The Bloomsbury Cookbook helps to answer this admittedly trivial question. According to Jans Ondaatje Rolls, ‘Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf were the great Bloomsbury jam makers.’ This statement is followed by a recipe for raspberry jam from May Byron’s Jam Book (1923). I own and often use a copy of this marvellous book, but did the Woolfs? Does it matter? And does it matter what Woolf and her circle cooked and ate?

Bee Wilson, reviewing a book on John Stuart Mill in 2009, wrote that ‘a life history in which the stomach is wholly absent does not seem quite human’, but I wonder just how human we want Virginia and Leonard, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, and others of the Bloomsbury Group to be? Ondaatje Rolls, in a stretch too far, believes that the group were the ‘foodies’ of their day, ‘despite a profound ignorance of all aspects of food preparation’. It serves her purpose to make this statement (she includes over 170 Bloomsbury recipes), but I don’t think it is true. The Bloomsbury decades were not, in general, decades of conspicuous self-indulgence (they included two world wars), and this was the last period in which servants played a large role in households where they could be afforded. Life lived, whether it be intellectual and creative or more mundane, was domestic and centred around a table for most of society. To refer to the group as ‘foodies’ is to misuse a term relevant only to the 1980s onwards.

So why make so much of the culinary history of this group? After all, except for the recipes and presence of Maynard Keynes’s wife,Lydia Lopokova (a petite and delightful interloper resented by the Bloomsbury élite), just about all the food is as English as the climate. One obvious answer is that Ondaatje Rolls (daughter of the very rich Christopher Ondaatje, brother of the novelist Michael) has written a book whose entire royalties will go to The Charleston Trust (google her name and you will find multitudinous links to The Bloomsbury Cookbook, though not to her connection to money).

A cookbook is a useful thing. The only use to which The Bloomsbury Cookbook as culinary text might be put is that archaic entertainment, the themed dinner party. Who will play Virginia and walk into water rather than do the dishes? ‘She used every dish in the place and left all the washing up,’ according to Nellie Boxall. Although there are enough recipes to give the title credibility, the book is so much more, even though that more is not exactly meaty. You might see it as a titillating literary entertainment; nevertheless it is extremely well organised, offers a clear overview of Bloomsbury, and does have considerable charm.

Virginia Woolf and her niece, Angelica Bell, 1932 (Peter Lofts Photography / National Portrait Gallery, London)

The book is a marvellous production, unstinting in its inclusion of reproductions of paintings by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry, and others (lots of portraits and lots of apples and pears), as well as archival photographs. The odd witty quotation from key members of the group is a bonus. My favourite is Lytton Strachey’s summation of the sexual tensions in his household (himself, Carrington, and Ralph Partridge): ‘every-thing at sixes and at sevens – ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanizers.’

Of course, there are precedents for the fleshing out of famous literary lives. Dining with Proust (1991) is a large, attractive book and has recipes by Alain Senderens to give it heft. Alice B. Toklas wrote a real cookbook (1954), mentioning a bass she decorated to amuse Picasso and Gertrude Stein. In 1979, Jane Grigson, England’s next-best cookery writer after Elizabeth David, wrote Food with the Famous. It was, she wrote, an ‘excuse to re-read favourite novels, look again at favourite painters, visit places associated with them, spend hours in collections of letters and journals, study early cookery books … and gave me a chance of relating cookery to life beyond the kitchen. Which is what, in the end, I think cookery should do.’

Ondaatje Rolls’s methodology mirrors Grigson’s excuse almost exactly. Does The Bloomsbury Cookbook succeed in ‘relating cookery to life beyond the kitchen’? Yes and no. If it does, it isn’t because of the recipes but via anecdotes, excerpts from letters, diaries, and quotations, and especially from photographs and drawings. What it doesn’t do (and what would be impossible anyway) is make any connection between domestic life, including cookery, and the remarkable literary, imaginative, and artistic output that key members of the Bloomsbury group managed to produce in between making bread and jam. It will sell like hot cakes at Charleston. Despite querulous reservations, I rather like it.