The food historian Laura Mason, who has died aged 63 from cancer, performed a great service to British food studies by researching and composing an inventory of the traditional foods of Britain. This work, carried out in the 1990s, was valuable in highlighting the existence, quality and depth of food culture in the UK at a time when, living in a era of plenty (for many if not for all), Britons were becoming increasingly preoccupied with matters of the table.

This preoccupation, occasionally obsession, has brought more good restaurants, better supplies of raw materials and many, many recipe books. It has also stimulated greater awareness of food’s significant role in every aspect of life, from society and the economy to the health of the planet itself. One might think this a truism, but a vast academic infrastructure has appeared to instruct us that it is not. An early element of this scholarly reappraisal was an appreciation of food history, an interest driven in Britain by the circle around Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Companion to Food, who was Laura’s mentor.

Her book, co-authored with Catherine Brown, Traditional Foods of Britain, which appeared in 1997, details 400 foodstuffs that might be defined as longstanding (in commercial exploitation for more than three generations), regional (with definite links to a “terroir”, however that might be identified), and distinct. Laura masterminded England and Wales, while Brown investigated Scotland.

The research and composition had been undertaken subsequent to Laura’s appointment by a hybrid committee called Euroterroirs in 1992, at the instigation of Davidson and the food writer Henrietta Green. The intention of the committee, operating through and funded by the European Union, was to list all such foods in the 12 nations then forming the EU with a view to extending the regime of Protected Designation of Origin and Protected Geographical Indication.

This earnest endeavour was met with some derision in Britain. Laura talked of “hostility, official and personal, to the very idea of the investigation”. When the moment came to publish its results, the official sponsors, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now Defra) and the marketing organisation Foods from Britain, washed their hands of it. In the end, I published it, a one-man enterprise in Devon.

Larger publishers turned down Laura’s proposals for books based on her findings and it was not until 2007 that HarperCollins finally realised the subject was worth pursuing, reissuing the original as The Taste of Britain.

Laura was the youngest of three daughters of Kate (nee Harbutt) and Tom Mason, a farming couple on the moors above Ilkley in Yorkshire. Her mother, a fine cook and household manager, had studied agricultural botany at Leeds University and had standing as a local historian. Laura attended Ilkley grammar school, then took a foundation course at the Bradford College of Art before moving to York to work with the York Archaeological Trust.

Her mother’s instruction allowed her to combine this with a variety of jobs as cook or chef in and around the city, including several summers as cook on narrowboats cruising canals. After some years, she took herself off to Leeds Polytechnic to read for a degree in home economics, later improved by a further degree in food technology.

While she was fitted for a career in food processing of some sort, her real interests lay in the history of food and she fell in with the group behind the Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions, including the librarian C Anne Wilson and the museum curator Peter Brears. This was an annual conference which drew together strands of research on specifically British foods. It met first in 1986 and gave Laura the impetus she needed to declare herself a freelance food historian.

It was fortunate that at Leeds she met Davidson, the co-founder of the original Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, who was in need of a research assistant for his large project, the Oxford Companion to Food. During the next few years she wrote or researched scores of articles for that volume.

While travelling through England and Wales compiling entries for Traditional Foods on everything from Bedfordshire clangers to Bath cheese and Goosnargh cake, she did not ignore her own special interest in the history of sugar-boiling and sweets. This gave rise to her books Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets (1998) and Sweets and Candy: A Global History (2018).

Her travels also yielded an unmatched acquaintance with English country cooking, which she explained and illustrated in a series of books for the National Trust, most notably Farmhouse Cookery (2005, reissued as The National Trust Farmhouse Cookbook in 2009).

She never moved from Yorkshire and continued her close association with the Leeds Symposium, editing Food and the Rites of Passage, their volume for 1999, and chairing the organising committee until recently.

But her expertise was in demand in wider fields, not least in the creation of Honeydukes sweetshop in the 2004 film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as taste-tester for Nestlé-Rowntree, and as adviser on sourcing foods for the Conran Bluebird store in west London.

Laura’s first husband, Ian Tomlin, died in 1982. She married Derek Johnson in 2012. He survives her, as do her sisters, Agnes and Ruth.

• Laura Harbutt Mason, food historian, born 7 August 1957; died 2 February 2021