Sunday 15 June 2014

Today you should be eating.....

One of my favourite recipe books is this battered old volume


In case you can't read the name, it is called "Economical Cookery" and was published in 1937. It helpfully includes suggested menus for three meals a day, for every single day of the year, with Sunday's menu costed out.  Just look at the amount of food each day includes - three big meals a day!

 
This Sunday we should be eating


7s in old money is 35p now. For a 6lb (almost 3kg) duck!

I don't just use  this book for wondering at the mind-boggling menus and prices though - it is packed with great and practical recipes for soups, stews, jams, pickles, cakes and bakes. There's a great chapter on making the most of leftovers, and many recipes that I turn to time and time again. But I won't be following their advice to cook Brussels sprouts for 45-50 minutes!!! (There's also a recipe for Brussels sprout sauce which requires you to pass the sprouts through a sieve. Well, if you'd boiled them for 50 minutes I'm sure that's all they would be fit for).

1 comment:

David Ford said...

My mum told me when I was a boy she used to spend about a third of the family income on food even with those low prices,and we ate healthily and very well indeed, the percentage spend now for families is a lot less than that, less quality too in my opinion