Monday 2 January 2012

Mumma's big old cookiebook



I'm not a hoarder (hmm, maybe I am when it comes to books), but I've just spent a peaceful couple of days at the kitchen table with my recipe book and a cardboard crate of loose recipes. Some of them have been there for more than fifteen years - and every time I opened my office cupboard they looked at me accusingly. It was time to sort them out.

The summer before I left for university, I sat at my mum's kitchen table copying my favourite recipes from her handmade book into my own new blank one.


That was thirty years ago, and I still use it all the time - I've added recipes from friends, clippings from the paper, and I've written notes all over it: 'Isobel made these for Mum's birthday - really good.', 'A 17lb turkey took 51/2 hours!', 'half this!'. Almost every recipe is a reminder of a meal, a close friend, or a brief acquaintance. There's elderflower champagne, from someone I worked with for a year or so, with whom I'd admired that spring's frothy crop of flowers. A boyfriend wrote a handy conversion table on the inside back cover. My daughter made a thick cardboard cover to protect the book, and wrote 'Mumma's BIG old cookiebook' on the front. The oldest pages are held together with enough drips of butter and dollops of cake mix to sustain a whole family should we ever get desperate.

This is more than a recipe book - it's a record of my whole adult life, from student (stuffed heart, anyone?), to earnest vegetarian twenty-something (soyabean curry - still not a top favourite, I have to admit), our early years of penniless marriage (lots of potatoes and lentils), small children (Dutch pancakes for after school - though a drink and a biscuit was more likely if I'm honest), family Christmases (just how many potatoes and sausages do fifteen people eat?), increasingly large children (lots of potatoes again, and even more pasta), to today - I've just pasted in a recipe for strawberry meringue roulade, in the optimistic hope that next summer I'll (a) have some strawberries left after the mice have ravished the veg patch and (b) have time to make something so frivolous. There are three blank pages left in the middle, so I've bought a new book - volume two is on its way.

Even better, last summer, my son and I sat down at the kitchen table, and together we began his recipe book. He took it with him to university this September and he tells me he already has a stack of recipes from his flatmates which he'll stick in one day ...


2 comments:

  1. I love this!! What a wonderful way of collecting memories along with recipes. It's brilliant that you son is doing it, too.

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  2. And it's like doing a project at primary school - all glue and scissors and little bits of paper everywhere - my idea of heaven!

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