Really Retro

 My Mum had just three cookbooks - an ancient Be-Ro book, Delia Smith's "Book of Cakes" and Marguerite Patten's "Cookery in Colour". She loved MPs book, and when any member of the church got married, she usually gave the happy couple a copy of this as a wedding present. When Adrian and Marion were moving house recently, they passed Mum's battered old book on to me.

Inside was a carefully folded recipe for a coffee and walnut sponge, torn from a magazine. Bob is really fond of C&W, so I decided to make one for his birthday. Sadly the paper is badly torn - and the instructions for time/temperature are missing! Fortunately the Stork website still has a similar recipe. When Bob went off to the Hospice on Thursday afternoon, I set to and baked his birthday cake.

It did not rise quite as well as I'd hoped, and the icing was a little runnier than expected. But it tasted good, nonetheless.

There is a very similar recipe in Delia's book. Delia's recipe requires 'coffee granules' - but the Stork one specifies 'coffee essence'. 

That is "Camp Coffee", a coffee& chicory liquid which has been around for 150 years. Back in Victorian Times, when India was 'the Jewel in the Crown' of the British Empire, hundreds of British soldiers were deployed to the subcontinent. The story goes that the Gordon Highlanders wanted to have a simple way of making coffee when they were on the march and in camp. 

Here is the bottle with the original label. General Sir Hector Macdonald is pictured outside his tent, and a Sikh servant brings him coffee on a tray. The CIC's bearskin is on the ground at his feet.

Over the years, this label has been redrawn a number of times. But until relatively recently, the bottle was made of glass. I only ever used Camp as an essence [never to make a drink!] and so my bottle was old and sticky. Before we left Dorset, I rinsed and recycled the one from my cupboard, which has barely a tbsp of liquid at the bottom.

Here's my new, plastic bottle. The Sikh and the Officer now sit side by side, as equals, sharing coffee together. The flag over the tent still says "Ready, Aye Ready" - the battalion's motto meaning Ready, Always Ready - a nod to the convenience of the product.

The label on my bottle alerted me to The Camp Coffee Club - a website with dozens of useful recipes, including yet another coffee and walnut cake.

Maybe this bottle will get used up faster than the previous one.

Mum's cookbook lost its colourful dust jacket years ago, and is now covered in clear 'Fablon' ['sticky-backed-plastic' as they always called it on Blue Peter]

I shall enjoy reading it through again, seeing what recipes were popular in the 1960s - just after rationing ended, but before soft margarine, food processors, and microwaves reached the average domestic kitchen. We had lovely home made biscuits at our craft group yesterday - and were told "the recipe came from another mum when I was at Toddler group, more than 40 years ago"

Are there any retro recipes or ingredients regularly used in your kitchen?