Stork's Tour of Britain's Cooking

This is another in my series of book reviews loosely based on the idea of reviewing a book. Very loosely, as you probably know by now. The book in actual fact is just like one of those firework matches we had as kids, the sort that looked like a match and were struck just like a match, but then flared up in bright colours with a temperature fit to melt steel, in a dastardly attempt to remove your eyebrows. In other words, the book is not what it seems. The book is an incendiary device that once lit, cannot be extinguished until all the fuel is gone. The fuel is everything that I can think of and get down on paper, while I peruse the book, or in this case, everything I can think of while tapping away on a noisy keyboard that my partner despises the noise of, which means I end up writing at 2 in the morning. In fact at 2 in the morning the incendiary book seems to be even more inflammable and difficult to put out.

I will start with the dangers of buying things on the internet to give some context as to why you are finding out about this non book via a non review. It looked great on World of Books, where I get my material from. The artwork looked especially good. This style of artwork was very prevalent in the sixties and is just so reminiscent of that era. My grandmother had similar style wallpaper in her kitchen, which in itself is strange because she was not one for fashionable purchases or excesses. It's probably more likely that she went to the nearest village where there was a small row of buildings with large windows and small doors and little signs on the doors that said open (unless it was Wednesday afternoon when it was half day closing) that sold everything available in rural Wales at that time, a sort of poor imitation of a three dimensional Amazon store with a lot less choice, where you could actually touch the things you might buy, and take them away with you when you left. These places were called shops and the only known thing back then that was Prime were numbers and unless you were into maths in a really big way you didn't even know that. It's where my grandmother would have found wallpaper that looked like this book cover, but which at tuppence a roll because none of the other farmers wives who had turned up covered in mud in a Land Rover liked it either, it was the cheapest they had. Decision made.

The artwork also reminds me of some of the first colour movies I remember, such as the comedies of Peter Sellers or "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines". Of course you cannot refer to men as magnificent anymore as that is considered misogynist. In fact men are no good for anything and it is just fine to shout that from the rooftops as loud as you like.

There was a period of film comedy back in the sixties when every movie had opening titles in cartoon form that looked very like this. Most homes also had bright colourful crockery with designs called things like Midwinter. This was an era designed to be a reaction to post war greyness and rationing, so Midwinter was probably not the best name, thinking about it, although that turned out to be the designers name not the subject of the pattern.

Having bought this thing I'm not really reviewing yet, on the internet, thinking it was a book, and having been seduced by the cover design, I was rather surprised to discover when it arrived that it was only 13cm square with twenty four thin 13cm square pages and a meagre ration of recipes to work with as my fuel. Is there a war on?

It reminded me of the early days of lockdown when ordinary household items were difficult to get, not unlike wartime Britain. All I wanted was a nail brush, to spruce up my nails after working in the garden, something we did a lot of in lockdown while we waited for civilisation to end. I mean a lot of gardening not nail cleaning.

I found on Amazon a colourful set of four nail brushes even though I only wanted one. Such is the world now, that when you want one tiny item it usually involves buying about 200. So I exaggerate, so what. When the four nail brushes arrived they were the size of my thumb, and this is not an exaggeration. They must have photographed them with a macro lens. Someone was having a great laugh at my expense. I could have just about held one between a thumb and forefinger and cleaned one nail at a time, but even in lockdown I had better things to do, like whittling kindling into unicorn shaped spoon rests. My mind was truly blown a few years ago when I discovered there was even such a thing as a spoon rest. I had always just put spoons down on the kitchen counter and my world never ended, now you needed spoon rests, so advanced has civilisation now become. It's how the Roman Empire ended.

The three main problems that caused Rome to fall were invasions by barbarians, tick, an unstable government, tick, and pure laziness and negligence, tick, tick.

And don't forget, the belief that people needed spoon rests, tick. The other reasons listed are alarmingly, looking very similar to today, and they say “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”

This was my review about the nail brushes on Amazon - Great if you have a doll collection with tiny fingers, I made a huge mistake. I assumed I didn't need to check the size of a nail brush, having only ever seen nail brushes all the same size for the past 60 years. These are literally tiny, although correctly described, I never thought to get a tape measure and see how small they actually are. They are not even the length of my four finger tips in a row, as you would hold them to use it. Completely useless.

There have since been further reviews added.

Tiny, These turned up in a very small box which I was confused by as I hadn’t ordered anything that small. I opened the box to find four of the smallest nail brushes I have ever seen. I only have small hands but even I would struggle with the handle on these. Don’t waste your money on these. (Rae)

And this one from 2022, because they are still selling them.

Completely fooled, Let's face it buying a nail brush is not a big decision. However, nailbrushes are pretty much all roughly the same size so we have a pre-set idea of what we will receive. Yes the measurements are shown but the main picture is angled not to highlight just how small these are. These should be advertised as microbrushes then perhaps fewer of us would be fooled. I will keep mine in the faint hope I find something very small to clean at some point! (Avidreader)

So I am relieved to find out that it wasn't just me who expected a nail brush to be the size of my hand, that's what I am like, I even expect a comb to be the size of my head. That said this book which turned out to be a pamphlet had enough period charm to make me slightly less irritated than having dirty nails to clean and a doll's nail brush to do it with. In a land far away a factory full of Chinese people roll about on the floor laughing, as they read my one star Amazon review of their miniature creation. Did Avidreader ever find something small enough to clean? Sadly we'll never know.

