In Food Britannia Andrew Webb embarks on a food-lover's tour of Britain, searching out regional specialities, meeting people who've started businesses from their kitchen table, and generally finding reasons to be cheerful about the state of the nation's stomach. The book gives the reader permission to linger lovingly over brand names such as Bird's Custard and Walker's Shortbread while also rejoicing in the way that generic dishes pulled from postwar childhoods - scotch eggs, curd tarts and bubble and squeak  are making a comeback.
It privileges the local over the global, the slow over the speedy, the familiarity of the recent past over the unknowable future. To read it is to be flattered that one's food memories not only matter but provide a useful map for how we might navigate feeding ourselves deliciously and responsibly in the 21st century.
Underpinning the project is Webb's bullishness about what technological innovation has done for niche food production in the past few years. Thanks to the web there is no longer any need for producers of damson cheese, venison steaks or sea salt to rent fancy premises or invest in costly advertising. One of the best chocolate producers in Britain does its stuff in Scotland. Thanks to a website and obliging local postal service, luxury boxes from Cocoa Mountain can arrive anywhere in mainland Britain within 24 hours. More radically, the web has allowed producers to devise new business models from the bottom up.
In Kent Michael Dallaway uses the web to get customers interested in renting part of his cherry orchard. For £50 a year you get your own tree, under which you can picnic when the blossom is in bloom and visit during summer to pick the fruit. You can even give it a name and treat it as a pet. This way Dallaway gets his cash up front rather than having to take a chance on the harvest.
That food producers and their customers no longer have to do business face-to-face over a well-swabbed marble counter doesn't mean Webb has followed their example, stayed home and researched the whole thing online. Instead he undertakes the kind of foot-slogging state-of-the-nation investigation whose history stretches back to the days when Daniel Defoe, Arthur Young and William Cobbett all did something similar. It's a capacious and forgiving format that allows the writer to cram in whatever takes his fancy without having to strain for symmetry or even coherence. Webb, then, picks what he likes food-wise about a region  a farmer here, a pub there, delicious produce everywhere  and puts them together to produce a textual tasting menu, best savoured at leisure rather than scoffed in one go.
This structure allows for plenty of well-I-never revelations. So, for instance, in the section on the West Country we learn that the now ubiquitous blueberry didn't make its first blushing appearance in Britain until 1952. Or what about the fact that once upon a time the well-to-do liked to indulge in something called the Roti Sans Pareil, which involved playing Russian dolls with game birds  a hulking bustard on the outside, teeny tiny garden warbler at the very centre. These days, if you fancy staging such end-of-days decadence in your own dining room, you can send off to Heal Farm in Devon for a slimmed-down five-bird version of this meaty extravaganza.
Webb's tone throughout Food Britannia is standard-issue larky, with gallant jokes about not asking lady producers their ages and the effect that hard toffee can have on wobbly teeth. The artisan shopkeepers he meets, meanwhile, all seem to be salt-of-the-earth types with an accumulated wisdom that you can discern in their quick eyes and patient hands. There are also plenty of nostalgic nods back to Webb's 1970s childhood when eccles cakes were referred to as squashed fly cakes and bourbon biscuits were regularly remarked on as looking like something you might give to the dog. Particularly good are the descriptions of tastes and textures. Webb is clearly a messy eater, scattering flakes and crumbs wherever he goes. He's probably horrible to watch in real life, but on paper he's delicious. When he talks about figit pie or bara brith it's a stern reader that doesn't find herself overtaken by a bout of empathetic dribbling.
Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.