Raising Expectations

Today I was trying to find one of my favourite recipes in amongst our cornucopia of cookery books and magazines when I came across one of my mum's old baking recipe books - "Be-Ro for all Home Baking" with the cover tagline "So wholesome, simple and economical" - which you as can see in today's image was very well used.
It brought back so many happy memories of cooking and baking with my mum - a life skill that she was especially keen us boys (me and my brother) should learn and thanks to her encouragement and endless patience (which we must have sorely tested) we did and now we both cook from scratch as much as we possibly can, I must admit grudgingly sometimes as one member of our household hardly ever cooks at all, and we still love to bake when we have the time.
Be-Ro has its origins in a wholesale grocery firm founded by Thomas Bell near the Tyne Quays and railway station in Newcastle in the 1880's. Among his top-selling brands were 'Bells Royal' baking powder and a self-raising flour. Following the death of Edward VII, it became illegal to use the royal name and as a result Bell decided to take the first couple of letters from each of the two words of the brand name and turn them into the more catching sounding 'Be-Ro".
In the early 1920's, the most commonly used type of flour was plain flour with self-raising flour being more expensive and considered a novelty. In a bid to make self-raising flour more popular among the general public the company staged a series of exhibitions, where freshly baked scones and cakes were sold for a shilling to visitors. These were so popular that people demanded to have copies of the recipes so that they could bake dishes at home and their recipe books were created from this point forward.
Leafing through this recipe book today I just loved the names of some of the bakes that I've never heard of before and am determined to try - Girdle Scones, Sly Cake, Granny Loaf, Fancies and Sponge Parkin!