A Life in Food

My mother was given the above recipe book as a wedding present. On the flyleaf she has inscribed her wedding date and her name, possibly the first time she had written her new name after signing the register in church. It was October 1949, food rationing was coming to an end and there must have been hope that the a recipe book was now appropriate as a present, that the ingredients would be available and the family members would be there  to eat the special meals. So it became part of our family life, she would write in recipes that she had been given, like the malt loaf recipe or stick in ones cut from newspapers or magazines like the Christmas cake recipe. I don't know when she acquired that recipe but it was the one we went to every year, the picture of the chef in the newspaper acquiring a blue pen beard and moustache as we girls waited to be allocated jobs, chopping almonds or cherries for the three Christmas cakes made every year in September to mature for Christmas. Naturally when I needed to make a special cake for Oliver's christening it was that recipe I went to.

When I left home to go to university, I started my own book and this too became a record of my life. My mother's recipe for home made bread being the first entry. It charted all the fads and fancies, the diets and the health kicks, the frugal recipes and the splurges for special occasions. Amongst them were recipes that became standards in the family, the sticky chocolate cake and the cookie recipes. It was useful too, when I went on self catering holidays, I took it with me as having all the key recipes I would want to make. This was my undoing though, I took it camping to France with me in 2011 and somehow, incredibly, it got lost. I mourn that book as a part of my life, lost.

It was too useful not to be recreated but now I am going digital, I am slowly typing my recipes onto the computer from where I can transfer them on to my kindle and carry them around with me that way. It will mean that I will always have them on back up and ready to be sent to student daughters at the call of a telephone. It won't be the same though, I will never be able to tell favourite recipes by the way the book falls open or remember cooking disasters by the stains on a page. It can never look like this:

I will never have that recall of exactly how I felt when I wrote a recipe down. There was a recipe in my book, Haddock Monte Carlo I believe, made with haddock and tinned tomato soup and rice which I never made after my first year at university, but reading it recalls the excitement of being independent and having to cook for myself and make choices as to what to eat. Remembering Haddock Monte Carlo they weren't necessarily good choices. This is what nostalgia means, a fond recall of things that weren't always that good.