What has emerged from our explorations of the foodways of Roman Britain?

The first thing is the range of eating habits and preferences in the different regions and how they altered through time. That this is so should surely not surprise us. Even today in a homogenised and globalised world, the different regions of Britain still retain local traditions and preferences. The Staffordshire oatcake is an entirely different beast to the traditional Scottish one. I have looked long and hard for something similar to Wiltshire lardy cakes in the various parts of Britain I have lived in since childhood, but to no avail. My partner remembers, with advantage, the season puddings his Yorkshire-bred mother would make to accompany roast chicken, but has never found their like elsewhere. These are just memories belonging to the second half of the twentieth century. The regional diversity of British cooking before that is well documented in such works as Dorothy Hartley's Food in England, which also shows the changes going on over the centuries before the impact of the Industrial Revolution changed British society so fundamentally. It should be expected that there would be differences observable in Roman Britain given that it covers a large geographical area and half a millennium of time. Equally we have seen that there was no one ‘Roman’ cuisine amongst the people who came to Britain after the conquest. Why should there be? They came from various areas of the empire with their own particular tastes and prejudices.