COOKBOOKS have certainly come a long way since Margaret Fulton's economical, no-fuss missive, The Margaret Fulton Cookbook.
These days, the contemporary cookbook author's family is as marketable as the cuisine they are serving, and many are mining their ancestral homelands for childhood cooking memories and dusting off their grandmother's fool-proof recipes.
- Rose Petal Jam, by Beata Zatorska and Simon Target. Tabula Books, rrp $60
Rose Petal Jam is the latest cookbook excursion through the family tree and joins other lavishly produced tomes, such as Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros (raised in South Africa, now lives in Tuscany), and My Greek Family Table by Maria Benardis (raised by her grandmother on a Greek island).
Rose Petal Jam is a hefty book at 320 pages, and much of it is devoted to relaying Zatorska's trip home to Poland after a 20-year absence.
She returns to the small mountain village of Jelenia Gora, where her grandmother taught her to cook and introduced her to herbs to heal common ailments.
Accompanied by her co-author and husband, Zatorska also chances upon her grandmother's old recipes, which she reproduces in between her stories of growing up in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s.
Delightfully, the classic Polish dishes - pierogi, beetroot-shoot soup, potato dumplings - are all there, as are those more specific to Zatorska's family: sour cherry liqueur, pickled cucumbers and, of course, rose petal jam.
