What's Cookin' at Baker's Club

 Our challenge this month was to use a recipe from Hastings Recollect. I had a blast reading some of the advice to cooks in The ABC of Cookery (1945), such as:

“Only an experienced cook can follow successfully a carelessly compiled recipe. […] your time and ingredients may easily be wasted and your temper will certainly suffer” and

“There are cooks who seem to be able to produce good results by guesswork but they are generally people who have long experience of cooking, and have learnt by bitter experience and many failures.”

It all sounds very fraught and I don’t think you could sell a recipe book using that rhetoric these days!

Despite a lack of instructions (some of the recipes just list ingredients and say “combine and bake”), we managed to create and enjoy a delicious selection of old-timey goodies. Thank goodness for google, because I don’t know the difference between a breakfast cup and a teacup. One recipe suggested “a saltspoon of salt” and others suggested adding “the weight of two eggs in flour and one in sugar”. I definitely prefer modern recipes that remind me to pre-heat the oven at the start of the recipe, and give me a temperature instead of saying “bake in a moderate” or “hot oven”.

 It was an excellent excuse to spend some time exploring Recollect and get a glimpse into baking in the past. Next month’s challenge is to use flowers in our baking.

28 August 2024

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