Back in the 1930s, the author spent her late teens and early twenties working as a kitchen maid and then a cook in some of the large and/or aristocratic houses of the day, and she recounts in this short memoir just what that was like. She comes across as cheerful and hardworking, and if the prose isn't terribly accomplished there is some interest in looking at the book from a food history point of view - the fumbling attempts at gingerbread, the emphasis on seasonal vegetables as they were what the estates were growing at the time, how literal ice-boxes were used to keep groceries cool. More appealing to me, however, were the aside comments that Wadlow made about her life - her disdain for kohlrabi (can't say that I blame her there), her avowal that Downton Abbey got kitchen life all wrong, her total over-it attitude with regard to scrubbing, and - most shocking to me! - the fact that her cook's uniform was a white dress. If I had to spend my days cooking and sieving meats to make fine pates and so on, and I had to do it without the benefit of electricity, washing machines, and dryers, white is the very last colour I'd be wearing! They should have let the poor girl use something else...