I am a basic cook of the 'oh well, at least we won't starve' variety, but I adore old cook books, the more retro the better. It was one of the less distressing/happier moments of cleaning out my mother's kitchen - sorting through the old cookbooks and craft magazines and deciding what to keep. I have a soft spot for all those old women's groups fundraising recipe books from the sixties and seventies.
I got given 'The Hopeless Cook's Cook Book' - kept it because Sis says some of the 'real' recipes in it (as apart from the "take one phone book, find the takeaway's number" variety) taste good enough for her to slum it with :)
I have a small but treasured set of old American fundraising ones sent to me by entropy_house...I'd save them if a bushfire was coming.
I have my grandmother's and my auntie's cookbooks. And exercise books where they cut out recipes and glued them in. Lots from the Women's Weekly. Still use them all the time.
"like We'll Eat Again, a dip into British WWII fare"
As you probably know, that's a play on words on the Vera Lynn song "We'll Meet Again". I've read that another play on words, popular at the time, was "whalemeat again!". Apparently the desperate food shortages during WW2 had led to whalemeat making its appearance in British kitchens for the first time.
"the invalid cookery sections of which are invariably terrifying"
Well they admit that they're invalid, so what did you expect? Or am I putting the stress on the wrong syllable? :)
Yep, the book has a couple of pages on whale meat. Sounds... fairly awful, actually :(
The author, Marguerite Patten, does point out that the ration-driven diet was utterly dull, but actually more healthy than the standard diet before or after the war...
I have the British edition of Cookery in Colour. My mother-in-law had a copy and found it so useful she gave Sis-in-law and me copies when we got married. We both still use recipes from it.
It's considered a sin to throw away a cook book in my family, so I have shelves full, including ancient pre-WWII books that belonged to various grannies and aunts. I recently needed to go through a couple of the oldest while doing some research for a mate, and some of the things they put in their mouths back then made me wonder how anyone survived supper! One bit of advice was to wash your meat and cut off and discard any putrefied parts before cooking...
I love your illustrations - there's something about the photography and styling that makes my toes curl with delight *g*
:) I was reading a domestic history of Britain in WWII and one of the women in it mentions how she once found a dead mouse that had gotten into her oh so precious rationed butter - she simply scooped it out, washed the rest of the hard pat down and kept using it...
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I have a small but treasured set of old American fundraising ones sent to me by entropy_house...I'd save them if a bushfire was coming.
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As you probably know, that's a play on words on the Vera Lynn song "We'll Meet Again". I've read that another play on words, popular at the time, was "whalemeat again!". Apparently the desperate food shortages during WW2 had led to whalemeat making its appearance in British kitchens for the first time.
"the invalid cookery sections of which are invariably terrifying"
Well they admit that they're invalid, so what did you expect? Or am I putting the stress on the wrong syllable? :)
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The author, Marguerite Patten, does point out that the ration-driven diet was utterly dull, but actually more healthy than the standard diet before or after the war...
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It's considered a sin to throw away a cook book in my family, so I have shelves full, including ancient pre-WWII books that belonged to various grannies and aunts. I recently needed to go through a couple of the oldest while doing some research for a mate, and some of the things they put in their mouths back then made me wonder how anyone survived supper! One bit of advice was to wash your meat and cut off and discard any putrefied parts before cooking...
I love your illustrations - there's something about the photography and styling that makes my toes curl with delight *g*
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Ewwww! On the other hand, as long as the mouse died of old age and not some horrible disease... *g*
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