Food - Bee Wilson counts the pennies being lost in our kitchens
"For some reason," writes Delia Smith disapprovingly, "spending money on recipe ingredients and kitchen equipment is sometimes difficult, and countless people just muddle along and make do." I wonder what that reason could be. Might it possibly begin with "p"and end with "y", containing the word "overt" in the middle?
These days, the "economy" in domestic economy seems to have all but dropped away. Delia is not alone in writing for an affluent audience, though her popularity makes the point more striking. It's not just the "recipe ingredients" she blithely bullies us to buy, ranging from bags of porcini (at £8) to organic cocoa, organic chickens and Tiptree redcurrant jelly. Her methods, too, assume a careless wealth. Occasionally, she will recommend a pasta dish as "great for students" or praise the cheapness of corned beef hash. But she seldom, if ever, these days shows awareness of the cost of heating an oven and running a hob, or tells us what to do with the second half of a mozzarella for a recipe that needs only 50g of the stuff.
There are many more extreme cases than Delia. Every day, you could watch, if you chose to, TV chefs throwing away litres of nutritious egg whites and heating the oven up to full blast just for a petit four or two. It is a sign of our peaceful, luxuriant times that we worry more about the fattening cost of a chocolate nemesis cake than its expense.
Only 20 years ago, Rosemary Wadey's Cooking For Two began with the warning that "careful planning is necessary so fuel is not wasted when cooking in small quantities". How quaint this sounds to modern ears. Elizabeth David, too, always paid attention to economy as well as taste - a "very economical" and toothsome recipe for "braised and grilled breast of lamb" is one of her most celebrated. The trouble is, such dishes take time (by way of shopping as well as preparation). And time is just what is said to be scarce by those who spend five minutes preparing the readymeal they will eat in front of three hours of TV. Cooking cheaply, moreover, is difficult for those who live alone (or eat grumpily apart from the rest of their family).
Victorian chefs such as Charles Francatelli, the author of A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1861), relied on economies of scale. Francatelli assumed that he was writing for large families. His boiled beef, which stretches a piece of brisket a very long way with dumplings, parsnips, potatoes and cabbage, is "economical, especially where there are many mouths to feed". Mrs Beeton, whose work was also published in 1861, usually reckons on numbers of eight or so. She costs most recipes to the last penny: economy is a "Home Virtue", "without which no household can prosper".
One writer who really took Mrs Beeton's words to heart was a certain Mrs Richmond, whose How To Feed A Family: 14 good and economical dinners for a party of eight persons of whom four are children appeared in 1916. Writing during the high prices of the Great War, Mrs Richmond never misses a chance for economising. There are austere tips on how to manage a stockpot (boil for two days), how to get the most out of a single fire (bake tomorrow's tapioca pudding along with today's beef pasties) and what to do with stale bread (make apple charlotte). Problems with vegetable refuse? Make compost! Leftover shank bones? Use them for invalid soup! Her repertoire ranges from dinner one: "Green-pease soup; kidney pudding; banana shape"; to dinner fourteen: "Carrot soup; rissoles; chocolate mould." Mrs Richmond even zealously reuses a strip of lemon peel from an apple pudding by drying it out in the oven ready to "flavour" some gruel or mince. This is the opposite vice to today's heedless egg-throwers: an economy too far. As Mrs Beeton put it: "Frugality and Economy must never . . . be allowed to degenerate into parsimony and meanness."
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