Blame it on the Vicar!

 I have been lost in my books for several days now.  Tasks which should have been completed remain undone, the cake tins are empty, and I still haven't made that butternut squash into curry.

A fellow blogger, Trundling Through Life, wrote a wonderful piece about some good hearty Lincolnshire fare and I disappeared down the rabbit hole of reading through all my old Lincolnshire recipe books, as well as a large number of old regional recipe books.

I cannot tell a lie, it was fun.

Naturally, answering one question then led me on to explore a dozen other things of interest.  

This morning I found myself reading an item in the October 1927 Edinburgh Review, it was written by my favourite old cook, Florence White, using her pen name: Evelyn Mary.

She wrote "Seventy years ago English cookery was good, but has suffered a decline in the last thirty years."  In part, she blamed the direction taken by the higher education of women, the devaluation of house-keeping and domestic science.

She explored even further back through old tomes and manuscripts and found that a similar theme ran through many of them.  

Dr Kitchiner, who wrote 'The Cook's Oracle' was absolutely convinced that disease most frequently arises from badly prepared food or poor nourishment.  He was a qualified doctor, a man who possessed a private fortune and did not actually practise medicine.  He concluded that people did not pay as much attention to the preservation of their own health as they did to that of their dogs and horses.

It was something of a relief to find that the general consensus was that even the French girls were not so skilled in the art of cooking as were her mother and grandmother.  

I readily admit that my mother and grandmother were far better cooks than I have ever aspired to be.

My interest in recipe books has little/nothing to do with cooking.  Shame on me.   Having said that, almost every meal I cook is from scratch.

If I could just cook with the same love that I have in my heart when I knead and bake bread, I reckon I could be a decent plain cook.  Alas! I don't and I am not.  

To quote one of the old books 'You must bring a loving heart to the primus or camp-fire.  No soured personality can be trusted to stir the beans, far less make the coffee.  Coffee should be made with love; that is the first ingredient and the chief cause of coffee being indifferent is your indifference to coffee.'

I have strayed from the point which was that just as we read that too few people actually bother to cook these days, the same thing has been said for generations.  Nothing much changes.