Cooking the Hamlyn way

I’ve been working on getting the garden into shape (but that’s another post); however my eye was caught one evening by a book I’d bought off the internet a couple of years back, fuelled by curiosity if not quite nostalgia.

Generally, I’m not very good at getting all misty eyed about the 1970’s. I mean, I ended that decade aged ten, so do have memories, but enjoy my life too much now to reflect on how things were (allegedly) better then, in some sort of glorious lost nirvana that modern youth cannot appreciate. I mean, to me, the sky was the same colour, the grass was the same colour, some days it rained (Ok, maybe not during the summer of 1976), cars rusted, the slam-door trains were dirty and dated, there was the winter of discontent, and back then Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ was contemporary rather than having period charm. I think that if there was an ‘O’ level (rather than GCSE) in nostalgia, I would fail it. Badly.

But I was still interested by one best seller from the 1970’s. Not a Jilly Cooper or Ken Follett, but instead Mary Berry’s (and others) ‘Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook’.

That book must have been a revelation; a well-lit colour photo for every recipe, a ‘quick tip’ for each with an accompanying pen drawing, and clear, easy to understand instructions.  Everything (it rather patronisingly asserts) that a “busy housewife” could want. I do have a small collection of other period 1970’s cookbooks that can act as comparison, and even where they do feature photographs, the predominant hue is brown, and light and colour seem a rather rationed resource.

So, what’s my interest? Well, when I was a child, there were two cookbooks that my mother always seemed to fall back on; Mrs Beeton’s and the Hamlyn All Colour, of which she possessed a rather battered copy that, as time progressed, increasingly deteriorated. Looking through my copy now, I can still remember many of the recipes.

And did I feast in style, straight from these pages? Well, at the time it seemed alright, but looking back now, some of the recipes are laughable. Can I tempt you with ‘Gourmet pork sausages’? Probably not, as these are your bog standard 1970’s sausages (Walls finest?), surrounded by “instant mashed potato”, and gaining only in sophistication by adding a gravy with redcurrant jelly in it. It’s not in contention for a Michelin star, is it? And there are quite a few recipes of similar ilk, but still plenty you could follow today, if you weren’t feeling particularly gastro-experimental.

But I overlook all of the fails, to consider what a step forward this book was. And others clearly agreed, as it was in print (in much the same content, and with the 1960’s period photo of Mary Berry) into the 1990’s, and it sold over two and a half million copies. It was, I suppose, the first modern cookbook.

Sometimes it’s good to look back I think, if only to see what was, even then, pointing to the future.