Friday 23 April 2010

Cooking, the books and reflections about racist penguins and kosher cookery.

Having recently published a reprint of the first Anglo Jewish cookery book, something that may seem, in the first instance, to be a little strange for a local history publisher who is a gentile, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/lady_montefiore_s_cookbook_1846.htm

However recent research discovered this to be the work of the wife of one of Ramsgate’s most important residents and therefore an insight into the life and particularly the cookery of the gentry in Ramsgate in the middle of the 1800s.

The first printing produced a few errors now corrected, partly because of my woeful lack of knowledge about Ramsgate’s Anglo Jewish heritage and partly because this is the first time that I have published a cookery book.

Anyway having produced 20 copies with these minor errors and given them away to various well-known locals, mostly chefs and Jews, plenty of each here in Ramsgate although most don’t fit with the stereotypes, I was amused to note that a much larger publisher had also produced an initial run of a cookery book that had an error in it that made it unsaleable.

The Australian edition Penguin's Pasta Bible had to be pulped costing the publishers at least $20,000. after a member of the public complained that a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto, called for 'salt and freshly ground black people'.

More information at http://www.penguin.com.au/new/new.cfm

Illustration above for the back cover of Montefiore's home in Ramsgate, Eastcliff Lodge © Mark Negin More information about the Montefiores the synagogue in Ramsgate and I will do something about Eastcliff Lodge soon.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/Montefiore/index.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/clock/index.htm

http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/09/montefiore-synagogue-and-mausoleum-open.html

1 comment:

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.