Cookbooks

I have quite a large collection of cookbooks. I love them just to read, though the large ones are a bit difficult in bed - your arm freezes! I know there are people with much larger collections than mine but I bet they too have their favourites: the few books they always find themselves reaching for.

I'm not a great fan of celebrity chefs, except for Delia Smith. Readers of my other blog, which I no longer do, will know that Delia is my guru! I have most of her books and I have yet to find a recipe of hers that is not absolutely correct. If she says 'cook for 7 minutes' then just do it. An absolute beginner can make incredible dishes just by following her instructions to the letter. My favourite book of hers, though, is the 'Book of Cakes'. You can see from the picture above (which was supposed to be below!) that this is a well-used book. Its pages are yellowed, curled and stained. Its back cover has fallen off. All the pages are there but not necessarily in the right order! And yet this book holds a cake for every occasion. In fact many of its pages actually contain blobs of cakes for every occasion!

But I do have one book which is even more precious to me because from it I learnt the most basic rudiments of cooking. I learnt how to cook breakfast. I learnt how to recognise different cuts of meat and what to do with them. And I learnt how to make a Victoria Sponge and Fruit Scones. With those two skills under your belt (so to speak) you can produce an impressive tea table of all sorts of goodies. It's Marguerite Patten's Step-by-Step Cookery. Sorry, the pictures are 'up there' again. It's the first cookbook I ever had and was a gift about 40 years ago. I must confess to wondering at the time 'What has she given me a cookbook for?', pretty much what a 17-year-old these days would think. But I was soon hooked and to this day I use her scones recipe, though I no longer have to look in the book. I did for years though (my memory!) so those pages also contain blobs of almost every scone I ever made. The dog goes mad when that book comes out because there's always the chance of a squashed currant falling out. To prove it works, just look at those scones straight from the oven the other day!

Apart from Mrs. Patten's book, which is too big, the books I use all the time live in my kitchen cupboard alongside the Church magazine, washing machine instructions - for Keith, you understand - and money off coupons. The picture of the other books, though I'm going to add it now, will also appear at the top, I fear. Where am I going wrong? That old McDougall's one - I don't know where that came from! It's ancient though, as you can tell from its condition and it's priced at 6d. That's 6 OLD pence, about 2½p in today's money. Hands up anyone who can think of something you can buy for 2½p now?

Now then - PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE WITH SUGAR, TREACLE, HONEY AND MAPLE SYRUP, WITH FLUTTERING EYELASHES AND MY UNDYING ADORATION............please can someone tell me how to make my photos appear where I want them and not in a glob at the top.