A trip back to my late mother’s house in Essex, unearthed a real gem recently. The small, blue, notebook was crammed with recipes, some written on the pages in her neat, cursive hand, others culled from newspapers and bearing stories of mystery and intrigue on the back of a recipe for peanut butter cookies and trifle. These stories are sometimes just a headline, sometimes whole paragraphs…never the whole story. What a feast for the imagination! My mother started collecting the recipes when she married my father in October 1948, perhaps even before that! Having survived all these years, the pages are yellowed and worn with time but there is a…