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.