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.