Thrift-store find: All you need to know about English cooking

An occasional series that examines odd, interesting, and even valuable items found in thrift stores or at estate, yard, and garage sales. Sometimes, though, it's just old crap

Lots of food manufacturers put out their own cookbooks with their products featured prominently in every recipe.

This old find from that haute-cuisine hotbed known as England, picked up at a East Side sidewalk estate sale for almost nothing ($2 along with a hardcover book of Stephen Jay Gould essays), is no different. (The original price is on the cover: one shilling.)

What makes the 96-page cookbook an interesting read are both its dated assumptions that only women venture into kitchens (and, presumably, stay there) and its window onto fave British dishes. Although it is undated, I would place its origins at somewhere about the mid-1950s.

The headlined product is Spry, a “ready creamed” and “snow white” vegetable fat that is, supposedly, revolutionary because it can be used in both frying and baking without leaving any taste.

A passage about “health” says all you need to know about English attitudes toward eating at that time (some might say that has carried forward to the present day):

In this climate, a certain amount of fat is a necessary part of the diet. Fat helps bread and potatoes and flour and sugar to digest. Fat and these floury, sugary foods give vigour and strength to youngsters and to their parents. Our bodies know this, before our minds. That is why bread and potatoes and pastry and cakes are a large part of what everybody likes to eat…No mother can do better for her family than to cook them plenty of cakes, puddings, pastry...

The book goes on to list fave English recipes such as veal forcemeat, kidney soup, a bacon-and-eggs fry-up (“the eggs are crisp...so are the sausages”!), marmalade pudding, sponge sandwich (with “1/2 gill of milk”, helpfully translated as 1/2 “teacupful”), and water icing. All, of course, cooked with plenty of Spry, which “is going to make good cooks out of many women who have been a little shy about their pastry, unduly modest over their cakes”.

Can’t wait.