I made peanut brownie biscuits this afternoon. I hadn’t made them since before the year dot. I was apprehensive. However, I used a tried and true recipe from my faithful old friend, the 1967 edition of the Edmonds Cookery Book, and no biscuit could have turned out finer.
My Edmonds Cookery Book has been with me to almost every corner of the world. It looks well travelled ……. and even well chewed, which seems appropriate for a cookery book.
No need to chew paper today; here’s a few biscuits from the batch. 
Something else I did today that I haven’t done since before the year dot; I licked the mixing bowl clean – not literally, I used a spoon and licked that clean. Delicious fun.
Two differences between English in America and New Zealand.
1) Just as in my wife’s Philippine English, a biscuit for you is what a cookie is in the United States.
2) I’d never heard or read the expression “the year dot”, but I understood it by context and also because in the United States we say “the year zero”.
How intriguing re “the year dot”. I didn’t realise it was specifically English English and I don’t even know how we came by that expression.
I wondered whether the dot in that expression might refer to a decimal point. If so, your expression and “the year zero” would both be tied to arithmetic.
Possibly, but it’s an old expression and New Zealand has not had a long decimal history.
Yes, cleaning the bowl or licking the egg beater thingy was a simple joy.
have an Edmonds Cookbook that looks very like that one – except the spine is held together with shiny brown packing tape. I like it because it tells me how to do very simple things that I probably should have known (but don’t). I think if the Edmonds Cookbook isn’t already a National Treasure, it should be made one.
Thanks for the reminder.
I agree completely. My copy is bound with sellotape. Bookbinders would frown. It is interesting to compare this old version with more modern editions. The modern editions take the old recipes and add extra sugar and butter and eggs which are obviously quite unnecessary because the old original thrifty recipes work just fine.
And another artifact of the British world: Sellotape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellotape
In the United States the main brand of cellophane (cell- with a c) tape is Scotch Tape:
http://www.scotchbrand.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ScotchBrand/Scotch/Products/Catalog/?N=7578040+4335&rt=r3
In the UK, Sellotape also became known as sticky-backed plastic thanks to a children’s programme called Blue Peter….http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sticky-backed_plastic