C Anne Wilson, who has died aged 95, was one of the first people in Britain to lay claim to the description of professional food historian, after her book Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to Recent Times was published in 1973. She spent most of her working life at the University of Leeds where, as a librarian at the Brotherton Library, she had the care of several categories of specialist literature. Among these were two matchless collections of early printed recipe books (singled out by the Arts Council in 2005 as having international significance), and having spent much time during the 1960s cataloguing one of these she boldly took the next step and wrote her pathfinding book.
Soon, thanks to her example, food historians would become an academic commonplace. The book might have projected her into another sphere altogether, when she was interviewed by the teenage magazine Honey a few months after publication. Her head, however, was not turned.