Pamphlet is one of those words that sounds weirder and weirder the more you say it. Have you noticed that some words are like that?.

Pamphlet - Not a book. (This is my concise definition) Also, not a nail brush.

Pamphlet - (Official definition) A pamphlet is an unbound book (that is, without a hard cover or binding). Pamphlets may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths, called a leaflet or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book.

Sorry, I now understand I should consider myself lucky that I didn't end up with a leaflet, although how a sheet of paper can be called a leaflet if it is actually just a sheet of paper is beyond me. At 24 pages my pamphlet is positively luxurious and frankly it seems I am being very ungrateful, Stork could have taken a single sheet of paper and folded it in half. As it is I actually have some genuine 1960's rusty staples thrown in at no extra cost.

But I digress.

Rationing and the war had a big part to play in the success of this product, because Stork was a brand of Margarine and it played it's own part during that war.

To all of us Brits back in the sixties, like my grandmother, it was just called Marge, like a friendly Aunty, like the BBC was called Aunty. Even before Aunty Beeb was knocked on the back of the head by Stalin's minions, thrown in a sack and discarded into a flooded quarry like unwanted kittens, the Director General of the BBC was a bit like the famous head of Spectre, mysterious, faceless and stroking a very fluffy white cat (whose kittens had just been drowned) while cackling and planning it's downfall, which is proceeding very well as it happens. 2.4 million people have stopped paying for the TV license in the last two years, another win for Spectre.

Stork is a brand of margarine spread, or Marge, manufactured primarily from palm oil and water. When it was introduced into the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1920 onwards, housewives were initially suspicious of the health effects and cooking ability of margarine. (I still am) As a result, it required a large amount of advertising in the 1930s to increase usage. It was with the onset of World War II and rationing of butter that sales began to rise, in part driven by the Stork Cookery Service. After rationing ended in the UK in 1954, the brand was relaunched, supported by the "Art of Home Cooking" promotion, with the first Stork television adverts being shown in 1955. Wikipedia

Butter - is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream.

Margarine - DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH, JUST COMPARE IT IN LENGTH WITH THE SENTENCE ABOVE . To produce margarine, first oils and fats are extracted, e.g. by pressing from seeds, and then refined. Oils may undergo a full or partial hydrogenation process to solidify them. The milk/water mixture is kept separate from the oil mixture until the emulsion step. The fats are warmed so that they are liquid during the mixing process. The water-soluble additives are added to the water or milk mixture, and emulsifiers such as lecithin are added to help disperse the water phase evenly throughout the oil. Other water-soluble additives include powdered skim milk, salt, citric acid, lactic acid, and preservatives such as potassium sorbate. The fat soluble additives are mixed into the oil. These include carotenoids for colouring and antioxidants. Then the two mixtures are emulsified by slowly adding the oil into the milk/water mixture with constant stirring. Next, the mixture is cooled. Rapid chilling avoids the production of large crystals and results in a smooth texture. The product is then rolled or kneaded. Finally, the product may be aerated with nitrogen to facilitate spreading it.

You read it anyway, didn't you? I suppose it's like saying do not think about pink elephants.

Now someone explain to me why a country covered in grass and cows had to ration butter during a war, while substituting that butter for margarine made from palm oil having to come here all the way from Africa in a ship shot at by German U Boats.

Marketing is what this little booklet is about and there were others in the series too. These include, Stork Goes Continental, Feeding the Family with Stork, Beat the Clock with Stork, and Away from it All With Stork, but I'll stop there as there were 182 results. I don't want to be accused of Storking. (Just in case you didn't get that genius pun, it is based on the crime of stalking, same pronunciation, which is the act of liking someone, usually a stranger, to a pathological extent)

Without the Margarine facts and backstory, think about those titles. I am seeing a puppet Stork made for kids TV in the sixties of course, when puppets had very obvious strings but nobody cared. All kids shows had strings attached. Sixties children were still able to suspend disbelief and see an actual Stork and not the strings operating it. In this TV series, puppet Stork has adventures, now look at the titles again.

"Stork goes Continental" is a lovely story of Stork driving a camper van around pretty bits of France and Italy and having adventures with exotic foreigners. "Feeding the family with Stork" is a horror episode where Stork is captured for the pot, while in somewhere like Sardinia but Stork makes his escape just in the nick of time so the Sardinian family go hungry, better luck next time guys. "Beat the Clock with Stork" is an episode where Stork finds himself on a TV game show answering questions in a specialist bird round, against the clock obviously. "Away from it all with Stork" sees Stork leaving for a weekend in an Airbnb in the Highlands of Scotland, discovering the delights of Haggis and Cranachan which is what all cooks do in Scotland on TV.

Stork on his holidays in Scotland brings us neatly to the first recipe, yes, you were starting to wonder if there were any.

A quick thought on traditional recipes. We only still have the ones we have, because someone thought to write them down. How many have been lost over the centuries? I do my bit to preserve recipes for future generations, I do a blog post about them, like my one for Bara Brith. We are lucky in Britain because there was a fashion during Victorian times for collecting many aspects of folk culture, like tunes, dances or recipes and putting them into book form, so that many have been saved.

