From Seed to Table ………. Stories from our past

Now, most of us will have a shedload of cookbooks which have been collected over the years, some well used and others almost untouched.

And I suppose they say much about their owners offering up insights into the accomplished cook, the occasional cook, and the sucker for the latest in food fashion.

Added to these will be all those books bought on the day after a holiday in the expectation of recreating the culinary pleasures of that “delightful and authentic little back street restaurant only the locals frequent”.

I should know because our kitchen is full of them, while the more favoured, and the more arty the books sit in the dinning room, to be looked at like picture books rather than a guide to making a meal.

Occasionally we have a clear out but that only means they end up in the cellar rather than the charity shop.


Most end up becoming history books, which I read not as a means to a meal but as an insight into how we lived, and what we thought was important.

And so, to F.W.P. Carter’s “The Penguin Book of Food Growing Storing and Cooking” subtitled “From Seed to Table”, which is not the most zippy of titles.

Indeed, I doubt that today it would get past the commissioning stage of the publishing process, but they did things differently in 1941 when the book came out.
Back then the production of home grown food was an essential part of the war effort with the Dig For Victory campaign which encouraged everyone to grow their own food, whether it be on an allotment or a vegetable garden in what had been the lawn or the flower beds.

Speaking in Southport the Minister of Agriculture said “What we do ask and ask insistently is that you shall grow all the vegetables you possibly can.  There are 5, 000,000 gardens and allotments.

If 5,000,000 families would provide themselves with vegetables for eight months of the year, that would be a very notable addition to our war effort,  The NATION needs your gardening skill, skill not only to produce but to plan production, [involving vitamins, variety and storage]”.

And Mr. Carter’s book had the lot, including how to grow a huge variety of vegetables, describing their different qualities, and how to store them.  There were also plenty of diagrams and a detailed description on how to prepare and maintain an allotment.

Nor was he alone.

Penguin books also published Food the Deciding Factor, which was a guide to rationing and food values, along with Hydroponics, Food Without Soil.

Just how popular these books were I have yet to find out, and my copy seems less well used, but I suppose there could be many reasons for that.

It won’t ever make its way to the kitchen, and it sits with all those other “period” history books I have collected over the years and occasionally dip into.

Leaving me just to reflect on those books that did make it into the kitchen and what their fate should be.

Pictures; from “The Penguin Book of Food Growing Storing and Cooking” and few from the kitchen, all of which  have themselves past into history.

Celebrating the food of the Mediterranean in 1954

Now I know it is stating the obvious that today's cook books will be tomorrow's little bit of history.

After all to read an 18th century recipe of suggestions or a mid 19th century order of dinner is to step back into a different world.

Of course I am well aware that by and large these were books written for the rich and so offer only a partial picture of how we lived in the past.

That said there are plenty of insights into how the poor ate, or not ate.

My favourite is The Family Save – All, which aims to offer up a variety of cheaper foods which might well have been eaten by the poor.

So with all that in mind here are two books by Elizabeth David, written in 1950 and 1954 and republished in the 1960s.

I came across my two Penguin editions which date from 1967 in the mid '80 from Bryan the Book on Beech Road.

By then I was well aware of Elizabeth David from the works of Claudia Roden and the TV shows of Keith Floyd.

Now if you grew up in the 1950s when food was still pretty basic and the memory of rationing was still vivid these books which celebrated the colour and excitement of food from the Mediterranean must have been breathtaking.

After all talk to my parents generation and they will tell you that olive oil was what you bought from the chemists and used for a variety of medicinal purposes.

And here were "a collection of recipes made by the author when she lived in France, Italy the Greek Islands and Egypt doing her own cooking and obtaining her information at first hand."*

My copies are stained and brown at the edges but that just makes them all the more of a treat to look at.

And they contain a wonderful set of illustrations.

I wish I could ask my mother what she would have made of Insalata Di Funghi.  Now she liked her salads but I doubt that a plate of raw mushrooms with "olive oil, pepper, a little lemon juice and if you like, a scrap of garlic" would have been her first choice over tomato, cucumber and a bit of lettuce.

But that is perhaps unfair, mum was very forward thinking and given that Nana was German and some of what we ate owed a lot to that fact, I think she would have embraced it.

And I am sure if she could accompany us to Tina's parents in Italy she would fall on the roasted peppers, assorted fresh salads and fruits with the same joy that I do.

Tina's mum is from Naples and while she has lived in the north for nearly 40 years her cooking is still rooted in that southern cuisine.

Rosa and Simone briefly worked here in Britain arriving in 1960 to what we had to offer which must have been a bit of shock but they returned to Italy with a love of instant custard and jelly which is an interesting cultural swop.

Now I could have of course reflect on the causes of the fairly swift transformation in what we eat over the last five decades, but that has pretty much been done to death, so perhaps it’s just a trip down to the shops and see what nice things they have and what on our return Ms David could suggest we make.

Pictures; covers from Italian Food, 1967 and Mediterranean Food, 1967

* The Family Save – All, W. Kent & Co, London Second Edition 1861

**Mediterranean Food Elizabeth David, Penguin Second Edition 1967