Review: CWA Cook Book; Seventy years in the kitchen.

Gift from Grandma, I think Dad suggested it. It looks nice. It's a spiral bound folder, with a nice textured plastic coating and a cream and blue colour scheme. The inside is full colour and often uses a linen-textured background, which unfortunately decreases readability. Ergh. First rule of design, form follows function. Also, although the first few pages of linen background are high res, mostly it is pixelated and ugly, I really don't know why. The pages with flat coloured backgrounds are much nicer, thankfully. Each section has a spread with some sepia photographs of old fashioned CWA meetings, group photos in front of CWA halls, and refreshment stands at country shows. They are charming. My favourite one is of the "younger crowd" at Gunnedah, about 20 young women enviably turned out in smart frocks and hair-dos.

There are no pictures of food. I do find it hard to know what to cook when I don't have pictures to help me choose, or to guide me to a finished product. But in this case, I don't think it matters, because the book is actually quite interesting to READ. I literally spent the morning on NYE Saturday sitting on my bed with this book, flipping pages and learning stuff. The CWA sandwich challenge I'm doing is to help me actually experience the book, otherwise I wouldn't know where to start, I'd just go "oh, wow, people ate tongue sandwiches in real life, not just in Agatha Christie books, I wonder if I should try out this mashed potato chocolate cake recipe one day" and then never actually use it because, yes, there are no pictures.

So there you go, I wouldn't have bought one for myself and it isn't exactly that useful in the modern world, but it is very interesting and I like it.