Through the Ice Pages

Being an absolutely awful cook, embarrassingly proven the other night when I managed to microwave a meal to an inedible state, I generally regard cookbooks as magical food bibles of pleasure and inspiration. This viewpoint may seem exaggerated, but cookbooks to me are like fairytale food stories. Describing the friendships and adventures of ingredients from the mixing bowl to the serving plate, the happy endings of recipes, being the creation of delightful and tantalising foods, are as unreal to me as the idea of a fairy godmother transforming me into Nigella Lawson, or Prince Charming rescuing me from the culinary witch’s terrible cook spell. Considering this, it is probably not surprising that I generally refrain from creatively cooking (tinned tomato puree pasta, with grated cheese being one of my cooking specialities). However, by using my imagination when reading recipes, or enjoying the food illustrations which accompany them, I still enjoy the magic of cooking. I am aware this may sound strange, but I suppose the point I am trying to make is that cooking is about enjoying the style, language and presentation of a recipe, as much as it is about enjoying the food prepared.

During my childhood, a food which I was always fond of making was Hedgehog shaped bread, a recipe which appeared in a Rosie and Jim annual we owned. Though, as you might have already guessed, my finished bread generally did not resemble a healthy looking hedgehog, despite my mum and dad praising its likeness, I always enjoyed following the recipe’s easy step-by-step guide and admiring its colourful illustrations. Another recipe I always enjoyed making with my mum was coconut ice. Assigned to adding the final ingredients to the coconut ice mixture after it had cooled, I would often whilst waiting to do my job admire the cookbook’s illustrations. The illustration which I always spent the most time observing was a photograph of sweets. Displaying, fudge, peppermint creams, chocolate coconut pyramids and other delicious confectionary, this page transported me to sweet heaven. Today, the boxed sweets which centre in the middle of the photograph remind me of the confectionary boxes which feature in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, Matilda (1988/1996) and the movie Forrest Gump (1994).

  Photograph from,

 Marguerite Patten's Cookbook.

In Matilda, there is a scene in which Miss Honey and Matilda enter Miss Trunchbull’s home and find a chocolate box which belonged to Miss Honey’s father. Carved out of wood and decorated with an elegant gold design, there is something enchanting about this chocolate box, which presents each delicately wrapped chocolate as exquisite and magical. Just by observing these chocolates, you are able to taste and sense the pleasure of eating them.  This notion of sensing food through its presentation is greatly demonstrated in Elizabeth David’s, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), as the introductions, ingredients and language of recipes, evoke the appearance, smells and freshness of Mediterranean cooking. This transports the reader to an idyllic paradise, as they sense the pleasures of being on holiday. In view of the notion, that visual and linguistic representations of food can stimulate our taste buds and make food more desirable, as we seek the created pleasures of our senses and imaginations, I would like to consider further the argument I make in my opening post. This being that ice cream is highly popular due to the way it is presented to us.  

  Which ice cream would you choose?

However, to avoid making this post to long, I have decided to split it into two scoops and explore the presentation of ice cream in the second. Though this post seems to digress from my ice cream blog subject, it was actually motivated by some colour plates from Mrs A.B. Marshall’s, The Book of Ices (1885), which I purchased at the London Canal Museum. Extremely colourful and emulating the creativity of cooking, these colour plates made me think about what entices us to cook a particular recipe, or to cook from a certain cookbook. Similarly, it made me consider what seduces us to select a specific dish from the pages of a restaurant’s menu, contemplating overall the power of language and imagery. This leads to the question:

Will food which is impressively and imaginatively presented through language and imagery, generally fail the expectations of our imaginations when eaten?