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The Realms of Arcady A Recipe Site for people who cook everyday for friends, family and partners and enjoy it (most of the time) and are not too serious about food. |
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Page Updated: 25th January 2008 |
As my news and knowledge of the wider world comes from the internet, the
only section of the Sunday newspapers that I regularly read is the bits
that deal with food. With the honourable exception of writers like
Simon Hopkinson, a good many articles can be summarised as "Rupert does
some something with an Aubergine". Several times during my life I've
had to submit a specified number of words for publication by a deadline and
I'm fully aware of the gulf between the lucid genius of my ideas expressed
with a glass of wine in my hand to the desperation when faced with a clean
sheet of paper and a hangover the next morning, so I have a vague
understanding of the process by which newspapers are produced.
Whilst many of the words about food in the press are in the form of new and
inventive recipes, my impression is that the average household is sustained
by no more than a dozen recipes over a lifetime and many of those are based
on the cultural background of the family living there. Over recent
years British food has increased greatly in its diversity. Partly, this has
come from a change in lifestyles. A man hacking out a railway cutting
with a pick and shovel in 1850 needed a high calorie diet (e.g. lots of
beer, bread, meat and potatoes) whilst his descendent travelling to to the
office on the train is healthier on on pizza, pasta, vegetable curry and a
modest quantity of red wine (modesty has never been my strong point).
Much of this diversity has come from the "homely" end of foreign cookery
traditions, not the endless stream of recipes created to pad out the
offerings from newspapers, magazines and TV schedules.
Recently, I was fortunate enough to find a family recipe book. Whilst
the earliest date in the book is 1915, its probable that its compilation
started around 1880. Most families have a book like this one, all too
often they surface at house clearance auctions and car boot sales when it's
time to clear out granny's home. These books are as much of family
history as wedding pictures, souvenirs from Morecambe and the reason the
family dog is always called Hilda (didn't grandad say he knew someone
called Hilda before he married granny or was that just too much whisky at
Christmas?). Scans of some of its pages have been added to
this site, for example:
Over a hundred years later all these items can be found in the aisles of
the local supermarket. The shelf space taken up by them is
significant so its reasonable to assume that they are still popular.
Yesterday, whilst attempting to prevent a few bottles of cheap red wine
being turned into bio-fuel, I visited the local supermarket. To the
left of the Shepherd's pie was lasagne (not so very different from
Shepherds Pie) and not too far away were bags of pre-cooked curry.
Somewhere, there's an Indian family with a book of recipes for the
non-industrial version of that curry which has been handed down for a few
generations. I rest my case.