Forme of Cury, which was written in 1390 in Middle English, details more than 200 recipes that were cooked in the royal household, including blank mang (a sweet dish of meat, milk, sugar and almonds) and mortrews (ground and spiced pork)


1390!!! crazy! I cant make out a word but I love that this recipe book has survived and is being so diligently taken care of and now recorded. Trying to find some more information on this and maybe find out if these dishes have been adapted and stayed in everyday use. Keep you posted!

I wanted to look a little deeper into the notion of inherited recipes. The dishes that are passed down from generation to generation. There is a limitless supply of blogs devoted to recording and exploring recipes that have been handed down through families, but my favorite thing that I discovered was an article from the guardian that was written on the subject. The fantastic language used to depict the Indian food with the wonderfully recognisable sensation described in response to the intense flavors.
The reference to 'a timeline of culinary engagement' is beautiful. It creates so perfectly the image of a woman who has worked and crafted with food for her entire life. The history of one whole aspect of her being can be found within this box, written upon cards from the past 50 years.
The one clear side to the cards is also gloriously poignant, highlighting the gift that is being passed down from mother to child. By carrying on her legacy, building on her existing collection, her child becomes a continuation of her. Despite her years and that she has finally stopped cooking, she has still not come to an end as her recipes are still being made.

We may believe that our generation (whichever that may be) was the first to have discovered global culinary exploration travels, but this is complete nonsense. Looking through Mother's recipes cards under B, I find Beetroot Soup (Armenian) followed by Biscuit Tortoni (frozen), Bent Biscuits, Blackberry Granita followed by, best of all, Bloody Mary which includes a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters. Now, there may be any number of you who add Angostura bitters to their Bloody Marys as a matter of course, but I don't think I was ever aware that this is what my mother did, but as soon as I read it, I knew that it made complete gastronomic sense.

There was a wonderful dinner of Indian dishes that she cooked on return from a holiday in India, the freshly ground spices singing in each mouthful, clear and precise, but European food remained her primary source of inspiration. So there are recipes for fennel à la Greque and hard boiled eggs in soubise sauce, panoche stew that begins in uncompromising style "Mutton cutlets, cut in small pieces" and kidneys Turbigo; pirozhki and tongue with almond and raisin sauce.

They add up to a timeline of culinary engagement. I can tell by her handwriting that some of these recipes must date back 50 years or even further. Some are credited to the house her grandmother kept 80 years ago. She always claims that the food there was among the best she ever ate. One or two must have been added in the last few years. I have just noticed that, with characteristic thrift, at the back of the recipe box are all the cards with recipes she either re-transcribed or discarded, still leaving one side of the card clear and ready to be filled up with fresh inspirations, an open invitation for me to carry on her orderly practice.

My mother wasn't the only one of her generation to collect recipes assiduously. There must be many more out there. What culinary wisdom has come down to you from previous generations?

So, scouring the internet for more information on the sharing of recipes, throughout the ages, I found about a billion food blogs and online networks and cooking challenges and internet noticeboards, all designed to help people around the world share their favorite recipes.
People everywhere seem to share the same desire when they make something incredible, they want give it to their friends, their family, and everyone else they can reach.
What I didn't find, was much of anything about how people shared recipes with each other years ago.
I did find one wonderful article however, about a recipe that a woman dearly loved and her attempts to find out where that recipe came from.

This is Maria's story:

I married a prospector who worked for Mount Isa Mines.

We spent a few years early in our marriage travelling the outback and I benefited from his experience there, particularly with cooking on an open fire and with a camp oven.

He called one dish he taught me "Steak Gerard", but it was not a fried or grilled steak at all, nor even a French recipe in my opinion.

It had the aura of the genuine outback - beef, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, flour and water.

Instead, it was what I would call a slow braise of shin beef.

He taught me the recipe from a carefully written piece of paper always carried with us, for he had not invented it.

He too had learned it from someone else and the recipe had been written down by the mechanic on the prospecting team, one Arthur Rains, from their time in Herberton in North Queensland and around Cloncurry in the west.

But my husband Eric, did not know who had taught it to Arthur.

