What's the muckiest page in your cookery book? (Literally)

Mine's a Mary Berry carrot and banana cake . My go to cake with some adaptations.

 

Mine is also a carrot cake recipe! It’s not a book, but a folder of recipes typed out by my late grandmother.

In second place, is her recipe for Peanut Butter Squares - that’s peanut butter and melted chocolate on that page!

 

When I was round at my parents house a while ago my dad was making some of his marmalade, as he has done for many decades. Couldn't resist taking a pic of it

 

Mine are a Nigella dense chocolate loaf, her non-traditional Christmas pudding and Delia’s apple and almond pudding - I think we must have a sweet tooth or several

 

Christmas cake. Luckily the mucky version one is a photostat of the one in my cookbook. I keep a three ring binder of my favorites for copies so as to preserve the good books.

 

How will your descendants know what's worth trying? @CanadianLori . A sticky mucky recipe proves either that it was used by a messy cook or that it was used over and over. A pristine recipe is just that.

 

I don't plan on taking the binders with me when I go!

 

Mine's Prawn Chilli Masala. Splashes of a fetching shade of turmeric yellow with flecks and seeds of chilli... Oh and the Murghi Tikka Masala, that's colourful too

 

What's a cookery book?

 

Mine is christmas cake and pudding taken from the TV Upstairs Downstairs. Made big mistake the first year I followed the recipe for the pudding.....it was for many many people but I hadn't realised until the amount mounted up and I had no more basins to put it in. Learnt very quickly how to downsize the amounts for the one pudding I wanted for our family. I still follow the recipes but find that I can't get crystallised angelica anymore. Tried to do my own from our garden plants and then forgot I had done it!

 

Mine is the curry page in most of my cook books.

 

I like reading cookery books but I tend to just go online and use recipes from there, once I've worked out if they are good enough.

Given how much home cooking has progressed over the last couple of decades due to the increase in sharing of information online, a lot of the old books are out of date. Things like brining, sous vide, reverse searing are all easily utilised by home chefs, yet plenty of the popular cookery books don't reference this.

Cooking meat by time/weight is no longer relevant to me when you can cook to internal temperature or tenderness and you get a much better and consistent result

That said here's one of my great grandmothers recipes which I still make now and again