Family Fortunes: My mother’s recipe book

Rolled oat shortcake, March 1947. Coconut buns, April 1957. Dropped scones, November 1959. These are just three recipes from my mother’s recipe book.

The book, beautifully handwritten in a small accounts notebook, holds our family treasures. My mam was a wonderful cook, but the desserts and cakes were the special times. And no wonder: some of these recipes have “home” in brackets at the top of the page, so obviously Granny in Kells passed on her baking talents and tips when my mam married and settled in Birr in the 1940s.

At the back there is a recipe for a cough cure. How well I remember the whole eggs being left in vinegar overnight until the shells disappeared. Then honey was added and this disgusting liquid was spooned into us morning and night. It was renowned for curing and for eliciting groans from us children.

Or the furniture polish using turpentine, paraffin and methylated spirits. Imagine the smell of that.

Then a new style of handwriting appears. My writing. The recipe that makes me smile is for toffee, using sugar, butter and golden syrup. The final instruction was “then eat”. And, oh, we did. Mam allowed us to ruin her saucepans with burning sugar and to probably destroy our teeth with toffee. Her recipes, and memories of her baking, are so special.

But the pièce de resistance, the recipe that will live on in our family, is her plum pudding. The pages have received many a splash of egg and butter. In a more health-conscious (or more affluent) version, we now replace the suet with butter. This pudding is now made in the US and France as well as a few houses in Ireland every year.

So forget Nigella, Jamie, Donal or whoever is in vogue: the old stuff is definitely the best.

And it’s those recipes, covered in blotches, that I will always remember.