"Kings built their castles. Bishops raised cathedrals. Yet there were cooks before either. What was their monument?" For his first book in 12 years, Lawrence Norfolk, historical novelist extraordinaire, inhabits the 17th century through its food. From the reign of Charles I through civil war, Cromwell's protectorate and on to the restoration, we are treated to both lavish feasting and battlefield foraging, the politics of the high table and the hearthside use of medicinal herbs. Historical events intrude on the kitchen, but for the most part happen far away from the Somerset manor house at the book's centre: the surrounding vale is a world unto itself, with families, memories and myths reaching back to the wildwood, and the wider world known only through the pages of the news pamphlet Mercurius Bucklandicus and its pictures of the "sad-eyed" king at court. ("He don't look no happier than me," remarks one local.)

John Sandall or Saturnall, the village boy set to work in the great kitchens of Buckland Manor, rises to culinary fame through his super-sensitive nose, which can identify any ingredient, and the mythical lore learnt from his mother's ancient cookbook. Its pages contain not just recipes but an idyll of prelapsarian plenty, passed down the generations by those who still connect with pagan forces: Saturnus and his groaning table, a Saturnalia from the Golden Age. "This was the first garden," says his mother, referring both to the book's radical ideal of social equality and the Somerset landscape they inhabit now, rich in Christian and pre-Christian legends. "That was Eden," John protests. "They called it that later," she replies. Norfolk's ability to fold history in on itself, and to summon deep time, is as dazzling here as it was in his earlier novels: family genealogy becomes a myth of origins.

In terms of plot and character, John Saturnall's Feast could be any historical novel with a well-packed bodice or silhouetted clash of swords on the cover: we have the outcast hero with mysterious birthright whose mother is pursued as a witch; the haughty high-born love interest straining against society's expectations; the friend whose only role is to be a trusty sidekick; the dastardly love rival who preens and struts like a pantomime villain. There is a stagey habit of misdirection to the writing, so that what looks at first like a murder or a battle turns out to be a haircut or an open-air fire. The portentousness of some of the pronouncements about the sacred role of the cook, meanwhile, has more in common with modern widescreen epic than with Robert May's 17th-century classic The Accomplisht Cook ("There is more to learn, John  beyond your anger. And others to beware. Ones who seek the feast " "A cook stands apart  Even in the feast he is alone").

But if the novel is less determinedly unusual than Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary or The Pope's Rhinoceros, its focus lends it clarity, and the material is fascinating. Classically informed, globally supplied and rich in local ingredients, the pre-civil war era is revealed as a golden age for English cuisine. Norfolk's imagination is bigger and more abstract than the individual; he conjures so well the bustling bureaucracy of the 17th-century manor house, its systems of rights and obligations, its geographical and social significance. And of course its engine room, the kitchen, perpetually busy to feed the hordes of hungry mouths dependent on it, from beggars to lords. "Kitchen's older'n the house  The fire's even older," John is told on his arrival.

The food writing is sensuous and exact, from the coarse "dark slabs" of maslin bread eaten by the servants to the extraordinary dessert called "the pool of Tantalus", made from jelly with candied baubles sunk into it, that John presents to the King. Norfolk explains how to polish knives (using a mixture of goats' urine and chalk), how to wash up for a household (with ash, sand and endless elbow grease) and what to stuff swans with (quails bound in spinach stems). You put the book down wanting to make it all: manchet bread, cat's tongue biscuits, snow-cream  Any number of fowls are boned and stuffed inside each other; the very "order of creation" is presented as a dish, from salad-leaf animals up to sugar-spun royalty. There are also times of hardship, when imagination transfigures turnips and water into ambrosia. There is food as seduction, food as art, food as disguise; cooking as alchemy, as everyday grind. Hunger and its satisfaction stand against Puritan repression and the strict social hierarchy. The feast is ultimately a political act: it brings people together.

There's a mythic quality to Lawrence Norfolk's fourth historical novel. Set in the mid-17th century, stretching across the civil war years, it skillfully entangles folklore and foodlore. John Sandall, the orphaned son of a suspected witch, is taken in at nearby Buckland Manor and put to work in the kitchens. Before her death, John's mother tells him that their true name is Saturnall, and this means that they are keepers of feast. John soon shows that he does indeed possess certain gifts and, under the guidance of the manor's master cook, slowly hones his art, coming to the attention of the headstrong daughter of the house, Lucretia. With an arranged marriage hanging over her, she fasts as a way of retaining control of her future. Throughout the novel, food is shown to be both a source of sustenance and a thing of ritual; recipes are legacies, the threads connecting generations. The earlier child's-eye chapters, though more opulent in tone, are less compelling than the later accounts of the battlefield but Norfolk's writing is at its strongest when he's describing the symbolic significance of certain dishes: spiced wine, delicate curls of spun sugar, slivers of almonds, and the flaking flesh of river fish.