Mel made me do it

This blog may occaisonally stray into cooking.  It may often stray into reminiscence.  It may often just stray...

I was asked recently what I would save if my house was on fire.  I thought about it keenly.  I could save all those documents that prove who I am, those kindergarten pictures that have some kind of pasta stuck to them that I've hauled halfway across the world, the first edition Barbara Cartlands.  I could save my wedding photographs or the Erstwhile's music collection.  In the end, there really was no contest.  What I would save first would be my Cookery the Australian way.

It is not the most attractive of books.  It is the antithesis of the Donna Hay, Nigella Lawson, Women's Weekly, or Jamie Oliver cookbooks that crowd other shelves in my kitchen with their gorgeous staged photos and a recipe or two per page.  It no longer has a spine per se - that was lost somewhere between one move or another - but you can see it has been put together the old fashioned way, with linen tape and bound sections, like battle wounds, spiked with that glue that hardened like lacquer.  Its cover is not so much buff-coloured as bruised.  The pages fall open at well-worn places, leaving others untouched.  Inside there are very few pictures, not in colour - which is lucky, because the pictures tend to be the dismembered corpses of meat.  It has all the essentials of a book that should be discarded.

But it won't be.  Not this one. 

What it holds is household management, invalid cookery, the first metric cooking measurements I ever encountered, the D I got helping a young Yugoslav girl understand schnitzel, cold afternoons with fresh scones and home-made blackberry jam, earning money to buy new clothes, school days, young motherhood, cream puffs, breakfast, lunch and Christmas.

It is scruffy - yes.  Its pages threaten to abandon the cookbook - yes.  Its most exotic recipe is beef stroganoff (Russia).  But in the great tradition of those notebooks that mothers and grandmothers left to their children, this cookbook - Cookery the Australian way 2nd revised metric edition - this book will be mine to pass on.  I haven't decided who to will it to yet, mainly because I haven't met the child I'd trust with it.  But in those reveries that happen while waiting for the potatoes to boil, I imagine a grandchild of mine will fondly remove it from a bottom drawer to show my great-grandchildren Grandma's favourite recipes.  And my great-grandchildren, as they gaze at the stains and damage and the dried-out pastry in the spine will, in traditional fashion, go "Urgh!  How did anybody ever eat that?  Can we have pizza for tea?"