Recipe books, 1939 to 1973

The bulky envelope that came in the post was from our good friend Joy from Hull. Contained within were eight or so recipe books from 1939 to 1973. All, as far as I can tell, are written by women and for women. (The exception is the ‘Bon Viveur’ recipe book from, we think, the late fifties, written by Fanny and Johnnie Cradock, but in the front cover image Johnnie’s duties seem to extend no further than to selecting the wine.)

On the subject of who these books were for, the introduction in the ‘Baking your Cake and Eating it’ book from 1973 makes a point of saying that one of its one hundred recipes is provided by a … man. With its coupons (1½p off Jus-Rol pastry, redeemable by 31.3.74), this is cooking from a different age – no foreign muck in here (apart from one recipe with macaroni). The back cover has an endorsement from the then Dr Who, Jon Pertwee, with a rather dreadful artist’s impression of him. Published by the Co-op, this is very much a showcase for the ingredients you’d buy in their shops, so no other ads appear.

That’s the newest publication. The oldest is The Mothers’ Cookery Book of 1939 published by the (deep breath) National Association of Maternity and Child Welfare Centres and for the Prevention of Infant Mortality. With recipes for batter pudding, ‘potatoes in their skins’ and vegetable and bone soup, the guidance is to boil your carrots for half an hour (or, if they’re old, twice as long), but it also had, to my surprise, recipes for vegetarian dishes, and some that included macaroni too. The ads in here are for Fry’s Cocoa, Marmite and New Zealand butter.

‘250 Recipes’ is published by Borwick’s Baking Powder and dates from the mid fifties. Written by the home economist Elizabeth Craig (1883–1980), she hankers in her introduction after the days when housewives did their own baking, and didn’t ‘condescend’ to buying their own bread and cakes. This book, with its lovely colour ad for Borwick’s on the back, was intended to help correct this.

Ruth Drew’s 1960 ‘How to Live Better on Less’ is more a book about household budgeting than specific cooking, and it took a while to suss that it was sponsored by Spiller’s flour, whose ad at the back is the only one. With guidance on hairdressing at home, dressing on a shoestring and furnishing on a budget, this looks to be a how-to for young housewives.

Good Housekeeping’s ‘Pressure Cookery’ from the mid fifties has lots of recipes and we spotted ads for Prestige, Presto and Easiwork pressure cookers. These were not cheap – the Easiwork was 79s 6d, or half-a-week’s wages. The other booklets were ‘For the Artist in the Kitchen’, from 1963, promoting Twirl vegetable oil; and ‘Many Ways Stag Salt saves time, saves money’ from about the mid fifties.