COOKBOOKS
Lucy Lethbridge
I’ve been clearing out my cookbooks because most of them I hardly ever use and they’re gathering dust. But what a social record of the past one hundred years they turn out to be! (Some of them, I hasten to add, pre-date me: I’ve a penchant for a vintage receipt book.) If one wanted to draw up a vivid picture of changing manners and mores in British social and economic life, then our cookbooks tell the whole complex story.
So, in my collection, I have three editions of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Cookery and Household
Management, one of them a facsimile of the 1861 first edition and the other two dating from the 1940s and 1950s, edited for the time. Mrs Beeton has never been out of print, and has simply been updated for every decade. So in the Fifties, there is less about trussing hares and pulling horseradish (tricky in a brand-new Formica-fitted kitchen) but the elaborate aspic-covered salads that the Edwardians favoured were back in fashion and freshened up with the wonders of modern food preservation, such as tinned peaches and salad cream. The 1940s edition has a photograph of a nutritious children’s breakfast – silverware, napkin, cup, saucer, doily, the whole works – and a raw carrot. Try running that one past the modern child. I picked up my 1956
Beeton in a charity shop and inscribed on the flyleaf are the words ‘ “The Way to a Man’s Heart is through his Stomach” with best wishes, Roy’. I imagine Roy a trembling swain looking forward to evening dishes decorated by loving wifely hands with hard-boiled eggs, stuffed mushrooms and neat mounds of potato purée. I wonder how it all went for him.
Fast forward to the 1970s. I’ve inherited a couple of books from my mother, including Delia Smith’s
Cheat’s Cookbook, which said it was alright to dispense with the stuffed mushrooms and serve Heinz soup at dinner parties by sloshing in some sherry. But nonetheless, there’s still about the 1970s cookbook a feeling of sticking to the basics, still not so far from Mrs Beeton. Cooks are still going to butchers, buying tongue, jugging hares, making Victoria sponge cakes with Stork. No one needs to voyage across the county to pick up za’atar or pomegranate molasses; even fresh ginger (known as ‘green’) was rare. There are a lot of sections on making children’s birthday cakes – and the many uses to which one could put a Swiss roll, two wagon wheels and a bottle of blue food colouring. Katie Stewart of
The Times Cookbook looks reassuringly motherly in her ruffled, Laura Ashley maxi apron. But just to confuse us, there is also Robert Carrier holding out the promise of gourmet elegance: if you want to know what the middle-class thought they ought to be cooking up for dinner parties in 1973, then a rustle through his laminated recipe cards is instructive. Lots of consommé and melba toast is the answer. From the 1980s, I’ve got Wonderful Ways with Mince by Josceline Dimbleby from a Sainsbury’s series of short, practical paperbacks which did the business – I’ve also got a copy of Winter
Warmers by Anthony Worrall Thompson. But this was also the decade when we got fancy about restaurant-style food – acres of white plate with tiny, fiddly little mounds of things on them. I wasn’t doing much cooking in those days, though I remember I learned to roast a chicken from a flatmate’s mother who sent us the instructions on a postcard. We ate a lot of tinned tuna. This is probably where the St Michael’s all-colour Cookbook (1982) comes in – as tinned fish features prominently in its pages.
By the 1990s, cooking was getting macho. No longer cheffy types in cravats like the Galloping Gourmet but blokes commanding the barbecue: Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver were getting stuck into seasonal eating. Cookbook illustrations show a departure from the white plates and a move towards messiness, cosiness, kitchens that could almost be described as whimsical. Nigella took comfort eating to new heights of gluttonous girliness with How to Eat. There’s a retro vibe too with Lindsey Bareham and Simon Hopkinson in The Prawn
Cocktail Years revisiting the food of the Sixties and Seventies that had been consigned to the embarrassingly naff: Black Forest gâteau, for example, or Cornish pasty. By the 2000s, food is freshlygrown-in-the-allotment, handtossed, tray-baked, thrown about, drips deliciously down the edge of an old-fashioned enamel roasting pan and is eaten al fresco on a lichencovered terrace with friends, neighbours and attractive children.
But nowadays it’s a strange thing that although we’ve gone dirty, we’ve also gone clean. Jamie, Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall, even the Hairy Bikers are all at it, sternly forgoing meat, their new book covers decorated with pictures of them looking buff and hydrated with organic vegetabolic goodness. I’m slightly embarrassed to find that I have a book (one of many available) that promises me ‘glow’ and is adorned with a glass of something deliciously, antiseptically green. That one will definitely have to go.