400pp; 150x228mm; pbk; illus 

This is a repertoire of raw materials (breeds of beef, apples, cobnuts), generic products (cheese, cream, whisky, bacon, buns, breads) and branded goods (Worcester sauce, Colman's mustard). As entry follows entry, a portrait of Britain's gustatory identity paints itself in your brain. At last, the reader feels, some real conception of Britishness is within our grasp. Each of the 400 entries gives a brief historical account and justification for its presence, a short technical description and one or more addresses where the echt product can be found. It is no substitute for the Food Lovers' Guide, it works to a different remit. There is no escaping this is an important book. 

There are more than 50 black and white photographs by the Devon photographer James Ravilious. 

The book is divided into sections on 

• Aromatics and Condiments
• Beverages and Spirits
• Baked Goods
• Meat Products
• Flours
• Fruit and Vegetables
• Oils and Fats
• Confectionery
• Dairy Products
• Products from Fishing
• Meats and poultry

SIX YEARS ago, Brussels paid for the compilation of a massive Domesday book of the foodstuffs of European Union countries. The idea was to identify - in Euro parlance - the PDOs (Protected Designations of Origin) and PGIs (Protected Geographic Indications) of each nation's native dishes.

The Brussels Domesday books were published in French as Euroterroirs and then translated and published by all the member states - except Britain. We chose to ignore it. Neither the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food nor its agency, Food From Britain, funded its publication.

But should we care? Surely we have moved on. Our children have international and not regional tastes. They are familiar with pizza and pasta, not spotted click and brawn; are more at home with Tandoori chicken and stir-fry than with pease pudding and faggots.

That's exactly why we need such a book, according to Tom Jaine, a former restaurateur, and partner with Joyce Molyneux in the Carved Angel, Dartmouth. He used to publish an impassioned newsletter about regional foods which inspired the Consumers' Association to recruit him to edit the Good Food Guide. Now he has retreated to deepest Devon, where he runs a small publishing house producing seriously non-commercial books. His latest is a dictionary of food and drink that unlocks the national psyche.

Drawing on the raw material of the Brussels report, which was prepared by Laura Mason and (in Scotland) Catherine Brown, Traditional Foods of Britain is a stunning record of our gastronomic patrimony.

"Today it's not fashionable to look at our traditions," says Jaine. "People argue that we have always had a magpie mentality, stealing what we want from around the world. But we should be squirrelling away memories of our food heritage to be explored when fusion food, Afghan spices and Polynesian cooking methods excite us no more. We'll be grateful to the intrepid souls who can still bake a real custard tart."

Traditional Foods of Britain is a hymn of praise to the good things that are British - some plain daft, many glorious and great. Forty of the best of our British cheeses, for instance, such as Beenleigh Blue, Appleby's Cheshire, Bonchester, Caerphilly and Cornish Yarg.

It is a proud roll-call of UK animal breeds: sheep such as Soay and Shetland, Southdown and Welsh Mountain, Manx Loghtan and North Ronaldsay, Cheviot and Hardwick. Great beef herds, such as Aberdeen Angus and Galloway, Hereford, Lincoln Red and Welsh Black. Fine porkers such as Gloucester Old Spot and Tamworth.

Pork products too, from the wonderful to the weird: Bradenham and York hams and Ayrshire bacon, black pudding, tripe, brawn, Bath chaps (pig's cheeks) and chitterlings (pig's intestines).

This is a book with a cast of hundreds, the bit players every bit as interesting as the stars. The character actors are our traditional cooked foods: fruit breads, spiced buns, muffins, pikelets, bannocks, oatcakes, griddle breads; biscuits such as fairings, knobs, Bath Olivers; doughnuts, brandy snaps, parking, gingerbreads, dumplings; tea-cakes such as Fat Rascals and maids of honour; cider cake, simnel cake, custard tart, Yorkshire curd tart, Eccles cake, shortbread, petticoat tails ...

As I read these entries, memories come flooding back. The sweetshop with its butterscotch, humbugs, Edinburgh rock, Pontefract cakes, tablet and toffee apples. And the drinks of childhood: Tizer and Vimto, dandelion and burdock.

I wonder if perhaps we haven't been too hasty and exchanged the family silver for a supermarket shilling. But, no, I wouldn't want to put back the clock. All the same, it is good to be aware of the comfortable rock on which our modern freewheeling gastronomic culture has been built Every school library in the country should get a copy. Perhaps it should be a set text?

In 1978 I wrote and presented a TV series called A Taste of Britain, celebrating the vanishing regional foods of these offshore islands. Even then, 21 years ago, we found that a lot of good things were on the verge of disappearing and many more had become a part of folk memory. Land on which the Mitcham mint industry flourished had been covered with suburban bungalows; cowslip wine is no longer made commercially and we never succeeded in finding the elusive Blue Vinney of Dorset.

Similar problems faced Laura Mason and Catherine Brown when they began to make an inventory of the traditional foods of Britain for the European Commission. The food listed had to satisfy four criteria. It should be linked to a region and ideally the location should be included in the name of the product - Devon clotted cream, Yarmouth bloater, Blackpool rock. The food or drink should have a tradition going back at least three generations and It should require a special skill in its production. Finally, it should still be made and marketed. Products only served in restaurants or made for domestic consumption were excluded.

