My Favourite Cookbook

As I child I was extremely close to my mother (as indeed I still am today!) and one of my most treasured memories of my childhood is the time we spent baking together. We baked all sorts of things, mostly simple things like bread and sponge cake, but whatever we made I remember again and again opening up the same old cookbook to look up the recipes: Good Housekeeping's Look and Cook (1953) compiled by The Good Housekeeping Institute.

 This big old cookbook has been part of the fixtures and fittings of our kitchen for as long as I can remember, indeed the front cover is inscribed with my grandmother's name: M. Robey (which is rather conveniently also my mother's as well as my name!). It's a vast book full of a huge array of classic British, kitsch cuisine, including Bramble Jelly, Jam Roly-Poly, Coddled Eggs, Haggis, Steamed Fish Mould, Seafood Cocktail and, my mother's personal favourite, Gooseberry Fool. 

      Despite the variety of rich and sometimes rather bizarre dishes, there was only one section that I was ever interested in: 'The Children's Cookbook', which is positioned, rather strangely, right in the middle of the book, between 'Store Cupboard Meals' and 'More Homemade Sweets'. 

Even when I had no intention of cooking anything, I would drag a stool across the kitchen so I could climb up on a stool to get the heavy cookbook down from the high kitchen shelf. I'd then proceed to spend hours going over the recipes in the children's section.  Some of my favourite pages to read were the sections at the beginning which explained vital things such as how to use the book, how to get ready to cook, how to use a knife and how to turn on an oven:

You will have to excuse me for including so many pictures but there is just so much that I love about this book that I want to share with you and sometimes, in this case at least, pictures say it better than words.
      I knew all of these basics already and so I didn't keep going back to these sections to learn.  I'm not entirely sure why I enjoyed reading these pages so much, all I know is that I was drawn back to them again and again.  Perhaps I was drawn to the nostalgia of an era where 'Mother' was always in the kitchen and young girls were taught how to be the good housewives of the future. A time of gender inequality where women were expected to have dinner on the table ready for their husbands to return from work, and yet a time that has, despite this, always appealed to me in some way. For those children who wanted "to give Mother a hand in the kitchen" (350) and who were coming to cooking as a complete first timer, the book lays out exactly what you should do in precise detail, leaving virtually no room for error: "The simplest method of collecting the ingredients is to weigh out the required amount on to pieces of greaseproof paper; having finished with an ingredient, put the packet or jar away - this will keep your table tidy, and at the same time save a lot of clearing up at the end." (367). 

      Various recipes are given, from very simple things like boiled potatoes, fried eggs and scones, to slightly more complicated dishes such as roast beef and potatoes and a fully iced birthday cake.

My favourites to read were always the most basic of recipes such toast, which is somehow dragged out through four stages, and a tea tray, which tells you to cut slices of various things you have learnt to make in other recipes and to place them neatly on a tray before using "both your hands to carry the tray, and make sure there is somewhere by Mother's bed to put it down" (463).

      As I mentioned earlier, this was always the book that we would use to remind ourselves of the quantities for basic recipes like Victoria Sponge cake and Yorkshire Puddings.

It's easy to flick through and find those recipes when I look them up today as they are the pages that are creased and covered in little splatters of batter and grease; it's like looking back through history at all the treats have been made and enjoyed over the years. And I still do use those recipes even today. Those things that I used to make with my mother when I was a child just wouldn't be the same if I used a different recipe.
　

 

 

The Good Housekeeping Institute.  Good Housekeeping's Look and Cook.  London: Everybody's Publications Ltd, 1962.