How do guarantee a cake won't stick in a baking tin? What's the secret of the best gravy you'll ever taste? What's the recipe for that cure-for-all-ills chicken soup grandma used to make? There are hundreds of tips in the book with names of contributors and dates when they were published in the 1950s. Your mum knew how to make the best jam, she'd have had a few recipes for making tablet, she made your favourite dish in a way that you can never quite properly recreate. Those dishes were cooked up with love, a lot of skill and in times of rationing and austerity that meant the maker of good food had to be a conjuror of miracles. Illustrated by classic adverts for food of the 1950s, with illustrations from the original versions of the cookery and recipe pamphlets given away with magazines, baking powder and flour manufacturers.