Food History

Our heatwave keeps on keeping on.

It isn’t really a heatwave anymore, since it’s only 31 degrees C outside, but it’s still technically Spring and far too early for so many somnolent days.

With weather like this, my mind always goes back to my childhood. We had heatwaves like this in the sixties. In fact, we had three summers that were worse than this in the sixties. The fault wasn’t the weather. The fault lay in my father thinking it was clever to have a coal stove that combined heating water and cooking.

He was very proud that he could fry an egg any time of the day. His daughters weren’t very proud of having to bring buckets of coal in from the coal shed. It was dark and horrid and spiderly. When I read Cold Comfort Farm it was always that little coalshed that I imagined hid nasty things.

We became very good at keeping cool. We cut oranges in half and froze them for snacks. We put sheets over the open windows and sprayed them with water. We filled trays of water (the one we used for making slices in more salubrious weather) and put them in front of an electric fan. We waited for the Mr Whippy van to come round, playing ‘Greensleeves’ and we would beg for gelati.

To celebrate the water ices of childhood and to provoke the weather into turning cool, here is a brief online history of some children’s favourites. The writer-embedded-in-me loves the naming of the sweets and ices and the dates - if you’re working on a book and need cute food background that can be slipped into your story as telling detail, this is just the sort of site for you.

And what am I going to do if the heat continues? I’ve bought three swizzle sticks and a fun mould and I rather think I’m going to try some iced tea with ice swizzles. Maybe lemon myrtle tea. Or maybe ordinary iced tea. It all depends on how hot it remains and for how long.

This is from The Nu-Kooka, 2nd Edition, “Containing the Best Jewish and Continental Dishes, Cocktails, Savouries, Confectionery. Revised and Re-edited and including the latest American Recipes.” It cost 5 shillings and is and was published before 1948. The National Library of Australia has the first edition, which was forty pages shorter and published between 1934 and 1945 as well as the second - I only have the second. Everyone Jewish owned the Nu-Kooka in my childhood, and most of us had copies of the Settlement Cookbook as well. Everyone except my Aunt Gussie - one day I’ll tell you the story of her and cookbooks.

I always wondered about the name, but now I suspect that “Kooka” was the type of stove and I am sorely tempted to talk about a Kooka in the town of Burra being a Kookaburra, but that would be a bad joke even for me, so I’ll refrain. Instead I’ll give you a recipe for a water-ice, since I promised Elisa a sorbet and water-ices were an important variant of sorbets in icebox Australia.

Orange Water Ice

1 cup sugar
2 cups boiling water
2 cups fresh orange juice
1 tsp gelatine
4 tbs lemon juice

Add sugar to boiling water and stir. When sugar is dissolved, boil for 5 minutes. Soften gelatine in cold water. Add gelatine and strained fruit juices to syrup. Place tray in refrigerator and freeze. [The recipe says to stir constantly during the freezing, which in my mother’s interpretation meant taking the tray out of the freezer every 15-20 minutes and giving it a vigorous whip.) When nearly frozen, turn the ice out into a bowl and beat one more time. Return to tray and finish freezing.

Note: gelatine is not kosher. This doesn’t stop it being in many, many recipes that were popular in the Australian Jewish community before the 1960s. From the 1960s we gradually replaced the gelatine with agar-agar.

Kaaron Warren (horror writer and current guest on the online forum devoted to Australian speculative fiction) and I made my aunt’s Tia Maria today. We modified the recipe a little, because I went on memory for what was in my cupboard (I know better, but we’re into day whatever of a heatwave and brain fatigue has set in). I am now entirely out of sugar and almost out of kopi jawa, but we have lots of Tia Maria for Kaaron’s farewell in a bit over a month. One is normally calorific and the other is much lower in calories - it will be interesting to see just how the second one works.

On days like today that it’s easy to understand why people wanted icehouses. We have a hot blustery wind that bears the ominous threat of bushfires. If I had an icehouse I would move my computer inside (or maybe find a good book in need of reading) and sit there all day, surrounded by giant blocks of pure cold. This is not the correct use of icehouses, but it’s what summer winds call for.

My favourite fiction-that-includes-an-historical-icehouse (not used in the proper manner either) is by Joan Aiken (Midnight is a Place) and my favourite drink from the product of icehouses is in CS Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy (sherbet) - although there may not be icehouses at work, the ice might have been brought direct from the mountains for the use of the idle rich. There is more rain in the mountains of Lewis’ world than in these mountains, that’s for certain!

Here are some London icehouses . Apparently these days bat hibernate in icehouses, which would give me company during my cool sojourn.

Except that I don’t have an icehouse. Typing ‘icehouse’ so many times has lowered the ambient temperature of my flat by a full degree Celsius, however.

I’ve just returned from Sydney. Due to the wonders of time-stamps, posts appeared magically these last few days. A kind of time travel - not the same kind of time travel as this bread, however.

I wasn’t in Sydney for Thanksgiving. I was in Sydney to spend quality time with some of my favourite relatives and to attend a science fiction event and to catch up with friends. I managed to elicit a cheer from the audience when I announced that the working title of my novel-in-progress was “Chocolate Redemption” but that’s the closest I got to combining food history and science fiction.

