Tag Archives: cooking

Vintage Cooking Books

Vintage Family CookbookFollowing on from my thoughts about incorporating some of the best ideas of the 1960s and 50s into modern meals, the next essential you need is a good vintage cook book.

Back in those days money was tight and books were an expensive item but every family had a much-used and often quite old cookery book that was both read for its own sake and referred to for special meals. My mother, an excellent cook, still had two or three books for inspiration but that was all she needed.

One staple book, I remember, was the Good Housekeeping Cookery book which was first published just after the Second World War and, amazingly, is still in print (although now updated of course).

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Vintage Cooking In The Kitchen

No one would want to go back to a 1960s (or worse a 1950s) kitchen with its primitive appliances and lack of storage but perhaps vintage cooking is about combining the best of the old with the convenience of the new.

One big difference between then and now is that far more meals were actually prepared rather than being chosen as convenience food and then heated up in the microwave. From a health point of view, as well as from a fun angle, this can only be better and suggests two very good approaches.

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Woman’s Weekly May 1960 Part 4

womans weeklyI recently acquired from the internet an old copy of Woman’s Weekly for 14 May 1960 and I thought it would be interesting to look and see what was inside and to see how different life was in those far off days and also how different (or similar) magazines were then.

We are now out of the magazine start pages and into the horoscope and then on to the main articles which form the bulk of the magazine.

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Woman’s Weekly May 1960 Part 3

womans weeklyI recently acquired from the internet an old copy of Woman’s Weekly for 14 May 1960 and I thought it would be interesting to look and see what was inside and to see how different life was in those far off days and also how different (or similar) magazines were then.

As I said last week, the next item is a short story. In fact, this is a long story published in episodes each issue by the magazine and is ‘The Fair Prisoner’ by Iris Bromige.

It’s an excellent story from the instalment that I have here and further research reveals that Iris Bromige is an author of some note, born in 1910 although whether she is still with us, I am not sure.

She wrote romance books aimed at women and this is a serialised version of what appears to be a book published by Hodder and Stoughton as ‘Fair Prisoner’ in 1960 so the book was probably serialised in this magazine and then published. The book was also reprinted by MacMillan in 1969.

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Woman’s Weekly May 1960 Part 2

example_womans_weekly_paper_print_photosI recently acquired from the internet an old copy of Woman’s Weekly for 14 May 1960 and I thought it would be interesting to look and see what was inside and to see how different life was in those far off days and also how different (or similar) magazines were.

We have looked at the cover so it’s now time to have a look inside and, before we begin with the content, one thing that is immediately apparent is the paper that the magazine is printed on.

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Woman’s Weekly May 1960 Part 1

womans weeklyI recently acquired from the internet an old copy of Woman’s Weekly for 14 May 1960 and I thought it would be interesting to look and see what was inside.

The magazine was launched, would you believe, in 1911 and, so far as I know, it is still going today and can be brought in the newsagents. The magazine has its own website which describes the magazine as Help, advice and inspiration for mature women. That is a description which, I believe, fits the magazine in the 1960s as well. From the website you can also download a high res image of a recent magazine cover to see what is inside.

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