The dish was delicious and it was amazingly easy to make.

I made it for years both out bush and later in our homes on regular stoves.

I served it at dinners and always received praise for it.

Eric had added a yeast dumpling from 'Egerland' (or an Austrian imperial) cuisine which sat alongside it on the plate as if invented with it.

Then came Cyclone Tracy and a lot of my life took off with her over the Arafura Sea into oblivion, including the recipe for Steak Gerard.

Eric had died too by then and it took me a few years to find a settled life again, by which time I was in a quandary about the precise quantities of some ingredients.

Silly really, because there are but a few.

So I set about recreating the recipe and it took several experiments before I had a recipe I thought was acceptable.

Alas, it still was not the same taste as the old one had yielded.

But I lived with it and I have continued to use that recreated recipe for a few decades now, but often wondered about the origin of the recipe and what the original quantities were.

This week on a strange whim I decided to look online for "Steak Gerard", just in case.

To my delight I was whisked through cyberspace to a site for ABC radio in Western Queensland and there was a recipe for Gerard Steak from a cook in Longreach.

I don't think any prospecting team ever looked around that town for minerals, or at least none but the fleece of gold, but that area was generally correct for a regional cuisine based around Mount Isa.

And, yes, the ingredients were the ones I recalled and the quantities similar but subtly different to the list I had recreated.

So, I offer you "Steak Gerard", thanks to Arthur Rains, mechanic and Deirdre Williams from Western Queensland.

I still wonder who put those ingredients together for the first time - for it would have to have been in the outback, don't you think?

Since then, we've discovered a little more about the history of the recipe, or at least two places where it has been published in the past.

Carolyn Willersdorf from Longreach heard Maria's story read out on the radio this week and said, "I knew immediately that I had the recipe in an old school cookery book."

She said the book was one she used when she studied at Domestic Science High in the Technical College grounds in Brisbane.

Mrs Willersdorf thinks she would have first made the recipe in her first year at high school, which was 1956 and it's one she still enjoys today.

"It's an amazing recipe.

"It's one that's sort of stuck with me all of my life anyway, since I've been cooking," she said.

And the cookery book from Mrs Willersdorf's high school days is called "The Simple Cookery Book" and it was published by the Queensland Education Department.

There's also another interesting connection.

The recipe came to ABC Western Queensland from Deirdre Williams and a Miss Williams was Mrs Willersdorf's high school cooking teacher back in the mid 1950s.

The next step in finding out a bit more of the history of this recipe was of course to ask Deirdre Williams herself, how she came to have the recipe.

She also had the recipe in a book she had at school in the 1970s.

The book was called "Day-to-Day Cookery" and Deirdre says she no longer has the book, but she has the recipe written out in the "Big Book" (a large collection of her favourite family recipes).

She says it's a special recipe because it's so easy and it's really well flavoured.

But her memories of the recipe date back before her high school days.

It was a recipe her mum used to cook for the family on Saturday evenings.

"When we were kids, there were nine of us.

"We were a big Catholic family and every Saturday night we went to church and mum would cook this 'Steak Gerard' and put it in the oven with potatoes baking as well.

"She'd put it on before we left and it would be ready to eat when we got home."

Deirdre Williams says she still makes this recipe for her family and has also contributed it to another published recipe book.

It's called "The Charleville School of Distance Education - Back for more".

So the legend lives on.

But we still have no idea who may have invented the original recipe, or how it came to be part of the repertoire of an outback Queensland cook or part of the Queensland Department of Education cookery books.

If you know more, you can add your comment to this story or share your thoughts on the ABC Western Queensland facebook page.

I don't remember the first cake I ever baked, assisted or otherwise. As far back as I can recall, I have had the knowledge of how to make a simple sponge cake ingrained in my understanding. I need neither a recipe nor scales (though scales do admittedly help) and I can whip up a cake in half an hour or so.

Since I realised this I have begun experimenting. These are strawberry cupcakes I made for valentines day. They are my own recipe and my own recipe for white chocolate frosting too. They were gross! The frosting was great but I should definitely keep it for sharp flavors like raspberry cake.
I bake all sorts of things but I still always refer back to that one first recipe that my mum taught me. I think recipes shared so directly and personally are always the ones you remember the best and use again and again.

