Jane Austen grew up in a household where the provision of food was not a simple matter of shopping or placing orders but of forward planning, hard work and daily contrivance. Almost all the foodstuffs consumed in Steventon Rectory were home-produced, the exceptions being luxury imported goods like tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, spices, wine, dried fruit and citrus fruit. These items were valued and guarded accordingly: ‘I carry about the keys of the wine and closet’, Jane Austen wrote on one occasion (L, 27 October 1798) and there are several references in her letters to keeping careful watch on their stocks of sugar and tea.

The glebe lands attached to the benefice of Steventon were only about three acres, but Mr Austen also rented the neighbouring 200-acre Cheesedown Farm from his patron Thomas Knight. For nearly forty years, from the Austens’ marriage until their retirement to Bath, the farm kept the rectory supplied with meat and cereals. Though Mr Austen had a bailiff to supervise the labourers in the field, he took an active part in managing the farm: Jane Austen writes very precisely of ‘my father's mutton’ (L, 1 December 1798). The dairy and the poultry-yard were her mother's province: even by the turn of the century, with a reduced household to feed, Mrs Austen had three cows in addition to ducks, chicken, guinea-fowl and turkeys (L, 11 June 1799). Potatoes, vegetables, herbs and fruit, including grapes, were grown in the garden. Beer, wines and mead – the latter from the honey given by their own bees – were made on a large scale: when the family came to leave Steventon their effects included ‘13 iron-bound casks’. Fish and game were brought home on occasion by the sporting sons, and various gifts of food took place among the wider ramifications of the family and their friends: venison from Godmersham Park, fish from Southampton and apples from Kintbury are among the many commodities mentioned in the letters. Those with less ready access to foodstuffs had to be catered for: Mrs Austen cured pork for her sailor sons to take on voyages, while brother Henry in London was the recipient of gifts ranging from a pot of raspberry jam to nine gallons of mead made by his sisters.