Middle class people with nothing better to do would travel the land, knocking on the doors of the indigent working classes and talk down to them in a condescending manner while conning them out of their Intellectual Property, which later ended up in a leather bound volume too expensive for the working classes to buy.

Dundee cake is a traditional Scottish fruit cake. The cake is often made with currants, sultanas and almonds; sometimes, fruit peel may be added to it. The original development of the cake began in Dundee in the late 1700s in the shop of Janet Keiller. It was mass-produced by the marmalade company Keiller's marmalade who have been claimed to be the originators of the term "Dundee cake". However, similar fruit cakes were produced throughout Scotland. A popular story is that Mary Queen of Scots did not like glacé cherries in her cakes, so the cake was first made for her, as a fruit cake that used blanched almonds and not cherries. The top of the cake is typically decorated with concentric circles of almonds.

First criticism, this recipe has glace cherries so someone has made an error, either Wikipedia or the Stork Cookery Service. Raisins, stoned, would imply you have to do this or buy ones that have the stones removed, I never knew there was such a thing always having been able to buy seedless ones. By the way, interesting fact, well I think so, seedless grapes from which they make seedless raisins aren't actually seedless. Seedless grapes have just been bred to produce seeds that are vestigial, or so small you don't notice them.

Vestigial - Forming a very small remnant of something that was once greater or more noticeable. The adjective vestigial derives from the Latin word vestigium, meaning "footprint, trace." It's most often used in biology to describe something that either didn't finish developing or has become, through evolution, pretty much useless.

For example, humans will soon have vestigial fingers as they increasingly carry out most of their lives using one hand and a mobile device. Future humans will only need a palm to grip the device and a thumb to operate it. Our critical thinking skills are also on the path to becoming vestigial.

The other thing to note is the word essence, as in, 1 teaspoon of almond essence. Essence has to be one of the most corrupted words in cookery language, using the word that means "the most significant element, quality, or aspect of a thing" to describe something synthetic that contains none of "the most significant element, quality, or aspect of a thing".

I looked up antonyms of essence but there really isn't a good one I can find. Maybe nobody in human history thought we needed to do the opposite of the essential. "Have you got some almond inessential?" Do you have anything almondless? In case you don't believe me, this is the current as opposed to currant definition of Almond Essence 60 years on. Almond essence is made using artificial flavourings and is therefore much cheaper compared to almond extract.

Strangely for a country too cold to grow citrus fruit, Britain has a very long tradition of cuisine featuring oranges in particular, my explanation being our ancient peace treaty with Portugal and the subsequent history of trade by sea with this near neighbour. The nearest small port to where I live, Salcombe, was once known as an importer of fruit from Portugal using quite small boats. Citrus fruits also keep fresh for a long time, so quite by accident of politics and trade Dundee in the far north of Scotland became famous for Orange Marmalade.

Now we travel almost the full length of Britain from Dundee to Devon, which as I explained has a tradition of citrus fruit importing, and again we see citrus fruit, this time in another preserved form, candied peel.

These two fruit cakes are not too dissimilar, almonds and mixed spice in the Dundee and treacle in the Devon.

Treacle is another of those strange words. - Treacle is any uncrystallised syrup made during the refining of sugar. The most common forms of treacle are golden syrup, a pale variety, and a darker variety known as black treacle. Black treacle has a distinctively strong, slightly bitter flavour, and a richer colour than golden syrup. Middle English (originally denoting an antidote against venom): from Old French triacle, via Latin from Greek thēriakē.

I have been either coming to Devon or living here for over twenty years and I can honestly say I have never heard of Devonshire Block Cake, it is possibly one that has slipped out of fashion, so I may make it as I have treacle in the cupboard with no other use. I will say now though that nothing would induce me to actually use Stork. I would be substituting it with either butter, lard or a mix of the two depending on the recipe.

For the next recipe I Googled London Coffee House Cake. Nothing. What did come up was the 10 best places in London for Coffee and Cake. Out of the ten, five were either out and out French or Frenchified, one was Japanese with a Frenchified name, one was Brownie based making it American, so that leaves three possible British entrants, for the country I and Emma Thompson would call the world cake capital, me proudly so and she out of embarrassment.

One of the British offerings was jazz and knitting themed, with vintage china and vintage cakes where nothing matches in a painful and expensive designer way, the sort of coffee and cake salon probably frequented by Emma Thompson, charity shop chic. One was designer "Working Class", opposite a Council Estate don't you know. It laughably says don't be put off by the Chelsea address which is almost certainly what actually attracts most of the customers. I do love reading London articles written by Londoners, they are just so revealing. The third British offering turns out to be a cutesy infantilised place for adults to go to, so that they can indulge in all the naughty things they were not allowed to eat by their nanny when they were little, that's if they even had a nanny and weren't shipped off to boarding school. So this one is all pink cakes and frosting and masses of toppings and fillings with nursery oopsy woopsy doodle do names. Presumably after you have eaten your cake, and the guilt sets in, they have a room at the back where some Corporal Punishment can be carried out by the Headmaster.

The absolutely very last thing you would ever find in any of these establishments would be a London Coffee House Cake. I bet you a Sacher Torte on that and hopefully you will raise me a Sacher Torte because frankly they are a bit dense and do need raising..