I feel I've been neglecting one of life's richest source of recipes. TV.
I don't know if you've seen the show 'man vs food' but its amazing. This guy travels America, trying every food challenge in the country. He looks at the most incredible, huge, awesome food and he talks to the owners and cooks in the restaurants and diners that make it. They show him, and the viewers, how they make their most impressive dishes and I always long to recreate them.
Obviously I cant make a 30 inch pizza and I don't have access to 50 oysters but I can do burgers!
Bun, onions, burger, pork belly, cheese, bacon and bun! EPIC MAN FOOD!!!!!

Been looking at a range of recipes lately, from the detailed and complex to the very very simple.
I've been wanting to make stuffed peppers for ages just because they look so awesome, I hunted around and found all sorts of options but none of them looked like what I wanted.
I knew I didn't want to use meat, I wanted a lighter meal and meat was an indulgence I couldn't really afford anyway.
I was walking around Tesco and saw that Halloumi was on offer and so I made the most of it and bought some.

Returning to the internet, now armed with fancy cheese, I found a recipe that definitely ranks in my all time favorites.
Cut the tops off the peppers and empty the seeds out.
Little bit of oil and roast them for 20 mins.
Make up some simple couscous, mix in chunks of halloumi and some fried mushrooms, fill up the peppers and roast for 20 more minutes.
This recipe wouldn't be great for a first time cooker but I quite liked its short simplicity.
Only thing was, as always, I made way way way too much!

The first recipe books date from around the first century, and for centuries after this they remained very similar, just taking the form of lists of recipes for haute cuisine, completely ignoring the food of the lower classes. Over time this changed and recipes aimed at people with more moderate budgets grew in popularity. Tips on ingredient substitutions and saving money started to be included along with the basic instructions for preparing a dish.
Now, thanks to the internet, its possible to search recipes of different prices or by different foods. Online recipe circles have begun to sprung up in recent years. They are made up of groups of individuals who may never have met, swapping recipes and sharing cooking advice.
The other day I discovered Pinterest for the first time and I think it might be brilliant. It's a forum used to share fascinations that people discover in their online journeys. It has hairstyle tips, inspirational quotes and best of all, recipes. People 'pin' the things they like the look of so they can find them again or send them to someone they know that they think would be interested. So strawberry mojitos and salt caramel chocolate squares, four cheese macaroni bake and honey flavored ice-cream can be collected together into your own personal recipe book, safely stored on the internet and accessible from anywhere.

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library has an extensive collection of recipe books, most of them from the 17th and 18th centuries. These were not the sort of recipe books that we have now, published as complete works. These were compiled by their owners, made up of recipes that were handed down to them, collected from friends and family or developed by themselves. Even once recipes had begun to be printed and published to the masses, people still cut out their favourites and collected them together and shared them amongst themselves.

At Christmas my mum made an epic veggie dish for my dad to make up for fact he cant eat turkey (the idea of eating animals freaks him out, which to me just seems weird) and I made sure I stole a piece cos it looked so good! Its a caramelised red onion and goats cheese tart, its really simple to make and it tastes incredible. I made this for me and a few friends last week and it was a huge success.
Rather than looking up a recipe or even getting my mum to write it down, I just phoned her up and get her to talk me through it really quick.
I got pre-rolled puff pastry and scored it all the way around about an inch from the edge without cutting all the way through. i then pricked the middle square all over with a fork and brushed the outside with egg. That then went in the oven for 20mins at 180 until it was all puffed up.
In that time I did the onions. My mum told me that its a delicate balance between caramelising and just overcooking  but I tried them pretty frequently after a while to make sure they were good.
When the pastry came out the oven I flattened down the middle square just with my hands and then I filled it with the onions. I placed slices of goats cheese evenly spaced all over and then sprinkled it with dried thyme because I couldn't get any fresh.
After going back in the oven for another 20 mins it was done.
I actually found this really easy to do, despite the lack of written instructions but obviously it would have been basically impossible with a more complicated recipe.

