Num Num Num! (The Dairy Book of Home Cookery - Clark Gellings)

Member Name: shewhoguards

Product:	The Dairy Book of Home Cookery - Clark Gellings
Date:	28/05/08 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A wide variety of recipes with photos

Disadvantages: None

I'm not really in to fancypants cookery. All of this Jamie Oliver stuff - a pinch of this, arrangements to make it all look delicate and pretty... it's all just a bit too fancy for me. I like food, I like cookery, and I like mucking about in the kitchen, but what I enjoy more are recipes I can grasp the basics of and then alter as I wish, recipes that help me use up leftovers, and recipes that are in general very simple. This means I steer clear of all the Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver stuff and go for older books - seventies and eighties is generally perfect.

I snatched this up for 50p on a car boot sale and I think it's going to become one of my more used ones.

It's a nice big book - A4 sized and hardback. The front boasts of over 700 recipes, and despite needing to cram all those in they still manage to spare the entire first chapter for a basic lesson on nutrients, what foods they can be found in, and what the body uses them for. The second chapter is then spent talking about more specifically dairy foods (it is a DAIRY cookbook after all).

And then we finally come to the recipes. Ice cream - a load of different flavours. Starters - delicious sounding things like Cheese and Apple Pears and pates. There are cocktails, there are soups (lemon soup! I must try), there are things to do with left over lamb, there are cakes and deserts - even sweet recipes!

Unusually for an older recipe book there are also lots of photos - my mouth is watering just looking at them.

Once upon a time a housewife could have lived out of a book like this, whisking up a meal for every occasion. I don't intend to go quite that far, but it will certainly come in very handy.

Unfortunately it looks as though it is currently out of print on Amazon, but second hand copies on there start at around £1.50. I suggest grabbing a copy - it's certainly worth far more than that.

Summary: I can see myself having a lot of fun with this