I am writing about my English Grandmother on the moment so I thought I might share some of the recipes she kept in her receipt book. The book was originally kept by the cook at Cumberlands, the grand house in Surrey where she grew up. She must have taken it with her when she left, writing in it one day this recipe for Lobster Balls. I will have a go at it next time we are in Ireland.

During the war she cut out recipes from newspapers and stuck them in. There is an air of scrimping and making do with advice on how to stretch out a rations worth of corned beef.

There is one scary recipe for a Fish Hot Pot. It starts with the cook laying some already cooked spaghetti or macaroni in the bottom of a large round casserole dish. Over this place layers of filleted sole, mushrooms and cream until the dish is three quarters full. Dust each layer with celery, salt and black pepper with some finely chopped parsley. Half a sweet bay leaf can be added. Slowly pour over contents sufficient milk to which you can add two teaspoons worth of mushroom ketchup. Put on the lid and cook in a moderate oven for two and a half hours. Grated cheese can be substituted for cream if a cheaper dish is required.

Thank you Mrs. C.H. Butler of Fir Tree Cottage, Nevendon, Sandhurst.

I should have mentioned that the recipe for yesterday’s moussaka came from one of my favourite cookbooks The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson & Lyndsey Bareham. The book performs exactly the job you hope it would from the name, rescuing a bunch of abandoned classics from obscurity and cliche and setting them right. The recipes don’t get a makeover as such, they are just set down as they should be, mistakes ironed out.

It starts with The Great British Meal Out which is just Prawn Cocktail, Steak Garni and Chips followed by Black Forest Gateau. It then moves into The Fifties Hotel Dining Room (including Eggs Mayonnaise, Mixed Grill and Chicken Chasseur), The Gentleman’s Club (Mulligatawny, Shepherds Pie and Toad-in-the-Hole) which could have been boarding school, The Sixties Bistro, The Continental Restaurant and so on.

Even now put me in a good restaurant and I see Prawn Cocktail and Steak and Chips on the menu I am more likely to go for those than anything else. I can remember first eating the combination on smart meals out with Mum & Dad to The Golden Grove in the wilds of the border with Wales just beyond Chester.

I followed the recipe for Prawn Cocktail on a meal for New Years Eve some years ago and it worked perfectly.

The recipe for Moussaka is in the chapter headed The Continental Restaurant and is preceded by Hungarian Beef Goulash and followed Wiener Schnitzel.

I am looking after the kids for a week towards the end of the month and I am going to feed them the recipe for Swedish meatballs to show them things can be done in a way that is not IKEA.

My copy of the book still has its Euro price sticker in the front which means I must have bought it in The Good Things Cafe. You have to wonder why more restaurants don’t sell cookbooks. You have a captive audience, replete after a good lunch and a few glasses of wine only too happy to part with more cash to buy a book to tell them how best to cook some of the food they may have just eaten. It always works for me!

Christmas is over, the tree and decorations are down and this evening we have cooked a moussaka. A suitably rich and warming dish for the day after going too late to bed and with   children picking up their pieces from the night before.

Moussaka does take a bit of time in the kitchen and I was left by myself to prepare it with a slab of records picked almost at random from the piles in the attic. Head of David and Pussy Galore made a good noise but also made you glad for the fact that a piece of vinyl was not going to last much more than 20 minutes.

Syd Barret just took me back to another time when I knew all the words to an Effervescing Elephant and my 18th birthday party and I painted a picture of the elephant on the wall at home.

This evening it was good to get back to some cooking after the food funk of yesterday.

Lunch was a sandwich made out out the mixture of ricotta, smoked salmon, dill and lemon zest that had been made for New Years Eve and never got eaten and was found early this morning in a bowl at the back of the fridge.

The children are away for the night. Ordinarily this would be an opportunity to indulge with something that would go well with a good bottle of red wine but not tonight. It was going to have to be quick as we we were going to the cinema. For me my first film since War Horse of which the best that can be said is that there were lots of nice sunsets.

Food had to be bought from Sainsbury’s on the way home. I remembered a recipe I had seen in the new Ottolenghi book for salmon steaks. I was fairly sure that if i bought a couple of good salmon fillets I would have the rest of the ingredients at home.

The recipe was salmon steaks in chraimeh sauce. The sauce is the lynchpin, a thick, sweet, hot, pungent tomato paste that is apparently the ‘queen’ of all dishes for Tripolitan (Libyan) Jews.

To keep it simple and quick I did not follow all of Ottolenghi’s instructions but it was still delicious. A teaspoon each of cumin and caraway seeds were crushed to a powder in my small hard metal pestle and mortar. Then using the heavy green stone pestle and mortar I crushed five cloves of garlic with half a chopped red chilli. I then added the cumin and caraway powder together sweet paprika, cayenne and ground cinnamon.

Having done all that I put on some moghrabieh to cook in salted boiling water.

I then cooked the salmon fillets in hot oil, skin side down first so it crisped up. Once they were starting to cook through I turn them over for another few minutes and then took them out to rest. Into the pan I scraped the garlic/spice mixture from the mortar. It spat and sizzled in the hot oil. I stirred it round with a wooden spoon as the kitchen filled with the heady sharp oil from the cooking chilli. Just before it started to burn I squeezed in some tomato puree and stirred that round before pouring in some water and seasoning it all with the juice of half a lemon, sugar, salt and pepper.

The sauce was left to seethe for a minute before I turned down the heat and retuned the salmon to the pan, skin side up.

By this time the moghrabieh was cooked. I drained it returned it to the pan loosening it with olive oil.

Some rocket salad was put on two plates with pieces of tomato and quartered lemon. The salmon fillets and their sauce and the moghrabieh were then arranged neatly around the salad and decorated with some finely chopped coriander.

The film was McCullin at FACT. It was not cheerful but was very good. A lot of questions were asked and a few of them answered as Don McCullin found his peace in photographing the English countryside in stark, haunting black and white, occasionally pulled up short as he did so by the sound of a distant shotgun.

Back at home the kitchen was still filled with the smell of the chraimeh sauce.

Listening now to Kristin Hersh on vinyl singing Your Ghost with Michael Stipe. I can remember watching the video on The Chart Show on a Saturday morning. You don’t get that anymore. Earlier in the evening I had listen to Vision’s of Joanna just in from work, loud, the only person in the house.