Ivan Day

Ivan Day
Day in 2013
Born1949 or 1950
Ireland
OccupationFood historian

Ivan Day (born 1949 or 1950) is a Irish-English food historian. Writing in 2010, the food writer Bee Wilson credited Day as, "no contest, the leading expert on historic cookery in Britain".

Biography

Ivan Day was born in 1949 or 1950 in Ireland. Day's father was a fisherman, and in the period following World War II as food supply was limited, he supplemented the family's food with fish and game that he hunted.

Day gained an interest in food history at the age of 13, after happening upon John Nott's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary (1723) at an antiquarian bookseller in Colchester, Essex. Finding the archaic language and instructions funny, he purchased a copy. As a teenager, he purchased old cookery books, recreating some for family during breaks from school. Day trained in biology, then art history, before moving into the field of food history. As a young man he lived for a time in Greece, where he learned how to cook over an open fire, and at 21 started a catering business, serving period fare. At one point, Day ran a restaurant.

As he moved into a career in food history, Day took on work as a consultant on historian kitchen, kitchenware and dishes. His clients included films and television makers, museums, and heritage organisations such as the National Trust. Heston Blumenthal consulted Day regularly during the 2000s, covering work at The Hind's Head and his television show Feast. He wrote on food history, in magazines, and by 2005 five books. By the 2010s, he was running a weekly cooking courses out of a 17th-century farmouse in the Lake District, Cumbria. The farmhouse contained both a modern and historic kitchen. Besides his consulting, writing and teaching work, Day has also worked as a judge at the World Marmalade Awards.

He owns a collection of old cooking books and tools, including pastry brushes made with goose feathers and roasting jacks. In a 2014 profile in the Financial Times, Day cites "a common potato pudding to be fired below roasted meat" from the Scottish writer Susanna MacIver's Cookery, and pastry (1773) as his favourite historical recipe, while contending that he would rather live in the modern day, indulging in historic cookery recreationally.

Day is married to his wife, Jill. As of the mid-2000s, his hobbies included fiddling and fell walking.

Notes

  1. ↑ An anecdote, recounted in a profile in the Telegraph, describes Martin Scorsese calling Day "out of the blue" to enlist Day as the cook for a banquet in The Young Victoria, a film he was producing on Queen Victoria.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Wilson, Bee (10 August 2010). "The Kitchen Thinker: Ivan Day". The Telegraph. Retrieved 25 October 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Ivan Day, now in his 50s, was born in Ireland, but..." Cumberland and Westmorland Herald. 12 November 2005. Archived from the original on 17 January 2019. Retrieved 25 October 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Russell, Polly (28 November 2014). "The history cook: Food of Christmas past". The Financial Times. Retrieved 25 October 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 Ellis, Hattie (1 January 2009). "Ancient recipes: Repast historic". The Telegraph. Retrieved 25 October 2026.
  5. ↑ Blumenthal, Heston (2009) [2008]. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London & New York: Bloomsbury. p. 275. ISBN 978-1-60819-020-1.
  6. ↑ Aglionby, John (1 March 2014). "Artisan foods: marmalade's pot of gold". The Financial Times. Retrieved 25 October 2026.
  7. ↑ Mitchell, Margaret (4 Oct 2025). "The art of dining". The Spectator. Retrieved 25 October 2026.