The Dairy Book Of Home Cookery Diet (in association with the Milk Marketing Board of England and Wales)

In the olden days, before the internet, mobile telephones and Kerry Katona, there existed a thing called a ‘milkman’.

He drove about the place in a ‘milkfloat’ which was (and may well still be) an open-sided shop that travelled at no more than 5mph. From the ‘milkfloat’ the ‘milkman’ (with whom you would have arranged an account via, for example, Unigate), would deliver food and drink to your very doorstep, including a range of dairy items (inc. milk, cream, eggs etc), fruit juice (orange), bread (Mother’s Pride white), “Watch Out, There’s a Humphrey About” stickers and, in later years (as fashions changed and people became less sturdy) bottled water.

He also delivered books or, more precisely, the splendid tome you see here: The Dairy Book of Home Cookery, by Sonia Allison (Milk Marketing Board of England and Wales, 1977). It has been revised and re-issued over the years, but the edition you see here is an exact replica of the one my own mother would routinely throw at my childish monkey head when she caught me in the larder with my greedy monkey paws in the breadbin.

I strongly urge you to buy a copy for yourself. It is not fancy, but it will teach you how to make bread, biscuits and jam, and how to roast things and line a cake tin. It also contains recipes for the kind of food people in places like Islington serve up at dinner parties, describing it as “ironic”, “witty” and “self-referential”, e.g. prawn cocktail, brandy snaps, steak and kidney pudding, shepherd’s pie and cheese and onion pasties. (Upon these people I set the avenging spirits of Elizabeth David, Simon Hopkinson, Sybil Kapoor and Constance Spry.)

But there is another and more relevant reason for you to acquire The Dairy Book of Home Cookery. Despite the fact that 1977 was some years clear of post-war food rationing, entire chapters are devoted to the foulest offal, the stuffed marrow and the banana – an ingredient so exotic still that it was appropriate for all occasions, even the fish course.

Some the recipes are so vile that reading them is thrilling, in the way it is thrilling to have someone pin you down and pretend to gob in your face; but they are also vile enough to kill the appetite of even the greediest lardy-larder. It is this simple fact that provides the basis of this simple (yet effective) diet plan.

You will see reproduced here some of the vilest of the recipes. Simply print them out, mount them on thin card, trim them and place about your person. If you are facing temptation (e.g. Katy’s brownies, plain Hula-Hoops, plain cake, toast), simply whip one out and have a little think about (for example) bananas and fish together, in a sauce, on a plate. Your appetite will have gone in seconds, and you will be a stone thinner before the month is out.

Good luck. (And do let us know how you get on.)