There’s a wonderful feel about egg and bacon pie – something reassuring about the sense of simplicity, old style homeliness and ‘tradition’. It’s unusual (for us anyway) to have things like this these days, but it’s an old blast drawn from the pages of the ‘Golden Wattle’ cookbook.
Becoming a parent turns most of us from rational, honest people into lying, cajoling and bribing individuals with a host of associated questionable behaviours. We lie to children about all manner of things, including the fat red man, the chocolate delivering member of the Leporidae family, and that dog that went to “stay on a farm”. Food in particular seems to bring out some of the worst examples, probably because children can be such picky eaters, which fuels our irrational fear they will starve to death or become an axe murderer or have some other grisly fate befall them. The story of space pie is one such example.
I’m not working from a large or statistically valid sample size here, but I think that by the standards of most home cooks these days I have a lot of cookbooks, somewhere close to 100 and growing. To this you can add a stack of magazines, a file full of clippings and handwritten things, additional electronic recipes I keep in my recipe software, and then there’s the internet. However, the subject of my interest here today is cookbooks rather than these ancillary sources, because (apart from witty, well written blogs <cough, cough>) cookbooks can offer insights and entertainment not available by other means, as well as other tangible and intangible value that appeals to me.
