The Family Cookbook

Lots of people do them. This one will be ours. Yesterday Connie and I wrote an introductory piece to send out to everyone who’s not (as far as we know) on the internet. She’ll be posting them out this week sometime. If you’ve a family connection, this is your invitation:

Family Cookbook: for contributors

Background
Connie & I have been talking for some time about a joint publishing effort, where she writes the words and I do the pictures. She has a lot of rather good short stories, but neither of us seems to have really begun. When my friend Gill Cawley made a very sweet family cookbook featuring her own delicious cake recipes we thought it a superb idea, so the plan is something similar.

Publishing
I’ve used Blurb before: you create your book on your own computer using their software and upload to a system which allows people to buy copies for themselves. Obviously we would want to get the balance right between top quality and affordability, so initially we’re thinking something approx 10cm square, choice of hard or softback, and running to maybe 50 or so pages, costing maybe £10 per copy. But the size and format would depend entirely on contributions, and on suggestions and ideas from contributors.

Contributors
Anyone with a family connection to any of the Coates or Burrell people, however remote, would be absolutely welcome and wanted. So that’s relatives however close or remote of the Willington Coates family, the Brafferton & Ingleton Nelsons, and the Birmingham and more widely spread Burrells.

We’re including dead people: my grandmother’s famous custard, aunt Sylvia’s favourite Battenburg cake, recipes from the renowned Audrey Burrell, jams from the magnificent Armstrongs, and we have a few vegetarians and many dedicated carnivores and cake addicts.

Tom Burrell is a fantastic cook and has come up with good suggestions about layout. But, and this is very important, you don’t have to be a fantastic cook to have a recipe in the cookbook. It can be your own favourite pasta sauce recipe, or the way to make your own perfect cup of tea.

We have a long history of ‘bait’ boxes in our family, so a section on packed lunches would be perfect too. Sandwich fillings and maybe pie suggestions, anything that used to go in a working lunch parcel in the old days, and/or anything we take to work for lunch now. They’re bound to be different.

Layout
The idea is a combination of useable recipe book and an interesting read for anyone connected to the family, so good pictures and clear descriptions, with a sprinkling of old photographs and family memories will be what we’re looking for.

An example layout would be a double page spread per recipe, with photo on the left and text, recipe and a few words about the author or the ingredients on the right.

There will also be room for whole page articles about individual contributors with a photograph or two, and memories of people who are no longer with us.

Next steps
Tom, Connie and I will be spreading the word around the family. We’ll be printing several copies of this so they can be mailed to people who don’t have the internet, and I’ll be making a blog post, and posting it on Facebook. Please feel free to do the same.

We’ll be spending the next few weeks/months contacting people and assembling recipe content & old photos, and gathering stuff up that comes in to us. By about the end of the year (Dec 2010), we’ll have a sort of editorial discussion to work out how the pages will start to flow, and I’ll begin publishing it, a (draft) recipe at a time, on my blog, with photos, so people can comment there, change or add anything, before it goes in the book.

We’d love you to join in! Send your handwritten recipes by postal mail to Connie, or by email to me brenda@b13.co.uk

Any questions, ideas or thoughts, please contact me Brenda

We look forward to hearing from you.

Here’s how to make an ice bowl like the one in the photograph above.

1. Choose two bowls, of any size, but of a similar shape, and one smaller than the other, and do make sure they’ll fit inside your freezer.

2. On your draining board, fill the larger bowl half full with water. Gently add the smaller bowl and top up with water between them. Add small pebbles or marbles until the levels of the water are to your liking.

3. Water expands as it freezes: put the bowls on a tray to catch the drips and gently place in your freezer. Leave overnight.

4. When thoroughly frozen, add warm water to the upper bowl and wriggle in a circular motion to gently ease out. Put back into the freezer for another hour to set the inner surface.

5. Gently lower outer bowl into a basin of warm water and remove your finished ice bowl. You can freeze again until needed.

6. You can add herb leaves at 2. for a summer salad bowl, flower petals or small pieces of fruit for a dessert bowl, or slivers of lemon for a prawn cocktail.

Enjoy.

And please do start sending me your recipes!

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