A few weeks ago I had a yearning to make peanut butter biscuits. The ones like my mother used to make. I tried a couple from the Internet, yet the couple I tried just weren't right.
I went after the original recipe from Mam. She searched around for her old Dairy Book of Home Cookery, as purchased from the milk man a few years back that she'd written down her recipes in. Alas, it had been thrown away due to too many spillages from cooking. Mam doesn't do the cooking in the household any more, that's become my dad's job, and, since all the kids left home, there is little point to our old Sunday routine of full roast followed by an afternoon making various cakes, puddings and pastries to gorge ourselves on.
I managed to inherit an old Reader's Digest book called The Cookery Year. My dad warned that it wasn't an every day cookbook and wasn't sure how much use it would be to me. Its cover is falling off and it has scribbles in it from when I was a toddler and didn't know better than to grab books when there was no paper to be found.
I wouldn't say it isn't every day cookery nowadays, although some dishes should stay back in the 70s/80s such as the version of kedgeree that was forced upon us all too frequently. Nor can I imagine myself pulling all of the inside of a crusty loaf of bread just to fill it with leftovers from the roast, some sherry, onions and mushrooms and then cutting into slices for P's packed lunches. But looking at this month's recipes there are none that would be considered posh with expensive, hard to find ingredients.
There are a few things in there I do make on a regular occasion, and some I am starting to make more often now I'm growing my own veg. It also includes, as the title would suggest, a lot of recipes for veggies that are in season, which should mean it comes in useful for the few things I'm growing that I don't normally buy and the few where I'm growing too many. It has a very nice section on how to preserve vegetables, as well as jams, pickles, sauces, wines from the recipes themselves to how-to diagrams on removing bones, using water baths and so on.
All in all, it is now my second favourite cookbook - my first being Google.
