A Bibliophile in the Kitchen

One of the blessings of living in a much extended house is that  little nooks get created  and one of these in the kitchen is the right size for a book case. When eventually a bookcase was going spare and I can't imagine how that happened, I decided to collect up all the books we had on food or recipes, naturally doing a cull and consigning some to Oxfam, and then setting all the remainder along with folders of clippings from magazines and appliance leaflets on the shelves - organised and all in one place.

Like many collectors of cookery books, I found that for many of the books I had, there would be only one or two recipes that I had tried and used again and would want to keep.There were some I had never made anything from and felt now it was unlikely I ever would and there were others that may have had a place in our culinary lives at one time but no longer did. But it was looking through all of these that I realised how much recipe books encapsulate domestic history even over the few decades that I have been collecting them.When you look beyond the element of instructions for how to make stuff, you find all kinds of indications of the era in which they were written; everything from the amount and style of illustration - or lack of it - the layout of the text, the selection of dishes and ingredients and utensils, and finally, on reflection what is absent that would be taken for granted in a contemporary book.

Looking along the cookery book shelves in any bookshop high street or online,  most of the recent releases are either related to a television series, a celebrity cook/chef/restaurant, a new diet, a kitchen gadget or else is limited to a particular course or fad. (Who, apart from a professional confectioner,  could possibly need 50 recipes for macaroons let alone 500 for cupcakes?) My collection began in South Australia with a book that had all the weight and almost the scope of an encyclopedia. It took me from a flat-sharing singleton to a young wife, supporting me with recipes for casseroles and desserts to Christmas cake and a wonderful flour-less Chocolate Almond Torte that certainly helped establish my culinary credibility both with my  younger cousins in-law and in my own confidence.

I thought it would be interesting to step back a generation and get Mum's experiences with cookbooks.  She reminded me that she had a recipe drawer and besides an exercise book with recipes she had written down and envelopes of newspaper and magazine clippings ( just like me!) she had the classics of her time and location; the Green and Gold Cook book - now 90 years old, and the Barossa Cookery Book (oh, I remember that cover picture!) first published in 1917 and still available! Both of these books had obviously been around for sometime when Mum set up home but may be fads and fashions didn't fly past so quickly then. Will Nigelissima still be available (apart from in charity shops) even in in five years' time, I wonder? Follow the link and check out the chapters in the Green and gold book - Invalid Cookery and Laundry tips and you will see what I mean about encapsulating domestic history. It is interesting to note that both of these books were compiled as fund raisers and the recipes submitted by home cooks. Both were hugely popular and widely referred to. Mum and I also talked about the kinds of recipes she had collected and she said that she was always interested in new recipes for cakes, biscuits and desserts. Home baking featured much more in her culinary life - we rarely had store bought cake,  there were always home-made biscuits (not "cookies") in the tin.  There were more occasions out of the home where it was required to produce something home-made - cake stalls and plates of afternoon tea or supper. At a time when marriage marked the point when most young women left their family home, they learned the basics of putting meat and two veg on the table from their mothers rather than from books. We expect a wider range of offerings for our main meals I think. I was struck by Mum's remark that you wouldn't have had a whole book devoted to Salads. Salads were simply something on the side and the scope for ingredients much more limited.

As for style, isn't it enchanting when the text reads like someone standing next to you telling you what to do? Something like "Boil three pounds of potatoes, bruise and work them with two ounces of butter and as much milk as will make them pass through a colander." I have to say though that in practical terms the current style of setting out a list of ingredients followed by the numbered steps is much easier to work from. When I am writing down a recipe of my own in my notebook I list the ingredients down the left side of the page in the order in which they are used and simply bracket any together like 'sugar' and 'butter' in many cakes and put the instruction for then on the right -'cream'. This keeps writing  to a minimum but is not so easy to replicate digitally.

So should flames or flood waters come lapping and I had the luxury of saving just one handful what would they be? It would have to be my three red books; the little binder of family recipes my mother compiled for me when I got married, my own notebook in which I have pasted tried and tested recipes clipped from magazines and written down some of my own successes and recipes from borrowed books and finally the cookbook which I have used the most, the NMAA Cooks.

This is also a book compiled of recipes from home cooks as a fund raiser. Originally published in the mid-70s the range of recipes reflects a population of established Australians and  post-war European migrants with little of the Asian influence that was just beginning. It comprehensively covered a range of things the editors thought young families would find useful. No invalid cookery this time but a brilliant recipe for playdough and details for how Dad could produce the Sunday roast.The spiral bound format that means open pages stay flat is so practical - if only I had established the habit of slipping the open book inside a plastic bag while cooking, right from the start.

What coincidence brought a blog post entitled the Just One Cookbook Project into my Reader on the morning I wanted to complete this post? Oh dear! The binder and my notebook wouldn't really count, would they? I mean they are really just a binder and an exercise book that have recipes in them, aren't they? Besides cutting back so drastically might just be the excuse to start over with a new collection. I am a self-confessed bibliophile after all.