constraints of the time, at least in relation to food. The book tells us that even though a third of all men aged 10 and above were agricultural labourers, 'Dorset's labourers' wages were notoriously low, partly because there was so little industry in the county to compete for their labour'.

The account of a 52-year-old Durweston labourer and his four children who had an income of about 7s a week shed some light on to the average labourer's diet. It was a generally sparse affair, economically prepared from cheap, bulky ingredients that were less preoccupied in tasting nice than in filling a gap.

"The usual breakfast is tea, or bread and cheese, their dinner and supper bread and cheese, or potatoes sometimes mashed with fat taken from broth and sometimes salt alone. Bullock's cheese is generally bought every week to make broth. Treacle is used to sweeten tea instead of sugar. Very little milk or beer is used."

Portlanders fared a little better, with a 1837 report on the island finding that the labourers' meagre wages still stretched to provide decent food and clothing. This was a nod to their closeness to the sea, as well as the abundance of land that allowed families to sustain themselves on their own food.

On the other side of the divide, those who could afford to eat well did so to a gluttonous degree. When playwright John O'Keefe stayed at the Red Lion in West Lulworth in 1791 he enjoyed lunches of 'roast loin of lamb, delicate broiled chickens, green peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine'. And then for supper there was 'the Lulworth staple, lobster and crabs, to which was added cold lamb and cucumbers, gooseberry pie, butter, milk and bread, and rolls, butter and eggs'.

Evocative images enhance the book's accounts and show the lack of interference between the source of the food and the finished products. Smiling labourers harvesting oats in 1936, an image of dairy workers in the 1890s coming back from their milking or shots of fishermen counting their mackerel catch in 1910. But as much as current trends may reminisce to a past where food was unadulterated and wholesome, Jo does not view the county's gastronomic heritage through rose-tinted spectacles, instead pointing to examples of people opting for frozen New Zealand lamb as opposed to native species 'because Dorset lamb could be so awful'.

The lack of overwhelming romanticism for past foods add enormously to the book as in their place is a realistic and sometimes grim account of what the people who came before us ate.

Jo continued: "In cases it was the opposite to what people today think it was. For instance, Victorian food was not all pure and wonderful and certainly wasn't as perfect as people today would like to think."

Not least because certain aspects of cookery seemed to focus on making unsavoury food palatable, as Jo explained in the book.

"Most of the 18th century (and earlier) recipes are designed to improve meat which was going off.

"One recipe is blatant: 'To make sausages from stinking meat.'"

Jo continued: "I wanted the book to provide an example of Dorset food in the past.

"It's an important part of the county's heritage and very much a part of the real-life history."

* Dorset Food by Jo Draper is out now (£12.99 Sutton Publishing).