Cooking Through My Years - Intro

The passing away of revered food writer, Katie Stewart, last week, had me thinking back to some of the food writers that were my inspiration and guide as I learnt to cook. In the coming weeks and months I am going to revisit recipes from many of them as I look back through my culinary past and recreate some of the dishes that were either of their moment or particularly notable to me for the success or failure I had with them.

I was born in 1959 and both my parents had been brought up on very traditional plain food.  My mother's family were farmers in Norfolk and my father came from Tyneside; all 'very meat and two veg'. As far as I can remember, at the time I I started learning to cook there were just three cookbooks in my mother's collection. The one I remember using most was a Good Housekeeping Compendium. The pictures inside this book show ladies sensibly dressed in housecoats and working in quite spartan kitchens.  I was perhaps lucky to have a mother to whom cooking was very much a household chore, as it meant there was little competition for the kitchen and no strong traditions that dictated how anything was cooked.  I was always encouraged and given rather free reign; and only quietly cursed for the amount of mess I made in the process.

No surprise to anyone at home that the main things I wanted to make were sweets and cakes.

Chicken was still rather expensive and had not yet been bred into the fat beasts we see today.

But by the time I found myself at senior school and attending domestic science classes things had rather changed in the kitchen.

I too was a proud owner of one of those huge puff sleeved blouses and I cannot think of anything less practical to cook in, it was hard enough not getting those drooping sleeves in your gravy as you ate.

After school I went on a catering course and then worked as a cook for three years before realising I had neither the stamina nor the artistry to be a 'proper' chef. I decided to go back to college, but food has remained my life's preoccupation.

I now have over 800 cookery books along with a few boxes of magazines and paper clippings.  That is what happens when you have a lifelong collecting habit and have been around over 50 years.

For each post in this series I am going to choose a different book from my collection based on its year of publication and start with 1959. As far as possible I will try to work with the year the book was first published.

The Housekeeping Compendium was published before I was born but as a mark of the respect for the book that sent me on my culinary journey it will be the one I kick off with and the recipe I am doing is Chelsea Buns, a lifelong favourite sticky bun.

The dough is a basic lightly enriched bread dough. Once proved it is rolled into a rectangle and then the filling is scattered over before rolling up 'swiss roll style'. You cut slices through the roll as thick as you want, prove and bake. I added a half teaspoon of mixed spice to the sultana and sugar filling, although it wasn't in my recipe and I also daubed a bit of icing on the cooked buns.

A very similar recipe for Chelsea Buns can be found here on the bbc food website. If you have a bread machine you can prepare the dough with very little work at all.

The next post in this series will be a recipe from 'Sweets That Have Tempted Me' by Esme Gray Booker, 1959.



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