For years now, the main dish that I'm used to my dad cooking is mushroom risotto. As a kid I was really fussy and not keen on it at all but luckily all that changed and now I'll eat basically anything. In the few months before I came to university I started trying to learn how to make my favorite meals so I wouldn't miss them if I couldn't go home too often. Imagine my disappointment when I asked my dad for the recipe for this and he showed me it was on the side of the rice packet!
I have to say though, this is one of the easiest and one of the best recipes that I've encountered. It is short and simple and if you follow it closely you get perfect, amazing risotto. Its not chatty or fun like some recipes, it really is the bare essentials, instructions laid out in numbered steps, but for what it is it's absolutely perfect.

Ok, so on my internet wanderings I saw a picture of some cupcakes that someone had made for her daughter's birthday party. She called them Princess Cupcakes, a perfect name for these girly, girly treats. Ever since I saw them I have been desperate to recreate these wonders and add them to my repitoire. A couple of weeks ago I made a wonderful discovery that finally made this possible, Fluff marshmallow spread is now available in ASDA! I whipped up some simple chocolate cupcakes from one of the recipes drifting around my head, and I filled them with fluff using the filling attachment of my icing set. I then made pink and lilac vanilla frosting and piped it on in pretty swirls. A fantastic cake, though really really sweet!

What I really liked about making these was that I didn't follow a recipe. I just sort of muddled through and figured it out as i went along.

So, here you can see a picture of the chocolate and hazelnut biscotti I made. It's something I've made with my um before and it turned out great. She helped less this time, foolishly assuming that I could make it myself, and so of course it went inexplicably wrong.
The recipe is from Joyofbaking.com, a great website for baked good recipes. Loads of my favourite things to make are fro this site. It's a long recipe so I wont include it here but it's a really good one for taking you through the process step by step. It is clear and broken down into separate actions, each one with its own paragraph for easy reading. it does, irritatingly, assume that you will own a food processor and an electric mixer (which personally I've always kind of thought is cheating) but apart from that, this recipe is so well written and clearly laid out that it seems to be fool proof. This does make the fact I did it wrong more difficult to understand, but at least I didn't do it so wrong that it didn't still taste great, it was just oddly flat. I could have refrigerated the dough for a while before baking to firm it up a little but I wanted to stick to the recipe and see what happened. This is one of many little tips picked from my mum and my grandma who have both been baking a lot longer than me. Some recipes include advice like this but not joyofbaking, maybe because they just don't take into account that people like me will always find a way to get it wrong.

As far as I'm concerned, food is the best thing in the world. Right back in the very beginning it was the ultimate temptation, the fruit of the forbidden tree. And yet we don't just eat fruit anymore, we have come so beautifully far since then. We now have steak and chips, fried chicken, cupcakes and the bacon double cheeseburger. We may have been kicked out of the garden but the world still seems like a pretty fantastic place to me, and food might actually be worth it. Food has become linked with culture, with wealth, with sex and with pretty much everything else good. It's that perfect mixture of sustenance and indulgence, necessity and decadence.

Food is not just food anymore, it is a creative outlet. some people wont just make a meal, they'll make a masterpiece. We share recipes amongst ourselves, altering and perfecting them; handing them down through generations and passing them around communities until there are recipes for an immense number of meals and delicacies available throughout the world to anyone who wants to look for them.

This sharing of recipes used to be something personal, a gift handed from one individual to another. The introduction of more and more cookery books to the world changed all that however and suddenly there was a 'correct' way of making things and at first this seemed to be dictated by women of high society with no real cooking experience at all. That changed of course and cookery books are now a fantastic source of various tips and recipes. I think I could probably amuse myself for hours just looking through a good cookery book, thinking of ways to adapt their culinary marvels to my limited budget. The internet allows me to do this and has brought a personal nature back to the world of recipes. I was absolutely thrilled when I found a recipe for Dublin Coddle that looked absolutely great to begin with but then had also been commented on by dozens of people suggesting variations and adaptations. The recipe itself was written much like any other, with a sort of dispassionate formality, but the comments had all the colloquialisms and exclamation marks you could want.