Where do my recipes come from ?

It’s a question I’ve often been asked and sometimes I can remember exactly where I found them. One of those is the Flapjack recipe. I was working at a school in Hertfordshire, job-sharing with a lovely lady called Judith. In those days we taught commodities – meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese etc and methods – creaming, rubbing-in and melting. The pupils brought their ingredients from home and so flapjack with syrup often finished up on the floor of the oven after an almost volcanic eruption. Reading the daily newspaper I came across a recipe for Oat bars which looked promising – melted method but flour to stabilise it all. Judith tried it, then continued to make it for her family for the rest of her life ! Other recipes are clearly from magazines. Prima in autumn 1997 gave me some wonderful Christmas recipes and my old cookery notebooks from my school days yielded the fork biscuit one. So you see they come from so many different places, but I keep going back to the tried and tested ones – there’s a lot to be said for reliability. I still have some precious recipes which I’m reluctant to share – foremost is Granny Pat’s chocolate cake…I promised some young people I’d keep that just for us – sorry !