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WRITTEN RECIPES

Since it is fact that some housewives do not refer to written recipes for cooking, it was first necessary to see of what proportion of housewives this was true before finding what proportion used Food Facts recipes. Housewives were therefore asked, “do you ever use a written recipe”?

Three fourths of the housewives used written recipes, although the majority used them only occasionally. The source from which recipes were most frequently taken was from Food Facts. This result must be interpreted with care since the housewife when asked this question knew already that the inquiry was concerned with Food Facts.

An analysis of the above results by the same classification data used for the analysis of the Food Facts reading habits, shows the same trend, as can be seen from Table 14 - 18

Considerably fewer housewives in the lowest economic group, who had only elementary education, who were over 50, who had never been taught cooking, and who did not like cooking, used written recipes than did housewives in the opposite groups.

An analysis of the use of written recipes, by where the housewife was taught cooking, show that less housewives who had been taught at home or in elementary schools used written recipes than did those who had had a more advanced tuition in cooking.

It was shown already that both the reading of Food Facts and the use of written recipes are influenced by the same factors, economic standard, education, age, tuition in cooking and liking for cooking. It could therefore be expected that Food Facts reading and use of written recipes were associated with each other.

The direct relationship between the habits of reading Food Facts and the use of written recipes in general is shown in the next tables.

Only 1/5 of the housewives who did read Food Facts used written recipes, whereas the great majority of Food Facts readers (88%) used written recipes.

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FOOD FACTS RECIPES

57% of the housewives had tried a Food Facts recipe at least once, but only 9% had used them regularly.

The use of Food Facts recipes is clearly dependent upon whether Food Facts are read and whether or not written recipes are used. Therefore it could be expected that a group analysis of the Food Facts recipe users would give a similar picture to the one shown by the analysis of Food Facts readers and users of written recipes. This expectation is confirmed by the results shown in Tables 21-25.

The proportion of housewives in the different groups who used Food Facts corresponds with the proportion of housewives who read Food Facts and used written recipes. But it is interesting to note that the actual proportion of housewives not using Food Facts recipes is statistically not significantly different in the groups. This indicates that the proportion of housewives who have a dislike to Food Facts though using other written recipes remains constant in all groups.

A list of the dishes for which recipes most often appeared in Food Facts was drawn up, and the housewife asked whether or not she had tried any of the recipes, and if so, how often.

The next table shows that the majority of housewives who had tried Food Facts recipes did so more than once. Recipes for dried egg dishes were more often used than any other. The explanation is fairly simple; dried egg was a new food to the English housewife whose use she had to learn, few other sources of recipes, particularly older cookery books gave any information on the subject. To evaluate the results of this table information on how often recipes for the different dishes had appeared in Food Facts would have been necessary. As this information was not available the table cannot be interpreted any further.

Those housewives we had tried a recipe only once were asked why they had not repeated it. The reasons given are shown in Appendix 4. The chief reasons were that the dish was not liked and that the housewives had not the necessary ingredients.