This next one is intriguing because I cannot fathom out what makes it "A Special Nottingham Recipe", not unless it is where they make Stork Table Margarine, as that is the only ingredient I would not expect to find in a traditional Gingerbread. Having said that a couple of recipes came up for Nottingham Gingerbread online although none explained why. Nottingham is more famous for HP Sauce than Gingerbread.

HP Sauce has a tomato base, blended with malt vinegar and spirit vinegar, sugars (molasses, glucose-fructose syrup, sugar), dates, cornflour, rye flour, salt, spices and tamarind. It is used as a condiment with hot and cold savoury food, and as an ingredient in soups and stews. Frederick Gibson Garton had a grocers and provisions shop in Milton Street Nottingham. He used a recipe for a brown sauce in his pickles and sauce factory in New Basford. Garton registered the name H.P. Sauce in 1895 and called the sauce HP because he had heard a rumour that a restaurant in the Houses of Parliament had begun serving it. The sauce bottle labels carried a picture of the Houses of Parliament.

Due to the invention of HP and the popularity of tomato ketchup a new political divide opened up in Britain over the last forty years. The media would have you believe that the major modern divide in Britain is the battle of Brexit or Remain, but this is just a typical media attempt to mask the real underlying division in the country and to push their own narrative. People have now found themselves split, with families torn asunder forever, lifetime's friendships crashed on the rocks as everyone falls into one of two irreconcilable camps of extremism. Do you have brown sauce or red with your full English? Breakfast is the battlefield, with colours nailed to the mast, the real tragedy being that the age old war with the entrenched beliefs on both sides has actually reduced the culinary argument to a simple request from your waitress "Red or brown love?"

There are traditionally two areas in England famous for cider, neither of which is Oxfordshire. Cider is very definitely a West Country thing and the famous ones mostly hail from Devon and Somerset the West Country neighbours of Herefordshire across the watery divide of the River Severn.

Google reckons it is from the South West too with an additional mention of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, so it looks like this recipe was fairly widespread.

Although receipts including cider as an ingredient are known in England since the 14th Century, cider cake seems to have first obtained significant popularity in the USA, the earliest version we know being in 'Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book' published in Philadelphia in 1857. She gives just;

Cider cake is very good; to be baked in small loaves 1 ½ lb of flour, half a pound of sugar, quarter of a pound of butter, half a pint of cider, 1 tea spoonful of pearl ash, spice to your taste. Bake till it turns easily in the pans I should think about half an hour. Foods of England

Pearl Ash is an entirely new concept to me and seems to be a very extravagant way to get a cake to rise. Pearls are expensive and in 1857 would have been even more so. However, it turns out that Pearl Ash is a term for a chemical.

Pearl Ash - An alkaline salt, pearlash (chemically known as potassium carbonate K2CO3) reacts with water or an acid such as sour milk, fruit juice, or molasses to create carbon dioxide. This gives baked goods lift. Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) all but replaces it in modern recipes. the spruceeats.com

The Baking Soda we now use to raise our baked goods has to be an improvement on Pearl Ash. The name pearl ash in fact has no connection with pearls at all apart from the appearance of the white powder produced from kilns that burned potash which is described as pearly white. It can also be dangerous.

Potassium carbonate is a white powder used to make soap, glass, and other items. It is a chemical known as a caustic. If it contacts tissues, it can cause severe damage, such as burning or ulcers, on contact. This article discusses poisoning from swallowing or breathing in potassium carbonate. Medecineplus.gov

It's interesting how the names in this book have faded in importance since it was written, now that we are a world online. For example entering Brighton Buttons into a search box brings up four businesses involved in selling or using actual buttons. Who knew that a place the size of Brighton would have such a contemporary button scene while having demoted the button biscuits to fourth place. Foods of England speculates that the name may derive from a Brighton in Australia of which there are eight, due to the fact the earliest recipe they found was published in a Melbourne newspaper in 1959. However I think it unlikely that this pamphlet published in the early sixties would have taken an Australian recipe to use in a tour of Britain, it's too contemporary. Surely it is more likely that the recipe for Brighton Buttons travelled to Australia along with all of the people who went there and founded the eight new Brightons?

As if to prove their theory wrong, the article goes on to say..........

We are hugely obliged to 'G Puckett' for discovering this receipt for 'Brighton Sandwiches'; "which seems to be a precursor of your Brighton Buttons. It’s in a manuscript cookery book dated 1866, belonging to a Miss Hudson of Ledsham.

Here is one recipe that really did stand the test of time and is probably still the most famous entry today in our little pamphlet. It is from a long line of pastry like cakes containing a sweet mixture of dried fruit and spices not too dissimilar to the Christmas mince pie which originally contained spiced and sweetened minced meat. Sweet meat is something that has since died out in British culinary tradition although it was popular in medieval times and still features in places like North Africa. In fact the definition of a cake no longer really applies to the Eccles cake and most people not familiar with it would probably describe it as a pastry.

Eccles grew around the 13th-century Parish Church of St Mary. Evidence of pre-historic human settlement has been discovered locally, but the area was predominantly agricultural until the Industrial Revolution, when a textile industry was established in the town. The arrival of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first passenger railway, led to the town's expansion along the route of the track linking those two cities. Wikipedia

It is thought possible that the "Eccles" place-name is derived from the Romano-British Ecles or Eglys ("eglwys" in Welsh means "church")

Eccles cakes are definitely a food that depends on it's recipe, it's freshness and the quality of the ingredients. For years it was something I would never touch until I found a bakery that sold what I would term the perfect Eccles cake, like no other. Sadly the owner of that bakery is now retired and the bakery is no more. We are left with the mass produced version available in motorway service stations which to me bears no similarity with the one I mention. Maybe they just have to be home made.

