COOKING FOR THE FAMILY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 14

COOKING FOR THE FAMILY

TIME-SAVING COOKING, by Helen Cox; Odhams Press, through Whitcombe and Tombs, N.Z. price 8/6. "FOUR hundred and forty streamlined recipes," warbles the blurb, which goes on to say how much time their use will save the business girl or housewife. Nonsense, Helen Cox! Every domestic cook, masculine and feminine, has long ago had to discover for himself or herself the inevitable compromises between the conflicting demands of clock and belly, The real future of time-saving in the kitchen lies in the factory-prepara-tion of pre-prepared, pre-cooked dishes. What Helen Cox has done in this book is to assemble the simplest and easiest of conventional dishes and to detail their preparation and cooking in clear, accurate terms. She has literally nothing to propound that any reasonably good amateur cook doesn’t already know. And, I was surprised to find, she mentions only the start-with-a-hot-over method of roasting a joint-surely, on all counts, the least satisfactory of the four available methods? As an outstanding time-saver (in certain circumstances) the ultra-slow method should have had a mention. The book has its merits. It is a cheap, simple and reasonably comprehensive guide to good conventional family cooking, and it is happily free of the coy-and-pleyful or pompous-and-literary affectations that are commonly allowed to over-season books of this

kind.

G. C. A.

Wall