Random reminder

Press, 4 October 1977, Page 49

Random reminder

GASTRONOME’S GALLERY

The 1936 edition of “Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery” is illustrated — well, “copiously” is the only word for it. Not only do we find a and white illustration of a baked haddock (haddock, alas, is not seen to its best advantage in black and white, and the illustration looks more like a picture of the rag one wipes the dipstick of one’s car with), but we are given a picture, also in black and white, of boiled potatoes, which at least look like potatoes, and of green peas, which look like black undersized mussels. Presumably the nervous young mistress of a household for whom Mrs B. was writing had been so gently reared that she would not recognise a potato for the

first time, boiled or otherwise, unless she was shown a picture of it. Likewise with kitchen implements. We are shown in the clearest detail a wire saucepan brush and. a dish mop (labelled respectively “wire saucepan brush” and “dish mop”), presumably in order to prevent the new bride from mistaking the wire saucepan brush for a tea caddy and the dish mop for a plate rack (which is also illustrated). But it is in the coloured illustrations that “Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery'” really comes into its own. What modern cookery book, for instance, contains a picture of three different invalid trays? Where nowadays can those whose pleasure it is to

gaze upon dead snipe and other game birds And a book which enables them to do so? What other work of reference depicts, in glowing colour, plovers with potato straws or “Calf’s Head and Bath Chap.” (Bath Chap is not, as you might have thought a sort of valet with special responsibility for flannels and soap, but a kind of ham.) The scandal of it all is that the artist who painted these’ vibrant works is nowhere named. We just wish we had been old enough to purchase the originals at the time they flowed from his brush. They would make the average hedge against inflation seem like a twofoot paling fence.