Teal blood and wine splatters … these are a few of my favourite stains

Subject 1: heavily bloodstained, with a thumbprint clearly visible. Subject 2: spine broken in several places. Subject 3: dismembered, but continuing to show signs of life. These are not the victims of some deranged serial killer, but the battered denizens of my kitchen bookshelf.

Clarissa Dickson Wright and Johnny Scott’s Game Cookbook bears the bloodstains of a brace of teal I thoughtlessly set down on the recipe for teal with orange. The spine of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cookery is broken beyond repair. As for Edouard de Pomaine’s Cooking with Pomaine, my copy lies in several pieces, having fallen apart at my two favourite comfort recipes: boeuf bourguignon and gratin dauphinoise.

There are people who treat their cookery books with care, cherishing them like incunabula. These are the people who buy wipe-clean acrylic cookbook stands from Lakeland. Then there are people like me, who wedge their cookbooks open with weights from the scales inherited from their grandmother, and turn with sticky fingers pages so powdered with flour and bespattered with wine and olive oil that the memories of past meals rise from them like ghosts.

Meanwhile a younger generation of cooks is equally baffled by the pristine acrylic bookstand and the archaic weights. Having learned their cookery skills online, they will never find a favourite recipe garnished with a smear of ancient sauce. Their playlists of virtual recipes remain forever unsullied by frequent use or the passing of the years.

And a good thing too, the hygiene-conscious will say. Ah, but what narratives, what memories, what family traditions can be passed from generation to generation via a screen? It is a question that Mr Hill of Rosliston, Derbyshire, recently raised in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. “My wife’s cookbooks... bear the stains of many memorable family gatherings,” he wrote. “Has anyone got a tablet with genuine food memories?”

Those of us who rely on physical cookbooks have a twofold relationship with them. There is the bond of trust between writer and cook that grows with every successful ragu or chocolate mousse. And, since cooking is an act of love, there are the layers of memory that accumulate around recipes, often manifest in a palimpsest of assorted stains.

My own favourite Great Stains include the recipe for Christmas pudding from the Tricity cookbook that came free with my mother’s electric oven in the Sixties: suet, grated apple, brown sugar, spices and making a wish while trying to stir a threepenny bit into the claggy mixture with both hands on the wooden spoon. Or Mrs Beeton’s Snow Eggs, the first pudding I learned to make, and an ambitious choice for a child: my inherited copy of Mrs B’s Household Management still bears the eggy marks. And the festive spatter-pattern of wine stains across the recipe for port wine jelly in Fay Maschler and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cooking For Occasions – for years, my alternative to Christmas pudding, which I could never make to taste like my mother’s.

And now the newest stain of all: a drip of bechamel on the recipe for a lasagne made to sustain the exhausted parents of a new-born daughter. That baby may not grow up to cherish her inherited library of stained cookbooks. But perhaps she will find her own way to celebrate the culinary tradition that is love made edible.

Letters: opposite