Hints From My Great-Grandmother's Cookbook

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a cookbook belonging to my great grandmother. Today I want to share a few excerpts (hints, rather than recipes) from it.

Let me start with the comfortable, homely words from the foreword:

All recipes are simple and practical.

No expensive ingredients are used and all can be bought in any New Zealand town.

Special attention has been paid to utilising odds and ends of vegetables, fish, meat, stale bread and cakes etc in many appetising ways.

A young housewife following through with the recipes given here can order her household without one ounce of waste in food.

Cookbooks like this one (Una Carter's Famous National Cookery Book, 7th ed, no year or publisher given on cover or fly) are *really* the way to find recipes to help you save. Look for old cookbooks written before World War II; or at least before 1960 - these are the recipes and tips which will really help you save.

Hints from the Recipe book:

• Use a wooden spoon for stirring
• Sieve flour for lightness
• Use breakfast cups to measure a "cup" in recipes
• Use old magazines as pot stands
• Keep lids on pans when cooking soups and stews
• Measure all ingredients before commencing to mix
• Have all tins greased or prepared before commencing to mix

I'll bring you more excerpts and of course a few recipes from this book as well as many of my favorites from other sources. Old-fashioned notions still have a lot of merit, even coming up to a century later :)