The expression "Home Made" is one that is now commonly seen in adverts or signs where food is sold. It has changed meaning somewhat and not unlike "essence" now describes something that is very much not home made. We go out for a meal in a pub to eat "Home Made" pies or go to a tea shop for "Home Made" cakes. It is generally accepted now that the term means the business is making things from scratch on the premises, not that the chef is making the food at home and transporting it to work with him in the back of his car. "Home Made" food has become something you need to leave home to experience.

Publishing was obviously an expensive procedure back in the 60's. Who can imagine a publication today issuing black and white photos of food? Here is the reason why, do these black and white images say eat me?

In Japan reproducing images of food has risen to a whole new level with three dimensional copies of plates of food that look as if you could actually eat them. In Japan we relied heavily on photographic menus until we found ourselves in a railway café in a Tokyo suburb having already sat down, when the owner came up to take our order and we realised there was no menu of any description. What do you do? So I proceeded to motion her to follow me while I walked around the café looking at what everyone else was eating, I smiled at the customers, pointed at their food and held up two fingers for quantity and we had a selection of different tasty things the only shock being when we tucked into the noodles and found they were ice cold. This is an example of insufficient input of information. What I should have done was stick my finger in the other customers dishes to do a temperature test.

Sampuru - is an example of an English word adopted into Japanese derived from the word sample.

In Japan, shokuhin sampuru (食品サンプル), taken from the English "sample", are widespread. In the late Edo period, in the 1800s, food sellers displayed a plate of real food each day in lieu of a written menu. During the early Shōwa period, in the late 1920s, Japanese artisans and candle makers developed food models that made it easy for patrons to order without the use of menus, which were not common in Japan at that time. Paraffin wax was used to create these until the mid-1980s, but because its colours faded when exposed to heat or sunlight, manufacturers later switched to polyvinyl chloride, which is "nearly eternal".

What will archaeologists think in 2000 years time when they are unveiling the remains of the world today with small delicate brushes in holes in the ground and they come across an entire menu in 3D, still in full colour.

Gairaigo - are Japanese words originating or based on foreign-language (generally Western most probably English) terms.

"I adore" the following examples....

aidoru - idol or pop star as in I adore you.

amerikan doggu - hot dog

arukōru - alcohol

baikingu - viking ( how often to Japanese people need to use the word Viking?)

bukku kabā - book cover

basu jakku - bus hijacking ( again, how many of these are there in Japan ?)

hotchikisu - a stapler ( from the genericised trademark EH Hotchkiss)

jipan - from jeans and pants added together to make Jeans.

koin randorī - coin laundry or Laundromat

and my absolute favourite

nyūhāfu - A transgender individual who has had a sex change operation. (from new-half)

But I am now seriously digressing. Where were we? Oh yes, poor quality black and white printing.

There are several similar cakes from around the British Isles that share the same simple ingredients and are cooked either in an oven or on a stove top on a griddle. The closest item in America that is similar would be the biscuit. Here the Scone is Universal while there are other more localised versions with slight variations, one of these being the Fat Rascal from Yorkshire.

In 1859 a Charles Dickens story identifies the Fat Rascal along with the Singing Hinny of neighbouring Northumberland. A Fat Rascal could also be baked as a turf cake, a buttery, flat cake baked in a covered pan among the ashes of a peat/turf fire, and the terms fat rascal and turf cake are sometimes used interchangeably. A Yorkshire cookery book of 1973 had plain flour, baking powder, butter and currants as the ingredients.

Rascal - a mischievous or cheeky person, especially a child or man (typically used in an affectionate way).

Will this be another name deemed to be offensive before too long? What will replace the Fat Rascal in the windows of Yorkshire bakeries? "Big boned, mischievous person" isn't quite as catchy or delicious.

This recipe has to be the simplest in the pamphlet with only four ingredients if you count the salt. Ireland is known for it's many potato staple recipes.

In 1845 a disease called potato blight swept Europe, and crops were devastated, nowhere more so than in Ireland. The difference in Ireland was that due to widespread poverty, dependence on the land, the small size of farms, and the poor soils and growing conditions up to three million people depended entirely on the potato for food. If the loss of up to half the crop in 1845 were not bad enough, the following year three quarters was lost. This led to starvation and a massive movement of population off the land. Up to a quarter of the entire population was lost either to starvation or emigration. By the twentieth century, plant breeding had eliminated the problem by breeding resistance to the disease into new varieties. It's clear from the recipe that this was poverty food that was meant to cheaply fill you up and provide energy. The average Irish person was, at peak reliance on the potato, consuming 10 lbs or 4.5 Kg per day.

In the less starvation prone times of the 60's the variations listed include adding cheese, bacon or even, the exotic for the time, anchovies.

Anchovies are a bit Marmite. Marmite is also a bit Marmite. If this all sounds confusing let me explain.

The expression "it's a bit Marmite" comes from the food product Marmite.

