Without question one of the strangest comics in my digital collection is Patsy’s Reflections, published in 1950, a collection of comic strips that originally ran in the British newspaper The Daily Mirror. It’s basically a comic cook book that places it’s recipes in the context of the adventures of young, inexperienced housewife Patsy, She”s trying to keep hard working husband Peter well fed in post-war Britain and always willing to lend a hand is neighbor Joan Featherpenny and the all knowing Mrs. Always. They help her find inventive ways to cook tasty, nutritious food in a Britain still suffering under austerity of food rationing.

I like this one a lot for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s a deftly crafted comic strip that manages to convey information while it entertains — which isn’t easy. Then there’s the fact it’s an intriguing historical document that tells us a lot about what life must have been like in post-war England. But mostly I like it because it’s about cooking and food, subjects that English language comics tend to avoid.

And being a great big fat guy, I am of course extremely interested in food. Hell, I was into it decades before all this “foodie culture” crap when it was considered to be juvenile, perhaps even feminine for a heterosexual man enjoy to his food a little too much. Sure your basic He-Man reg’lar feller was allowed to appreciate the occasionally well cooked steak and baked potato under “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” exemption. Hell, he might even be allowed to enjoy something as fundamentally girly as desert in public, just so long as it was something unfussily wholesome like a slab of apple pie. Food was like sex, it was just not something that was overtly talked about — and to do so was more than slightly suspect. And of course there was always men, you know, actual, proper men always ready to point that out. ”You’re sure enjoying that pie, aren’t you, big guy?”, etc.

Patsy’s Reflections are also of interest because for twenty years I worked in restaurants, doing everything from busing tables to washing dishes to finally chopping vegetables. I used to have an upscale neighbor who when I told her what I did for a living would invariably exclaim, perhaps a tad too kindly, “Oh, you’re a sous chef”. Which I suppose is technically true, but I never had any ambition to be a professional cook, let alone a chief. I never worked the line, I never wanted to work the line; there was too much pain and pressure there for my tastes.

But even before I became a professional for close to thirty years I cooked for myself because as I once told someone, nobody was sure as hell going to do it for me. I wish my beloved Grandmother, God Rest Her Soul, had taught me even a tenth of what she knew about cooking, but, well, I was a boy, and it was never even discussed. I did it without benefit of your fancy cookbooks mostly through a process of hits and messes — i.e., I picked it up on the streets. But I wish I did had Patsy’s Reflections back then; you can treat it like some kind of a wonky novelty if you want, but you should except the very real possibility you might learn something from it.

Soup is easy, comedy is hard. My Grandmother, God Rest Her Soul, made the best soup in the world. I often said, and genuinely meant, I would prefer eating her soup than anyone else’s steak. But it took me nearly forty years of trial and error to figure out how to make a halfway decent pot of soup. But then, I’m a slow learner; it took me nearly thirty to figure out how to properly scramble an egg; it’s always the simplest things that are the toughest to master. I tend to judge restaurants on their soup, my thinking being, if they can’t get the soup right, what are the odds they’ll be able to anything else?

My advice to you; make soup. It will enrich your life.

I love fish but have never really cooked a lot of it for myself, mostly because coming from Eastern-European extraction fish wasn’t a regular part of the traditional diet. For me growing up it was mostly fish sticks (a.k.a. fish fingers in the UK; I still don’t know which term is sillier). And when I got to be an adult there was always something daunting about cooking a non-frozen piece of fish, there was so many questions; how do you know when its done? How do you know when it’s over done? All my answers are here:

Meat is messy, meat splatters, meat is expensive, so I never cooked a whole lot of meat in those thirty years. Mostly I used to haunt the discount meat section and even now, working 40 hours a week it’s still usually beyond my budget. I used to like to make meatloaf but I never quite got it right, and even my mother, a profoundly awful cook, could make a decent meatloaf. She made hers with a ketchup glaze and green olives embedded on the top. I tend to blame my failures on the fact that I never owned a proper meatloaf pan, but that’s just probably wishful thinking.

And, finally, here’s some whale recipes. That’s right, whale.