Try a repast from the past with the grey squirrel casserole, or even a fish custard

Rook pie and Bath chaps, grey squirrel casserole and fish custard might not be familiar options in most homes or on the menu at fashionable restaurants.

But a once distinctly "unfoodie" nation, now celebrated for its culinary diversity, its obsession with television chefs and its embrace of foods ranging from chicken tikka masala to seared tuna, should not forget the past. So, campaigners for real food say, bring back rook pie ("take four dead rooks and skin ...") and Bath chaps (first, pickle your pigs' cheeks in brine for two or three weeks ... ) to celebrate Britain's culinary heritage.

The recipes have been collected in a competition by the Guild of Fine Food Retailers, which represents specialist food producers and the Countryside Alliance, as part of the latter's campaign to promote the virtues of our farm produce.

But they also remind people there was time before chicken tikka masala, when Britain did have a rich and diverse national cuisine based on the heaving tables of the Victorians and Edwardians, before it was largely eradicated by Thirties depression and post-war rationing.

And parts of that cuisine live on, in farmers' markets, specialist and farm shops and in some rural and working-class communities. The winner of the competition, Leanne Eadle, makes the Bath chaps at her family's free-range pig and chicken farm near Oxford, selling them at farmers' markets in Oxfordshire, Reading and London.

Bath chaps are also regularly on the menu at the St John restaurant in central London, where Fergus Henderson, an enthusiast for such dishes, serves them pan-fried as main course or cold and sliced as a starter.

Other dishes in the top 10 chosen by the Guild include the Henderson-style dish of faggots, still widely eaten, particularly in the Midlands and the North, and the fish custard, flaked fish in a white sauce thickened with eggs.

Roman Pie, a recipe in an Edwardian cook-book, is more obscure and, since it involves layering boiled rabbit with macaroni in pastry case, must represent a pioneering example of what would become our obsession with pasta.

Elizabeth Burt, the spokeswoman for the guild, said: "This teaches us how we used to eat more different bits of animals than we do now and how these were once part of family life. Mrs Eadle's Bath chaps typify the ideal. We hope this will help rekindle interest in individually produced, artisan and traditional foods, which is needed in a society dominated by fast foods and the mass-produced supermarket culture.''

Even before the Victorians, Britons had an adventurous cuisine. The 17th-century recipe for A Grand Sallett, discovered by the guild, involved figs, currents, capers, almonds, olives, oregano, beetroot and lemons. Just the dish for some enterprising modern chef to claim as their own creation and serve with the seared tuna.