Marmite - a brand name for a type of soft, dark brown, salty-tasting food for spreading on bread, made from yeast, that is popular in the UK.

Marmite - an expression for something or someone that some people like very much and other people dislike very strongly:

Even Marmite itself has taken on board this attribute, by using the slogan "Love it or hate it". A certain friend of mine in Illinois, along with most Americans, hate it and no amount of PR on my part, on behalf of the devilish substance, has even slightly dented her disdain.

This is how anchovies can be described as a bit Marmite, so linguistically it is a fascinating development, as normally one would use one food to describe another only in the sense that they had a similar flavour, not to draw a similarity to how they are received by public perception. One wouldn't describe a strawberry as a bit caramel or vanilla ice cream as a bit sugary doughnut. In my particular case anchovies and Marmite, there is actually one common factor which is salt, both are noted for their saltiness. In other respects they are not similar other than the fact that both divide opinions.

Interestingly this most British of foods, unknown in France has a French name. If you have seen a jar of Marmite and puzzled over it's strange design in almost black glass with a rounded base you may not have realised that the jar itself represents a Marmite which is a cast iron pot used in traditional French kitchens. To add insult to injury Marmite was discovered by a German scientist Justus von Liebig in the late 19th century. The Germans were just not interested in spicing up their bland food in any way so kept on eating noodles and stewed pork. How the British got wind of it I'm not sure but in 1902 the Marmite Food Extract Company was formed in Burton on Trent.

Why Burton on Trent? Because Marmite is made from brewer's yeast which is a by-product of the brewing industry and in Burton there was one of the largest beer brewing companies in Britain, Bass. By 1877, Bass had become the largest brewery in the world, with an annual output of one million barrels. Early in the company's history, Bass was exporting bottled beer around the world. If you have ever seen Manet's famous painting Bar at the Folies Bergere, where the barmaid stares out at the viewer, then look at the bar top in front of her and you will see a bottle of beer with a red triangle on it. This is the Bass beer brand logo, one of, or possibly the first, internationally recognised food or drink brands. Bass was a pioneer in international brand marketing. "Many years before 1855" Bass applied a red triangle to casks of its Pale Ale.

Beware, pronunciation alert. For those of you who have trouble pronouncing Worcestershire Sauce here is another one. If you have an electric machine that you insert slices of bread into, which then heats that bread up until it goes brown or even black than you know how to pronounce this town in England, because Towcester is pronounced Toaster, or even Toe-stir.

When on holiday in Iceland, we turned up for breakfast in a rare hotel outside Reykjavik, there aren't many of them. Large signs in English on the Towcester or should I say Toaster, commanded that you did not in any way alter the controls of the machine even slightly, upon pain of death. So we inserted our bread, which popped up about eight seconds later almost warm and just as white as it had been when it descended into the slot. So obviously I altered the controls moving the heat setting from minus 28 to plus four. Now we're talking. Eventually something resembling toast emerged from the top, smoking nicely like proper toast should do, nice wafts of blue smoke, that filled the air. Proper toast, yummy. Icelanders obviously had no idea what was needed when it came to the prerequisites of toast manufacture.

Later after our interview with the police and after the Fire Service had left and the 128 guests had returned to their rooms, some of them still in their underwear, we decided it would probably be a good idea to check out before we were actually thrown out in utter disgrace. Elsewhere in Europe, British holidaymakers disgrace themselves by sleeping in gutters after they have consumed copious amounts of alcohol, or embarrass themselves by translating English into other European languages by imagining that saying things louder and slower will do the trick, but in Iceland, all you have to do to blot your copy book is to make toast or towcest.

One of Toaster's claims to fame, or should that be Towcester, is the so called "Treacle Bible" in the church. I could not guess what a "Treacle Bible" was and probably neither can you. If I say it has nothing to do with the ingredients of Devonshire Block Cake, recipe number two but more to do with bloopers or typo's it would be more accurate. The "Treacle Bible" as it became colloquially known was a later 1549 translation of "The Great Bible" which made a simple error in the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 8 Verse 22. It states "Is there no tryacle [treacle] in Gilead"? In Early Modern English, treacle had a double meaning and was also considered a medicine or cure all so the sentence should have read "Is there no medicine in Gilead?". Oh how people laughed. The Great Bible of 1539 was the first authorised edition of the Bible in English, authorised by King Henry VIII of England, to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England. The Great Bible was prepared by Myles Coverdale, working under commission of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Secretary to Henry VIII and Vicar General.

Over the centuries there have been many famous editions of the Bible with what we call typo's today. Some oddly nicknamed editions are, The Owl Bible, The Wife Beater's Bible, The Bug Bible and The Vinegar Bible.

"Oranges and Lemons" is a traditional English nursery rhyme, folksong, and singing game which refers to the bells of several churches, all within or close to the City of London. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index and the earliest known printed version appeared c. 1744.

It's lyrics give this pudding below it's name. Interestingly this recipe only includes lemons while most include both oranges and lemons, but then it also includes margarine instead of butter so it's off to a bad start. Incidentally it is pure coincidence that a certain cultivar of the orange is called a Clementine as it is named after it's discoverer Clement Rodier and nothing to do with the church in the nursery rhyme.

