Book of a lifetime: Collins Family Cookery by Elizabeth Craig

From The Independent archive: Rachel Hore treasures her mother’s copy of this culinary bible – aimed at celebrating a Britain just off rationing – although she still has yet to make the shepherd’s pie with whale meat

A young girl helps in the kitchen while her mother bakes a cake, circa 1955 (Getty)

Elizabeth Craig’s formidable career as a cookery writer spanned 60 years, and she must have been in her seventies when in 1957 she compiled this culinary bible for the post-austerity generation.

My mother acquired the neat brick of a volume with its no-nonsense white cloth binding and lurid colour photographs soon after her marriage in 1959. During my childhood, I was frequently to find it lying open on the Formica, dusted with flour, as she consulted it for Liver and Kidney Devil or one of the hated milk puddings then considered de rigueur for healthy children. “Yoghourt” (sic) gets only a brief mention on page 764, under “Invalid Cookery”. Ski, the “full of fitness food”, wasn’t to brighten children’s mealtimes until the 1970s.

I love the book as a snapshot of my mother’s times. Its peremptory foreword, by the author’s husband, commends it for keeping alive the art of cooking, which he fears is slowly dying. He berates the “lazy or overburdened housewife” for serving the new “prefabricated” food. In her introduction, Craig pre-empts the thrifty who might “jib at the general use of butter or gasp at savoury dishes containing six eggs.” Britain had finally come off the ration four years before, and this cookbook celebrated the fact.