DC Thomson, the Scottish publishing house, holds a huge amount of nostalgia value for me, The Beano being my absolute number one childhood read. I got the comic every week, collected the single character booklets, and dreamed of catapults, minxing, and big piles of mash with sausages sticking out. And I’m never getting rid of my Dennis the Menace and Gnasher fan club badges.
So the new DC Thomson book, Pass it On: Cooking Tips from the 1950s, appeals to both my real nostalgia and the kind of fantasy nostalgia I have about times which pre-date me. Can you feel proper nostalgia about things you didn’t actually live through? Reading so many old books has almost given me false memory syndrome.
The book is a guide to what home cooking used to be – a collection of recipes and tips sent in to The Sunday Post, People’s Journal and The People’s Friend by those women who cooked for their families in the face of culinary challenges we can’t quite imagine today – the food rationing of the Second World War didn’t come to an end until 1954 for some food items, including meat, cheese, butter, preserves, tea and sugar, and frugality was key.
There’s a lovely selection of original recipe pages you can look at here and I decided to have a crack at one of them. My favourite recipe genre (and the staple of recipe books up to the 1950s), invalid cookery, is here along with recipe suggestions for your Government Cheese – the nickname of the mild cheddar which was the only type available until the end of rationing. Mind you, I’m a month into a dairy-free diet on account of my new baby son and his sore bottom, and even Government Cheese is sounding wildly delicious to me at the moment.
The bread omelet sounds good, like a slightly more elaborate eggy bread.
Then there’s the Carrot Mould, which lives up to the old British stereotype of cooking, boiling carrots into baby food for a whole two hours and then turning them into an unnecessary shape.
The Gingerbread Upsidedown Delight is definitely one I’m making at some point, the Enid Blyton-style name adding to its appeal.
But I made the American Pie.
There’s been more than 40 years of speculation about what Don McLean meant in his chart-topping song, but I think I can say with confidence that this wasn’t what he was singing about. This one is a bit of a mystery – I mean we know the phrase “As American as apple pie” but there’s nothing mentioned about a pile of macaroni, cold meat, tomatoes and breadcrumbs. This is obviously a way to use up the leftover meat probably from the Sunday roast. I wondered about which meat to use – it could be Spam for full retro effect, but I went for turkey and smoked ham as that sounded at least a little bit American to me.
Despite my initial thoughts that this comes from a place where people didn’t quite get macaroni – it should be coated in a sauce surely, not used as a plain unflavoured base – it was actually quite pleasant, a smooth and creamy element to the dish. The whole thing has nothing to hold it together though, and just flops into a pile of ingredients on the plate. It would be better with an egg to hold it together and some cheese on top, but then again, that would probably be an extravagance too far in the age of rationing.
The book is available here and I think it will be going on my Christmas list.
