Book review – food history

‘Sometimes, in the search for originality, the most obvious dishes are forgotten,’ says Elizabeth David, the doyenne of cookery, in her book French Provincial Cooking. I often think of this phrase when I’m writing about vintage cookery. So much of food (and food writing, and writing, and media, and life) is trend-driven. It’s all about novelty. I look at the handwritten list of my planned vintage recipes – ‘chocolate mousse, custard slice, beef olives???’ – and have to acknowledge that my particular wheelhouse is anything but original. I try, though, to hold David’s words close: those ‘obvious’ dishes are known for a reason. And their familiarity is part of their appeal. David was writing, specifically, about oeuf mayonnaise.

‘That’s not a pasty!’ my husband declares loftily, eyeing up what most definitely is a veritable clutch of cheese and onion pasties emerging from my oven. Handsome, puffed up, golden brown (the pasties, not the husband), filled with a cheese, potato and onion filling, contents threatening to splurge. The steam rises from them like in a cartoon, almost beckoning us towards them. ‘Oh, OK,’ I reply, sweetly. ‘I shan’t trouble you with them.’ He backtracks. No, no, perhaps he was hasty. What did he know about pasties? Shouldn’t he just try them anyway?