Cooking the books

A few weeks ago, while I was clearing my office at Portofino, among other things, I came across an old, battered cookery book that had belonged to my mother. She gave it to me over 40 years ago when I came to the UK. “You’ll be able to cook yourself some French dishes if you don’t like the food over there.”

It had come with the first fridge we ever bought in 1966. It was brand new Frigidaire fridge, white as snow with lots of shelves and a large icebox. Just last week, my nephew confessed: “I didn’t know that Frigidaire was a make!” In the same way as Hoover became synonymous with vacuum cleaners, Frigidaire is the only word I’ve ever called a fridge in French.

I wonder where my mother had kept food fresh before that purchase, especially during the scorching Algerian summers. Although when I come to think of it, she kept very little in the fridge apart from a block of fresh butter and a few ice trays in the icebox. Most of the food she cooked was bought daily. I remember her sending me during my teenage years to the market several mornings a week to buy the necessary ingredients my mother needed to make lunch. 

The book was full of seasonal recipes listed by month. It came in very handy when I opened Krimo’s at Seaton Carew and wanted to introduce new dishes to the menu. 

Karen still has a Be-Ro book from the sixties. It has been cello taped and stapled several times in the years I have known her. It sometimes comes out when she is making pies. And when she does make pies, it is on an industrial scale!  

For a great many years, I became addicted to buying cookery books and magazines. Apart from those that listed recipes, I liked chefs’ autobiographies, where I followed my favourite professionals into their kitchens and tried to copy their daily routines and cooking methods. 

Things have moved on nowadays and I find myself rarely buying cookery books, although I still get a few as Christmas presents. The internet has changed the way I look for recipe ideas and inspiration. I often type the name of an ingredient in the search bar and simply scour photographs of dishes made using that ingredient. Usually, one of them will catch my eye and I invariably picture a new finished dish and quickly jot down a recipe. 

I am also astounded by the number of cookery videos featured on YouTube. I wish that it could have been about when I first started my fledgling career in catering. It would have saved me a lot of time, effort and money trying to perfect dishes over and over again. 

Every time I catch sight of my mother’s cookery book on our kitchen shelves, I see her in my mind’s eye, leafing through it, looking for dishes to delight us with on our return from school at lunchtime.