What did you cook?
"Sausages! What could be more quintessentially warming winter food?" Gregory.
Without food and water humans would not survive, which is why food and cooking is such a vital part of our lives. For many people cooking food is a pleasurable activity1.
Women throughout history did the cooking, and it was not always a pleasure to cook day after day. But refrigeration, convenience foods (tins in the first instance), and easier ways of buying food in a single supermarket rather than several stores, freed up time spent feeding the family. It was the major change that made it easier for women to enter the workforce, and the beginning of seeing cooking as a hobby. Of course, washing machines and other household appliances helped to reduce the workload, but while you could cope with wearing dirty clothes, you always had to eat.
Food, cooking and memories of meals are a different way of writing stories that you can share, and will remind you of good times.
There is now a huge interest in cookbooks and family recipes. My mother-in-law filled a notebook with baking recipes - seeing a loved one’s handwriting is especially sentimental (and unusual nowadays). I have written before that I love the notes my husband wrote in his cookbooks.
It is okay to write in your cookbooks2 - to add notes, change the recipe based on your experience, or add a wee note about when you cooked the recipe etc.
Annotating a book is a simple thing to do but it gives a lot of pleasure to others. Besides leaving information, it is an easy way to leave an example of what you love to do - a kind of mini memoir. How lovely for a family to use a cookbook for years, with handwritten notes from several generations.
Here are some other ideas for sharing recipes:
A present cookbook. Pull together your favourite recipes, along with some family pictures, and publish it3 (or print out the pages and put them into a display folder). There are many occasions when a custom cookbook would make a lovely gift, and a welcome present: child leaving home; wedding present; new house; new child etc.
A collaborative cookbook. Ask friends & family to send recipes and photos, then combine them into a book (or print out the pages and put them into a display folder). This is great present for a major birthday, wedding anniversary, or a leaving present.
An expert recipe. Become known for one recipe - preferably one you can make as a gift. You could share the recipe with the gift, or be like my friend’s mother, who was renowned for her mustard sauce, but would never share the recipe. At her funeral the recipe was printed on the back of the order of service.
Share a recipe. Print one recipe that you know & love, preferably with tips and notes. Give the recipe with the ingredients needed, or with a pan that you would use to make the recipe.
Write a food journal. Document what and where you cooked and ate, and whom you were with. Other ideas for food journal contents are: best restaurant list, memories of food, excerpts from food articles, links to programmes and videos you love, recipes with their stories, ideas for recipes, or ingredients that go together, wines you have tasted, or your bucket list for food you want to taste or restaurants you want to visit. If you write on social media, they mostly have a link so you can print a book of your posts.
Write your own recipe book (or combine recipes you use often). I often use recipes I find online, so I print them, or if they are in a book I copy them, because I prefer them in one place. If you are like me, you can print your recipes and put them into a display folder, then you can easily write notes on them, or keep them in a file on your computer. You could also have a folder for dinner party recipes (including guests’ likes & dislikes), adding notes about who attended, any fun stories, and the date - even a photo of the dinner party. Having your own recipe book is also handy for the times you think “what on earth can I feed them today?”
Recreate the recipes from your childhood. If you can, ask your parents or other relations for recipes you loved as a child. Tell the tale of your childhood through food and sweets that you loved. Photograph the sweets you loved. Or write down a recipe that your children or grandchildren love (and add pictures of them eating it), so they will have a lovely memory and recipe in future.
I am sure you also have pictures of food or food occasions - you could tell the accompanying story. Our daughter was adopted, and so she did not taste ice cream until she was four years old. This is the delightful moment she had her very first ice cream! She still adores ice cream.
As well as giving pleasure and sharing your cooking knowledge, you are sharing a part of you - your love of cooking. It is part of your legacy.
My late husband Gregory loved food & wine. He was quite knowledgeable about both and in particular, he knew a lot about French wines. For several years he ran a small wine club. Gregory bought wine at auction and sent two boxes of wine a year to his club members. He sometimes included a recipe to match one of the wines. Members often gave the recipe, and the accompanying bottle, as a gift. This is Gregory’s recipe in his own words.
