Cooking With Richard

Wonderful thing, the internet. Everything is slowly being catalogued and placed online by devoted collectors. When I was a child I owned several books in the How and Why Wonder Books series - devoted mainly to topics in the natural sciences. A person called Rob Storey is collecting these and has put all the book covers online. The one I remember best was the dystopic and frightening The Spoilt Earth, a post-apocalyptic vision of an environmentally degraded world. (Here is another, smaller collection of covers) Now I’ve just got to wait for someone to scan the contents and put those online too. You can’t buy good quality science books for children any more. Instead you get tame nonsense like this, nothing dangerous because of course the publishers might get sued.

Delicious pesto from a recipe from Jamie’s Italy book:

The pesto is home made, from a couple of bunches of basil.

Medieval recipes website. Some interesting ones including baked mallard and marmalade of quinces.

This is a cookery book for women (obviously) from 1968. Look at that cover. Look specifically at the combination of kebabs, nasty looking tinned sweetcorn, and cheap red wine.

It contains a few crimes against food, particularly in the savoury section, reflecting, I think, the lack of available ingredients at the time:

On the other hand there is a promising recipe for pork pie, and the cakes (where English cooking is traditionally excellent) look really good:

This monster of a book comes in at 884 pages and it’s all about food & science - for instance why eggs go hard when they’re cooked and why fruit goes brown when chopped. I got it after reading an interview with Heston Blumenthal where he says that he became fascinated with the science of cooking after reading this book, and naturally started to experiment.