Or more accurately, a box of recipes.
Boud's comment on the last post reminded me that, as well as my shelves of cookbooks, I have a box folder full of recipes I've torn out of magazines, been given, or collected from somewhere. Going through them I remembered why: there are some yummy looking recipes there. If only I thought to look at them and plan when I do my shopping ...
My mum and I lived with my grandparents so it was my gran who did all the cooking. She didn't use recipes but she made lovely food. One year, however, my mum did make Carrot Whiskey.
You'll see at the end it says 'Best if kept for a year'. I'm not sure how much better it was but I do remember my Uncle Bun (gran's brother) being the only person who would drink it.
The book on the right is also a McDougalls Cookery Book. I said my gran didn't use recipes but she did use this, and that's her copy. The neat one must have belonged to my great-auntie Gay, who left everything to me. It's actually the previous edition (23) as opposed to the my gran's which was edition 24.
Auntie Gay was a brilliant cake decorator. She made me some fabulous birthday cakes when I was growing up including a fairy-tale cottage. I assume these books were hers. I used to go to her house for tea sometimes and she'd let me help bake. That's my carefully-written recipe for rich tea biscuits. Note: Medhod.
8 comments:
I noticed that my daughter was using a recipe from her phone, and I was thinking how times have changed. I remember seeing my mother holding a limp piece of paper written on by hand, covered in chocolate, that contained her favourite chocolate cake recipe. I wonder what happened to that.
Those are the best recipes, Joe.
Recipes and recipe books like that connect us to our family's past in a very visceral way, don't they!
Wonderful memories of times gone by. There are so many cookery programs on TV these days. I wonder how many viewers actually cook as per the recipes.
God bless.
I cherish the recipes written out by my mom.
Do you have a Rx for Carrot and Oyster Pie?
Jenny and I were saying yesterday that as far as we could remember our mothers only had one very battered cookery book, tucked away in a drawer and seldom used because they knew all their habitual recipes by heart. This fad for a whole stack of celebrity cookery books is a very recent thing.
I also love old recipes. I have my g-grandmother's dumpling recipe. She never used measuring cups or spoons; handful this, pinch of that. My aunt measured one day as she made them. Uhmmm - carrot whisky - sounds kind of terrible.
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