Caitlin Barr decided to recreate some vintage recipes from her grandma’s 0ld cookbooks; she is yet to recover.
While clearing out my grandma’s house with my mum a few summers ago, we came across a shelf of recipe books. Nestled amongst some classic Delia Smith cookbooks and several drinks volumes (with such charming entries as “Vodka and Coke: put the ice cubes into a highball glass, pour the vodka and Coca-Cola over the ice, stir gently and serve”), I discovered a collection of Sainsbury’s recipe collections. They were all slim books, priced at 99p, and crammed with gloriously 80s photos of brightly-coloured party food and homely family meals.
A Google search told me that these volumes of The Sainsbury Book of…, penned by well-respected food writers including Anna Del Conte, Josceline Dimbleby, and Barbara Maher, were classics of their era, selling millions at checkouts. They were the first of their kind, produced by a supermarket chain with recipes using ingredients you could nip into one of their shops to source.
As I pored over the pages, I stumbled across recipes ranging from the twee (rhubarb and apple cobbler, leek and potato soup, chicken liver pate) to the disturbing (peach and rice meringue, grape and orange salad with ham, herrings in oatmeal).
I resolved to make a couple of dishes, Julie and Julia style (but with significantly less time, budget, and Stanley Tucci). I selected two recipes which were suitably deranged, but palatable to my picky taste buds, and prepared for what I was sure would be an enlightening and wholesome experience.
What transpired taught me more about the sheer perplexity of 80s cuisine than I’d originally envisaged – but also entirely broke my spirit. No wonder homemakers were throwing back benzos, cheffing up these wretched recipes every night.
I began with the ominously titled ‘meat pancakes’ on the understanding that pancake batter is simple and involves nothing more than bunging in some meat and flicking my wrist a few times. How naive I was.
Ten minutes later, I was staring at a congealed mass of what was once flour, milk, and egg, now resembling beige vomit with chunks of raw onion and lamb in it – entirely un-flippable in its sheer stodginess. It was unceremoniously scraped into the food waste bin.
How did we get here? Did adding the lamb to the batter decimate any chance of a structurally sound pancake? This thought had occurred to me, but that was what Julia Roles, author of The Sainsbury Book of Family Meals, had demanded. Who was I to argue with a woman who had, I can only assume, an impeccable perm? It was the 80s after all.
“Mr Blobby’s blended remains went into the food waste bin, garnishing the onion-smattered beige pancake corpses”
Nevertheless, I was determined to actually sample the dish, so ploughed on with a second attempt, spirits slightly lifted by an 80s Spotify playlist. Another disaster, just about edible, but an entirely unpleasant culinary experience. The recipe took all the flavour out of a regular pancake and replaced it with bland mush. I ended up salvaging the rest of the lamb by rinsing the batter off in a sieve while Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House played.
Next, marshmallow mousse. It looked so fun and so violently pink in The Sainsbury Book of Children’s Party Cooking that I had to give it a go. Highlights of this endeavour included: spending 20 minutes cutting up individual marshmallows; adding a colossal amount of food colouring to achieve the shocking pink hue; realising said food colouring had a use-by date of 2012; getting such a tired wrist from whisking jelly into evaporated milk that I had to employ my mum’s electric beaters; and the fact that three days later, it still hadn’t set. Mr Blobby’s blended remains went into the food waste bin, garnishing the onion-smattered beige pancake corpses.
I am in no way blaming my failure on Julia Roles, Carole Handslip (‘trained home economist’, author of Children’s Party Cooking), or even John James Sainsbury himself. The fact that so many people still have these books in their kitchens, according to Mumsnet and X, is testament to how well-loved and useful they were – and still are. Yes, I have reconsidered my plans to throw a dinner party based on Children’s Party Cooking, but a part of me still longs for a spoonful of marshmallow mousse. For now, I think I’ll hang up the apron and leave the meat pancakes consigned to history where they belong.
