Remembering Grandad on his birthday

It was my Grandad's birthday this week. He would have been 94. Although his name was Frank, he was always known as Jim. I have no idea why. No one seems to remember.

On Mum's bookshelf there are many pictures of him, which I will share over the coming months.

For his birthday, I'm going to put up one of my favourite photos of him.

Jim is about 8 years old and sitting in a garden in Ipswich. I don't know who Doug and Denis were - my Grandad was an only child. They have some charming metal toys which they are showing off to the camera. Two of them look like they might be in school uniform. The shadows look long, perhaps they were playing together in the garden after school one day when someone (my great grandad?) took a snap.

When I look at it, I see my own 7 year old boy in that  little boy with the big grin, captured on film in the late 1920s.

A book for ordinary middle-class families who cannot afford to despise margarine

One book that seems a little older than the other cookbooks in Mum's collection is the Bestway Cookery Gift Book, first published in 1926, which suggests that it may not have come from my paternal grandmother's house. Mum picked up things like this from lots of places, including older friends of hers. 

The Spectator from 1926 offers a review of this book as a "most excellent receipt book giving exact directions". It is aimed at the "intelligent amateur" and with a nod perhaps to the economic climate of the time,  it will help "ordinary middle-class families who cannot afford to despise margarine or to throw away materials." The "squeezed middle" of the 1920s perhaps?

One such example of  'waste not, want not ' is this recipe for Essex Cakes, which requires the use of the residue from making lard known as 'scraps'. Unlikely that I'll be be trying the original recipe for these cakes, given that I'm unlikely to be able to get lard residue anywhere, but the recipe is quite simple so could work with a vegetable fat.