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‪This paper examines how food in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain was used by middle-class reformers to aid in the establishment of a cultural hegemony. Although scarcity and malnutrition persisted in Britain during that period, the laboring poor and working classes had greater choice and discretion in their diets. One-time luxuries such as tea and sugar abounded. This paper explores how middling moralists utilized print culture to promote foodways that adhered to so-called acceptable, largely idealized social practices. These practices celebrated nuclear families, connected foodways to national identities, and placed responsibility for conformity in the hands of women, particularly mothers.Drawing primarily on a range of popular printed sources, and especially cookery books, the paper explores how a web of largely middling men and women redefined social norms through the prescription of foodways. For example, the universalism and communalism of food preparation and consumption made it the ideal vehicle to redefine national myths and erase less palatable pasts. The slave-sugar boycotts that began in Britain in the 1790s and lasted for almost half a century offer a prime example in that respect. Although historically celebrated as an advance in the powers of the consumer and a watershed moment for the entry of women into imperial politics, the boycott literature was also highly prescriptive of what constituted ‘good’ female behavior. In this sense, the boycotts masked a larger conformist agenda for domestic life. Ultimately, this paper seeks to further challenge notions that food choice and abundance associated with nineteenth-century Britain were socially liberating.‪