Surprisingly, we have no central body which nourishes and supports traditional foods. Buildings are listed but not foods. The authors had a hard time researching their book. "It might be expected an account of British food would meet co-operation", the authors write, "information would be plentiful (but) these isn't a government department, an academic institution or a professional group which could be relied upon to produce anything more than fragments of information".

Two years in the writing, Traditional Foods of Britain is a major contribution to the history of our culinary culture. It makes no judgement on taste or flavour but it does describe in some detail each of the 400 or so products which you'll find in the regional list of entries. Thus, if you turn to even the most esoteric food, its story is told in abundant detail. I spent a happy weekend looking up favourite and familiar foods and stumbling on rarities I'd never even heard of. Black Bullets turned out to be high-boiled, spherical sweets made these days only in Sheffieid and Whitley Bay from oil of peppermint, sugar and glucose. The name derives from the French word boule; these golden, translucent Bullets have been around since the early 19th century. Cumnock Tart is a rarity these days; this sweet fruit tart filled with rhubarb and apple is made by Bradford's bakery In Glasgow who produce a mere 800 tarts a week.

Many more products are kept alive by the enthusiasm of individual producers. Beremeal and Peasemeal is available only from one mill in Golspie, Sutherland. Only one butcher is making tongues cured in the Suffolk way. Only one producer makes mould-ripened Sharpham cheese and the sole maker of Bonchester cheese has gone out of business. The potted char of Windermere and the potted lampreys of Worcester are but a memory and many other traditional products are poised on the edge of eclipse.

But this book is not a lament for what is lost; it is a celebration of what survives and a roll call of British taste. Where else would you find Tizer, Vimto and Irnbru lying happily alongside jellied tripe, hot cross buns, bread pudding and red herring? Despite the efforts of the supermarkets to persuade us that imported product is somehow superior to homegrown, most of us still prefer to buy British. At the end of the century this is our Domesday book of regional favourites, the most comprehensive list yet of all the things we might be in danger of losing if they are not properly cherished.

Although this inventory has been available in French for the last two years it has been left to a small publisher in Devon to make it available in this country. Tom Jaine is to be congratulated on his enterprise in doing for the government what they obviously weren't going to do for themselves.

The more I hear or read about Britain's gastronomic renaissance, the more gloomy I become. When I hear the laughable claim that London is the restaurant capital of the world, I think wistfully of the plateaux de fruits de mer, choucroute garnie or plates cotes gros sel that I could be chomping through on any street corner in Paris. Or I think of Rome and that wonderful sense of calm and order that pervades every good Italian restaurant, no matter what its price range or gastronomic status. When it is as easy to eat well in London, and when we have a repertoire of cooking that we could reasonably call our own, then we might begin to stake a claim to a renaissance.

If there are grounds for hope, they reside not in London but in a small publishing house in Devon. Traditional Foods of Britain (Prospect Books, 01803 712269; £19.50) is the product of research undertaken for the Euroterroirs project, funded entirely by the European Union. It is a superb inventory of those foods, fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, cheeses, breads, confectionery and beverages that can claim a regional identity. Those of us who have been looking into better quality pork production, for example, can read about the respective merits of Tamworth, Middle White and Gloucester Old Spot, with a description of their characteristics, history and techniques of production. Tom Jaine, the publisher, wryly remarks, 'It may be asked why this book is produced by a small publisher in Devon, not by either of the official British sponsors of the Euroterroirs project - the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, or Food from Britain.'

The book is not just a directory; it also gives encouragement to a growing legion of small producers who are reaming that their survival depends on producing something special. In this respect, organic growers have taken a clear lead, in as much as they have a support network and a readily identifiable cause and promotional body in the Soil Association. I am not a fully paid-up member of the organic movement: there is a cloud of worthiness which hangs over the phrase 'organic vegetables', suggestive of a basket of swedes, marrows, overgrown carrots and multi-hued tomatoes that does not quite set the pulse racing. But times have changed. Organic, and other, growers have branched out into a huge variety of salads, herbs and vegetables including obscure beets, chards and squashes. Potato growers have become bored with standard commercial varieties and are going for such exotics as Linzer and Purple Congo. Peas are becoming fun, too: some growers are picking the young leaves and shoots for salads, and those peas that do reach fruition are likely to be an aspara gus or a sugar snap variety.

Gaining access to this bounty is becoming easier. The big supermarkets are begin ning to stock organically grown vegetables, and then there is mail order. One producer I know delivers his organic boxes in person in the evenings. Traditional Foods of Britain does not list such suppliers, unfortunately, but there are other sources. Lynda Brown's The Shoppers' Guide to Organic Food (Fourth Estate, £Z99) is invaluable, as is Henrietta Green's Food Lovers' Guide to Britain (BBC Books, £12.99), though the latter needs an update and, I am told, a new publisher. These things take time: neither Paris nor Rome was built in a day.