Goode Cooks

I grabbed a couple of old cookbooks to read on holiday. I have had these for years. I'd watched Shirley cooking on the BBC when the girls were tiny. Always incredibly frugal - and fond of making a meal for 4 for next to nothing - but sometimes a little strange in her approach.

I have heard her described as "The Jack Monroe of her day" - and in some ways she was. She began being super thrifty when the money ran out, and she had to produce family meals from what was in the cupboard.

She had a chatty down-to-earth style, and occasionally produced some very bizarre dishes in an attempt to cut costs [but who am I to comment - 'bizarre' and 'chatty' are adjectives frequently applied to me and my cooking]

Rereading the books I concluded that they are very much 'of their time'

1. There's no mention of broccoli, pitta bread, wraps, couscous or blueberries.
2. She makes bread- but using a packet mix
3. She makes her own soft margarine by cubing a block of hard marg and beating the cubes with warm water till soft.
4. She makes cream by melting butter and gelatine in milk and liquidising it, but uses a lot of 'synthetic non-dairy' cream on the grounds that it is cheaper, and if well flavoured,nobody will know!
5. She makes next to no references to a vegetarian diet

Those foodstuffs in point 1 are easily available and most people are used to eating them. These days most people I know who want 'interesting' bread either buy it ready-made, or make their own from scratch. 'Soft' spreads are inexpensive and available in many variations- why make your own? ditto cream. Her ideal meal seems to be meat and two veg with a cheap carb laden pud to follow

Having said all that, I did find her recipes a useful starting point when our girls were tiny and our income was the same. She costs everything to the last penny. In 1987 she set herself a challenge of feeding herself for 4 weeks on a weekly budget of £15 [this is set out in Goode For One] I found it interesting to compare prices then and now. 

Her basic shopping list was divided into 4 - meats/fruit&veg/dairy/groceries. She allowed herself £3.75 for each section. I've meticulously worked out the change in prices now - and although £15 then is equivalent to about £45 now - three times as much ,the price of her foods has only doubled. So food prices in relative terms appear to have fallen. Some things have gone up a tea, coffee, fish - whilst a can of beans, an iceberg lettuce, sunflower oil and rice, cost about the same. Milk has not increased much in price- look at the struggles of our dairy farmers to keep going when the supermarkets pay them the minimum.

But having said all that, these are useful basic cookbooks for someone attempting to be thrifty, fond of a trad 'British' diet. I am not planning to keep them - they are very much the worse for wear - all the pages are there, but some are loose., and I have written a few notes in the margins.

Shirley wrote a blog from 2006 till her death in 2015. It is still online - but sadly it doesn't have any sort of index which makes it hard to track down her best recipes. But if a couple of you would like these little gems I will happily post the books to you. Comment below and at the end of the week I'll draw the winners' names out of my sunhat!