Smackerels and provisions

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

WEEK 16

The book

The Pooh Cook Book by Katie Stewart

How/where/when did I get it?

Spirited away from my mother-in-law’s bookshelves a few years ago, as far as we can remember

Have I used it since then?

Well, only when ‘we’ were very young.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Lemon nectar. Toad-in-the-hole.

So, what about it?

It was one of those hot and sticky kind of days when nobody really wants to do much except sit around. The birds were calling to each other in that particular way they have, and we were all in the kitchen, and there really were an awful lot of lemons, so we decided to make lemon nectar from The Book. There was honey in the recipe, and that meant Pooh Doing Some Helping, and he got some stuck on his fur accideliberately, which meant he had some for later, so he didn’t tell anybody.

While the nectar was getting cold in the fridge, Pooh looked wistfully at the clock and said ‘I wonder if it might be time for a little something’, and we checked and he was right, so that meant getting the sausages and all the things for the batter and Piglet did the batter, so when we’d wiped the walls down and bought more milk and eggs and flour we made the batter again, but this time a bit more slowly.

Once we’d got all the cutlery and crockery, plus some spares just in case Someone Important dropped by, the toad-in-the-hole was just done, with the batter perfectly crispy on the outside but sort of melty in the middle, which is just the way we like it, so we started eating. And halfway through the toad-in-the-hole Piglet suddenly asked ‘What are sausages made of, exactly?’ and there was a bit of a silence. But then Pooh, in that friendly way he has, gave Piglet an extra crispy bit of batter, and we finished it all up and agreed that meals like this were just the kind of thing we needed in Times Of Difficulty And Need.

And by the time we’d cleared everything up it was very nearly supper time.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

Don’t be ridiculous.