Gregory’s recipe for Sausages & Mash
Sausages! What could be more quintessentially warming winter food? These fat-lubricated protein bombs, with their savoury aromas and golden, glistening skin promise sustenance and comfort on the coldest, mistiest evening. Even the fact that the contents are pre-chewed seems designed to put us at ease; and here, for once, British cuisine throws off its inhibitions and is happy to flavour generously with herbs and spices.
I urge you to find good meat. The best sausages will come from a local butcher who makes his own: there are still a surprising number of these stalwarts of the community around if you look. As for the sausages, not only will they have been made from meat that is better to start with (and reared in happier circumstances), but it will be coarsely minced and not packed with starch and fat. Mass-produced supermarket bangers, spongy, uniform and bland, just won’t make a satisfying meal.
The key to cooking a good sausage is to do it slowly. For this reason, frying – and I mean slow frying here, 30-45 gentle minutes – is better than grilling, which allows the juices to drip out. Braising, however, is even better than frying, and provides you with instant gravy to go with the (naturally essential) mash. So here is a recipe for braising, adapted from Delia4.
For the basic recipe (feeds four), you will need: eight good, plump sausages flavoured however you like; four rashers of smoked streaky bacon; a large Spanish onion, 250g button mushrooms, half a bottle of red wine, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, olive oil and flour. You can vary the flavourings, substituting other aromatic herbs for the thyme, omitting the mushrooms (or adding soaked dried porcini for a more intense flavour), adding juniper berries, mustard or even a small tin of chopped tomato. Pretty much anything goes here. For the cooking wine, use something full-bodied, but don’t waste the Cahors5. You can buy Banrock Station’s Shiraz/Mataro blend in a box: ideal for cooking and not bad for slurping down either. For the mash, you will need 1 kg of floury potatoes (King Edward are best; otherwise Maris Piper are widely available; avoid waxy varieties), butter and hot milk, along with something to mash them with.
First decant the Cahors to let it breathe. Prick the sausages (which I would never recommend unless you are going to braise them), and brown them in a little olive oil in a casserole dish. Meanwhile de-rind and dice the bacon and peel and slice the onion. Remove the sausages and gently cook the bacon and onion together until both are soft. Now add a tablespoon of flour and blend it with the fat, cook for a minute and then slowly add the wine, stirring as you do. Return the sausages to the dish along with a crushed clove of garlic, a bay leaf and a couple of sprigs of thyme, but not the mushrooms. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook on the hob or in a 180˚C oven for 30 minutes; then add the cleaned, whole mushrooms, and cook for a further 20 minutes.
Meanwhile make the mash. Peel the potatoes and cut into medium chunks. Place them in cold water, and bring to the boil. Add salt and cook until just done, then drain in a colander. Meanwhile heat a little milk – 100 ml should be ample. Return the potatoes to their pan when fully dry, put over a gentle heat, and mash with a masher, or a fork, or even electric beaters (I use an old-fashioned vegetable Mouli). Season to taste and add plenty of butter (50-100g) in thin slices and enough of the hot milk to give your preferred texture.
Serve generously and not too tidily, and enjoy the Cahors!
I must confess, I don’t like cooking, and therefore it follows that I am not a good cook; which comes first? I am infamous amongst my friends for my lack of skills or interest in cooking. But my husband loved to cook, and was an excellent cook, so my appreciation of cooking, cookbooks and good food increased during our marriage. We were a great team, he loved to cook and I loved to eat. When my husband died, I took over the cooking, and our culinary experiences have been depressingly poor since then.
Obviously only write in your own books, not in library or lent books - though an occasional post-it note left in a library book might be fun for the next reader to find.
Blurb Books is a good publisher. This is just a suggestion, and there are many other custom book publishers. I have no association with Blurb Books, but I have used them and liked the quality of the books I received.
Delia Smith, British cookery writer & presenter.
Gregory's wine club sounded lovely.
This was another great read. I love recipes as a connection. My wife still has her mum's notes on making stew and dumplings, and I have my grandma's flapjack recipe written on the back of an old cookbook with an old phone number.