History of Cookbooks is the Story of My Life

My life can be measured in cook books to an extent. I have lots and lots of cookbooks and it is interesting to see how food and our attitude to food has changed since the 1960s. I suppose it also matters what stage in your life you are at. Here are some of my cook books in chronological order.
First this note book which I started in 1964. Money was tight. Food was expensive compared with wages. I used to write down recipes as I tried them and comment on them. My husband was a guinea pig.

Note books of recipes, reactions and cost

That same year my mother suggested I sent up for this free cookbook which was given away by Trex providing you sent up so many tokens from their packaging. It was innovative at the time as everything was mixed with a fork or spoon in a bowl all at the same time. Trex was marketed as "helps make food healthier and more digestible".

The Trex recipe book showed a new method of baking

In 1966 I was given this Mrs. Beeton's Book of Cookery and Household Management.  It was full of recipes and information, such as how to gut fish and I used it a lot. There were not many pictures in it, though. Nowadays, we like to see pictures of the food we are going to cook.I also have Delia Smith's  Frugal Food which was published in 1976. Like Mrs. Beeton's book though, there are hardly any pictures in it.

Mrs. Beeton's books didn't have many pictures

Then came a bit of a breakthrough. the lovely Mary Berry  together with others wrote recipes for this book. Every single recipe had a picture. This became my food bible and my friends and I all used it when we gave dinner parties for one another. We thought we were so sophisticated at the time!

We thought we were so sophisticated......

I see that my copy cost £2.99 which was a lot of money then.
At the beginning of the 1980s Sainsbury's published a great little series of cookbooks with really simple recipes in them. Their title ranged from, Entertaining", to "Family Meals", "Soups and Starters", "Cheese", "Ices and Cold Desserts", "Wholefood Cooking" and so on. Every page had a picture. Every recipe was simple. Food was becoming a little bit more exotic because people were going abroad for holidays and getting a taste for things like chilli,kiwi fruits,and peppers and avocado pears. I still use some of these recipes today. I remember my daughter trying out recipes from them when she was young and just learning to cook. I suppose the idea from Sainsbury's point of view was to persuade us to buy different and new ingredients. We thought these were very exotic!

Really exotic ideas from Sainsburys

And now we have Celebrity Chef's. The recipes in these books are not frugal, they are not simple, they are not quick. You have to be at a certain stage in your life to enjoy them I guess. My daughter bought both of them back from visits to La Gavroche and the Manoir Aux Quat Saisons. They are lovely books containing such wonderful recipes but such a far cry from my frugal note book of the 1960s.

Celebrity Chefs recipes

How times have changed!
Glenda
www.cutleryandcatering.co.uk