Oranges and lemons

Say the bells of St. Clement's

Today's eco warriors, the same people who lecture us about single use carrier bags in supermarkets while buying single use tents to attend outdoor rock concerts and festivals, probably have no idea that a hundred years ago people naturally conserved, reused , mended and salvaged virtually everything. Has Greta Thunberg ever darned her own socks? Unlikely.

In the same vein, most of them would turn up their noses at cooking with leftovers. It is a fact of life today that up to one third of fresh food bought, goes into landfills, thrown away by that same generation. If they knew anything about the past they would be aware that many older recipes are based upon saving the planet or as it was called back then being poor and destitute and not being able to afford to waste anything. Hence there are many old recipes which feature bread, quite often, openly stated "dry bread" or even "stale bread". So here we have a recipe of that ilk. This one is essentially the famous Bread and Butter Pudding with added fruit. Of course we cannot call this a Bread and Butter Pudding, so it would have to be described as a Bread and Stork pudding.

Kent was traditionally called "The Garden of England", producing most of London's fruit . Today most of it is a wealthy suburb of London commuters or the London retired, most of whom employ gardeners to work in their gardens. Kent was also traditionally included in the term "The Home Counties".

The origin of the term "home counties" is uncertain. Marcus Crouch, writing in 1975, thought that it derived from the Home Counties Circuit of courts that since at least the 18th century had surrounded London. Looking further back, he suggested that it included the counties in which, since Tudor times, it has been possible for civil servants and politicians to have their country homes and still be able to travel into London without excessive delay when they were needed.

So in fact, not a lot has changed since Tudor times. Civil Servants and Politicians still live in the Home Counties and spend their days making London easier to get into and out of if you live in the Home Counties. Billions of pounds are spent ensuring they don't have to spend too long getting to their offices, by banning ordinary people from using cars or entering the special zones where they work. Meanwhile rural Britons are lucky to have two buses a day.

A hilarious headline in the local paper yesterday stated, "South Hams to be hit hard by Rail Strike". Of course everyone who lives in the South Hams knew instantly that this headline was written somewhere in London. How, you may ask? Well the main reason is that there are virtually no railway tracks in the South Hams, and only one railway station of any note, the one that gets you to London.

There has probably been more argued and written, about the Bakewell Tart, than any other food in Britain, and much of it is hotly debated. Today the urban British population recognise The Bakewell Tart much as it is described in this recipe, but don't take it to Bakewell whatever you do, as to anyone in Bakewell itself, what is described here, is quite simply an abomination, a "Fake News" recipe. A corruption of the local delicacy The Bakewell Pudding, which bears little resemblance to the "Tart".

The pudding originated in the Derbyshire town of Bakewell. The origins of the pudding are not clear, but a common story is that it was first made by accident in 1820 (other sources cite 1860) by Mrs Greaves, who was the landlady of the White Horse Inn (since demolished). She supposedly left instructions for her cook to make a jam tart. The cook, instead of stirring the eggs and almond paste mixture into the pastry, spread it on top of the jam. When cooked, the egg and almond paste set like an egg custard, and the result was successful enough for it to become a popular dish at the inn.

Note that the description above likens it to egg custard, whereas the tart has more of a cake like interior.

The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop still lays claim to the original secret recipe. Normally at this point after this sort of story I would include the authentic recipe, but obviously this recipe is a secret, and as The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop have their own secret armed intelligence operatives who hunt down transgressors of the recipe, who then mysteriously disappear, I will not be including the recipe here, even if I had it, which I don't, obviously, honestly, definitely.

Just to throw in another pronunciation argument, can I just say that everything in America with the word Derby in it is for some reason pronounced Durby while in Britain obviously it is pronounced Daarby.

The first evidence of humans living in Derbyshire was from about 200,000 years ago, as an axe from that period was discovered near Hopton. Being that old, this axe was a stone axe, none of your new fangled metal. I would like to claim that analysis of the axe has shown traces of Bakewell Pudding on it but sadly chickens eggs only appeared in Europe about 197,000 years later. Of course it is theoretically possible early Derbyshireites made Bakewell Puddings with some other sort of eggs, like Pterodactyl for example, but we'll never be able to prove that. What we do know is that they were hunting rhinoceros and defending themselves from attack by lions and hyenas so they probably had their work cut out just staying alive and probably not a lot of spare time to go around whisking up eggs and almonds especially with a stone whisk.

I think Somerset Apple Amber has been glamourized a bit. Reading the recipe, it sounds more like a poor man's Lemon Meringue Pie, with apples instead of exotic lemons. My first thought with the word amber is it having insects trapped in it so probably not the best name anyway.

Searching for Somerset Apple Amber online, the best I can come up with is The Somerset - Apple and Fresh Pomegranate Multi Wick Peanut Oil Candle and that is the extraordinary price of £40 for something that you set fire to and burn, without it propelling your car. At least burning £40 of petrol has the advantage of getting you to Plymouth and back during a rail strike. Even the company selling it considers it so expensive that they offer the opportunity to pay it off in instalments. It is "inspired" by "dusky sunsets over misty Somerset orchards" so that is where the apples come in, but there is no sign of meringue, probably because it is "vegan friendly" as are most things which are grossly overpriced. You can have it with a lid and gift wrapping too, but that would be another £8.00, that's half a Quattro Formaggio Pizza, or a whole Due Formaggio Pizza on top of the £40 for the candle itself, which comes to £48 which would probably buy enough petrol to get me to Bristol and back in a rail strike.

