Sherryburgers

Another one from beloved Peg. From a section entitled Last Minute Suppers: OR THIS IS THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE. According to dearest Peg, the recipes in this section are for those times when … there you are again at quarter to six, with your hat still on, staring at a pound of minced steak or a tin of tuna fish. Lady, if I were EVER home at 5.45, I would thank my lucky stars and be able to cook a flipping roast dinner! This is not the time I would classify as needing Last Minute Suppers! Anyway, I get her point – you can frequently find me getting home at 7.10pm and staring miserably into a fridge containing one bendy carrot and my cupboard containing a huge tub of custard and a tin of BRISLING…

Betty’s Cocktail Biscuits

From a chapter of Peg Bracken’s “I hate to cook book” entitled “Canapés and Heartburn Specials; or – WHO STARTED THIS BUSINESS?”. Good old Peg. Her book is full of recipes involving condensed mushroom soup and packets of French Onion Soup Mix and cheery disdain for people with “fat cookbooks”. Peg seems to live in a constant hair-pulling whirl of party invites populated by people called Ethel who “deep-fat fry small objects or wrap[] oysters in bacon strips”. My book comes complete with someone’s scrawled notes over it in pencil, which get increasingly exasperated as the pages turn, like, “what IS this?!?!?!?!?!?” and “NO“, and “try my frozen onion mix”. Whole party selections are crossed out, like Previous Reader just couldn’t stand it anymore.