First recipe - part one - family cookbooks

"Good food, sharing and celebration"

This is the subtitle of this first recipe pick - Charmaine Solomon's Family Recipes. I'm turning to it for this post because of another coincidence in my life. I actually picked it out a week or so ago and it has been sitting on my desk waiting for me to use it. And today another completely unrelated event has spurred me to do this.

I'm still on Charmaine Solomon as you can see, but this one is a little bit different to her others. It includes recipes from her and her husband's families past and present and also stories of her life, her ancestors and her family life today. In the process, both in the introduction and also scattered throughout the book she tells stories of her ancestors and her family of today. The recipes are not just from her - they are from her ancestors and from her children and partners too.

I daresay there are other similar books out there, but the only other vaguely similar one that I have is Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook: Food for Family and Friends, although now that I think of it I guess Nigella Lawson's first book How to Eat is almost in the same kind of vein. Jamie Oliver, of course, has many recipes dotted here and there in his books from his parents, grandparents, wife and also friends, but not, I think, one dedicated to his family food.

It's also interesting that Charmaine Solomon's book is one of her later ones, while Nigella Lawson's is her first book. Madhur Jaffrey's is somewhere in the middle I think. I guess there are equally good reasons for it being a first or a last book. First - because, this is probably where we all begin - with the influences from our personal past, and last -because you've run out of creativity - I think Delia once said that she was 'all recipe'd out' - or because you now feel confident enough to return to your roots.

Charmaine Solomon's roots are particularly rich and varied. On her father's side she is of Dutch Burgher descent - a mix of Dutch, Portuguese and Sri-Lankan. On her mother's side it is even more complicated - Irish, Anglo-Indian, French and Indonesian, with her youth spent in Burma and adulthood in Sri-Lanka. And then her husband, a musician, is Jewish but born in Burma. And of course, they have lived here and there before finally settling in Australia - itself a melting pot of cultures from around the world.

Each recipe in the book has a fairly lengthy introduction about where it comes from, and throughout the book are scattered family photographs and a very few pictures of the food. The emphasis is very definitely on family.

When my children left home I created my own Family cookbook. This is the pretty simple cover I created. It started out as wanting to give them the recipes for all their favourite dishes - the Dearman top ten I called it - for as teenagers they were very boring in their tastes. But when I started it I found myself putting in ever longer, and longer sections on the influences that made me the cook I am, plus what to have in the kitchen and general tips about cooking. I also used each recipe as a jumping off point to suggest similar recipes and ways to vary the basic thing. They seem to have appreciated it and still use it and the other books that followed. The first one being so successful I made them several more, although I have not done so for some time now. Well they and their partners are all accomplished cooks now, passing on their wisdom to their children.

Until now that is. And here we come to the coincidence. It is my son's partner's birthday on the 1st October and they are coming to dinner on Saturday. As a birthday present my son suggested I give her a cookbook of her own - a selection of his tried and true recipes - mostly from my first book, plus a few new ones. And so here I am with a first recipe and family cookbooks.

I have no such book from my mother - my sister may have some scribbled recipes somewhere. But mostly what was passed down was oral and demonstrative. Ditto for my other cooking influences - the French ladies who fed me on all of those prolonged stays in France. However, a few years ago now, for my book group choice, I decided to do cookbooks. As well as presenting a mini history and a discussion about cookbooks in general, I asked all my fellow book groupers to bring along a favourite cookbook and it was revealing that a few of them brought along handwritten, scrappy collections of recipes from their mothers. We cling to our origins do we not? Comfort food is family food - the food we remember from our childhood and youth, wherever that might have been spent - good food, sharing and celebration as Charmaine Solomon says. The celebration being the birthday parties, the traditional meals - one of my top ten in fact was the Christmas turkey.

So our first influencers are most probably our mother, then it's on to recipes and the discovery of great cooks who influence us in different ways, make us more adventurous and creative. On the very first page of this website is the following quote:

"If you can read, you can cook" Yotam Ottolenghi

Simple but so true and one that I have always believed in. Anyone, I believe, can cook. They just need the right books - and the right books might not be the same for everyone. Charmaine Solomon says the same thing in a slightly different way:

"The best friend a novice cook can have is an author who takes the trouble to tell you not only how but also why you should do this, that or the other, and I found some who did."

And you will find that most cookbook authors acknowledge somewhere - either in their dedication, or in the official acknowledgements - the cooks who have influenced the way they cook.

"The research for 'Family recipes' was done in a different way - absorbing knowledge from the generations of cooks who preceded us. It is with no less gratitude that I acknowledge these cooks, whose notes I am still discovering with delight in their old, handwritten collections of recipes." Charmaine Solomon

In my first family cookery book, and actually in a few subsequent ones I also acknowledged those cooks who influenced me - starting with my own mother, through the French, to early teachers - Elizabeth David, Robert Carrier and Jane Grigson, down through all of the other favourite cooks I have discovered throughout my times of browsing the bookshop shelves and watching television - Delia, Jamie, Nigella and Nigel, Yotam Ottolenghi, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Beverley Sutherland Smith et al. And, amazingly there is always something new to learn.

I have stopped making cookery books I guess, in favour of this blog - which seeks to do much the same thing, although the influences are more widespread here and the topics go well beyond cooking the Dearman top ten. But maybe the printed word is something I should return to, as I do now for Sarnai.

There are lots of tempting recipes in this book. (Why don't I use my cookery books more often?) Here is just one that I use from time to time - very tasty dip from Charmaine's daughter Deborah.

SUNDRIED TOMATO TAPENADE

She says she uses the sun-dried tomatoes you buy from a greengrocer - well I'm not sure where you can get them, but I have seen them - sold loose. She doesn't mean those in oil - though mind you I have used these and it works perfectly well.

125g sun-dried tomatoes

1 cup boiling water

1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley

1 clove garlic

small piece of lemon, including skin

olive oil

salt

Soak the sun-dried tomatoes in the boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain, reserving the water. Blend the tomatoes to a purée in a food processor with the parsley, garlic, lemon and 1/4 cup olive oil, adding a tablespoon or so of the soaking water to facilitate blending. Taste and add salt in moderation. transfer the tapenade to a jar and pour a layer of oil over the top. Keeps for a few weeks in the refrigerator.