I only make that connection with pizzas in case you were wondering, because I happen to have had an extremely good Quattro Formaggio Pizza last night and I was trying to think of something useful that cost £8.00, but it was £16.00, hence half a pizza.

These candles are also "Consciously Created" which was a surprise to me because I thought you would definitely have to be unconscious to invent a £40 candle. Certainly unconscious to buy one, it is a lot easier stealing someone's wallet if they are unconscious.

Hurrah! Finally, a recipe that does seem to actually exist online. Unlike the Somerset Apple debacle above, this one comes up with at least three hits so it really is genuine.

Debacle - a sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco.

There was me thinking that The Fiasco was a Latin American Dance, when it turns out it is actually a small Italian car, that I don't fit in, because I don't fit in any Italian car, like my feet don't fit in any Portuguese shoes. That is a bit off the wall I know, but I hold grudges, and years ago I spent a week in Portugal admiring all the beautiful shoes on sale only to repeatedly discover that none existed in my size. As Erin Brockovich famously says in the film Notting Hill, "What do men with big feet have?" long pause for comedic effect, "big shoes". Except in Portugal where men with big feet are barefoot.

Yes, I know Erin Brockovich and Notting Hill are two different films but did you know that while Julia Roberts was in the Diner acting the role of Erin Brockovich, the real Erin Brockovich played the part of the waitress and the real Ed Masry was also seen as an extra in the background. Check out the cast list if you don't believe me.

But I digress yet again.

Not only that, the recipe from the "The Women's Institutes' Book of 650 Favourite Recipes" is almost exactly the same, apart obviously from this Stork problem we keep encountering, because the Women, who unlike Men are wholly useful, are using butter and lard. Their book also sounds like much better value for money as it has 650 recipes, unlike this pamphlet.

The Women's Institute book is for sale online on a website bizarrely called "Eat The Books". Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Nobody wants to eat books. I blame these Millennials again, just because a book has recipes in it, it doesn't mean you can connect the idea of eating and the idea of reading into one handy phrase and turn it into a website. You might as well have a website specialising in gardening books and call it "Compost Your Books", actually composting your books would probably be easier than eating them.

I lived in Worcestershire for twenty years and I have never heard of this one. Hopefully, dear readers, we are up to date on the pronunciation of Worcestershire by now. The internet has not heard of it either, serving up all sorts of onion and cheese related offerings instead. The best suggestion was "Gruyère, spring onion and Marmite muffins", I think the spies and bots at Google now have me down as a fan of Marmite so I am being tracked by satellites and offered Marmite products at every search. I was after socks earlier today, but I draw the line at Marmite socks, or for that matter Gruyère socks, although it is sometimes difficult when blindfolded to tell the difference between Gruyère and socks.

Can you imagine what would happen if this targeting and cookies occurred in the real world? You'd be driving along looking for the garden centre and suddenly your car would swerve into a drive through Marmite emporium. "Hi there! We have a feeling you may be interested in Marmite socks?"

Spring onions are baby onions that have not formed a bulb yet, so they are just long and thin with green tops and white bottoms. Also called, Scallions, Green onions, Japanese bunching onions or Welsh onions. Although in fact in Wales, they are not called Welsh Onions, they are called Sibwls, pronounced Shibbles, which is interesting because the French word for Sibwls is Ciboule.

Durham Cutlets definitely sounds like peasant food or even something devised by the food rationing genius Lord Woolton. Lord Woolton, a businessman, not a politician, was put in charge of food supplies in Britain during the war. For a very interesting read on how he not only fed the nation on reduced supplies but also educated the public in nutrition while keeping morale high, I recommend the book "Eggs or Anarchy" by William Sitwell. It is full of facts about wonderful recipes for fake this or false that or imitation something else.

In fact it is another win for the pamphlet as it turns out to be a genuine article again and it brings us to fake cutlets. Durham Cutlets are described as minced beef with spices and breadcrumbs formed into a cutlet shape and fried. A piece of macaroni may be inserted in to represent a bone and the 'cutlet' decorated with a frill.

Known at least since the Liverpool School of Cookery in 1900 and a handwritten cookbook from the 1880's in the Lewis Lloyd Collection in Powys County Archives. Foods of England

No post of mine would be complete without pasties and the pamphlet doesn't disappoint in that respect, although I am not sure any Cornish Pasty ever had peas in it. So I am left unsure, as with several of the other recipes that don't appear on the internet, why they don't appear. Did the Stork Cookery Service invent them or did they just disappear around the time this pamphlet was published. We may never know.

What we do know is that trains have changed a bit since the 1960's. A cute blue steam train may have served as a symbol for travelling Britain when this publication came out but time was moving on and technology moving even faster.

At 7.58pm on 11 August, 1968 a black locomotive edged slowly under the arched glass roofs of Liverpool's Lime Street Station and ended Britain's age of passenger steam travel, where it had all started 138 years previously. The final journey of Stanier Five Black Locomotive 45110 from Carlisle to Liverpool marked the last trip by a mainline steam train in the UK.

Maybe that symbolic last journey also saw the end of our peasant cookery past and with it the recipes that sustained our ancestors. True enough some classic dishes have survived and are still popular but how many have fallen by the wayside we'll never know.