Other days were better. I regularly explore the Queen Victoria Building and did my annual trip there on Friday morning. It has a range of food outlets and watching how they change over time is fascinating. I have been watching for twenty years now (which was a surprising statistic - I hadn’t realised it had been re-opened that long) and good cakes of continental European varieties, big breakfasts and chocolate have been constantly available. I suspect chicken schnitzel lunches have also lasted. Most of the food there is cafe food and QVB caters to cafe society. If you want food courts or proper restaurants, you walk down to the bottom level. From there, you can find a series of food courts making a web under Sydney streets. This underground shopping is a relatively new phenomenon for Australia and it skews food provision towards lunchboxes with rice, or nori rolls - anything that’s not messy and is portable. Just out of curiosity, I looked for the staple of takeaway food in my childhood: chips. Not fries. I found fries in the fish stalls and in the Lebanese stall, but they weren’t chips. Chips in the sixties here were thick and substantial and the only place I found them in all my wanderings on Friday were in Woolworths (a department store).

I visited other places. I ate raspberry and chocolate gelati from an Indian movie rental place, right next to a Korean supermarket in Ashfield. I walked through Paddy’s Market and found that the fruit and vegetables are a bit better than they have been but not as good as in Paddy’s heyday. (The handbags in Paddy’s are identical to those in Victoria Market in Melbourne, for what it’s worth, and Victoria Market has also lost most of its interesting and gourmet food. Not that I eat handbags.)

My last regular visit was to Burlington’s, the big Chinese supermarket a few blocks from Central Station. My friends and I used to get a lot of our supplies there in the eighties, when we had interesting cookups and when it was the only really decent speciality supplier. It’s still big and still has a bunch of good stuff (if you want seahorses in your medicinal soup, go to Burlington’s) but its range is way less vast. I couldn’t get any of the herbs and spices I was after. They were even out of galingale! In fact, the only food I bought from Burlington’s was pickled mustard for my cousin and jasmine agar agar mix for bring-a-plate emergencies.

Small changes in foods - big changes in cities. These days you often go outside the city centre for the really good food shopping.

Today’s website belongs to culinary historian Ivan Day and is full of lovely pictures. Don’t drool over your keyboard, please.

While I was finding the raisin wine recipe last week, I found that my grandmother had put a soap recipe in just before it. While I don’t expect you to want to eat soap, I rather thought you might like the recipe, especially as it was the only recipe she put in the “sauces and pickles” category. Same as last week - I can’t tell the difference between her tablespoons and pounds. I am assuming lb, but feel free to correct me. What’s funny is that her writing is *way* better than mine. She just adds a little flourish sometimes on abbreviations and my poor brain can’t cope. Especially when the flourish is a horizontal stroke that cuts through all the letters 1/3 of the way from the top.

Home made soap

5 lbs clean fat and 1 lb resin in a kero tin with 5 quarts of water and when boiling add 1 lb caustic soda which has been soaked all night in 2 quarts of water in small quantities. Boil slowly for 1/2 hour lift from fire and let stand. Cut into bars when set.

This is another recipe I’ll not try - I am a real wimp when it comes to caustic soda. I refuse to use it as a pickle or sauce either. Yes, I am cowardly.

From a c1956 Melbourne newspaper clipping.

Soften 2 oz butter or margarine. Beat in 1 oz sugar. Work in 3 oz SR flour, using a little lemon juice to make the texture like putty. Knead smooth. Chill 10 minute. Form into small balls and roll the balls in sugar. Place on minimally greased oven trays then press each ball flat with a fork. Bake in a moderate oven for 15-20 minutes.

This is what Australians thought of as biscuits in the 1950s. Not very different from British biscuits. Now I need a 1950s US biscuit recipe. Next week, perhaps. I’m off to spend my Saturday in the world of science fiction.

It’s a chocolate fudge kind of a day in Canberra. Overcast and oppressive and summery. This was the sort of day my mother would have us into the kitchen, making afternoon tea so we would stop worrying about whether it was going to storm. This fudge recipe is from my grandmother’s little green notebook.

Fudge Cake

2 tbs butter
2 tbs cocoa
1 cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup milk

Melt butter in saucepan. Add cocoa. Stir till smooth. Add other ingredients in above order. Beat two minutes. Bake in a moderate oven.

PS Next week I will be returning to the Regency Banquet testing. Hang in there. I may also be returning to older historical cuisines. This week I have really been in family mode and my posts have reflected it. I remember making that fudge cake when I was a child…

I get tangled with timezones and travel and the general confusion that is my life. If tomorrow is Friday then my family in Melbourne will be having a roast dinner. Our ancestors in Western Europe would have eaten meat pies for Shabbos. Our next door neighbours when I was a kid ate fish. Friday has attracted more regular food customs than any other single day of the week.

I’ll ponder a bit more on food and time one day, but right now I’m going to leave you with a story about the neighbours who lived over the back fence of my childhood home. They were a good Catholic family. We didn’t mean to upset them when we named our cats after food. Truly we didn’t. We were just a family that got on very well with food.

There was giant Felafel (who slept and surveyed his domain from the whole of the ironing board) and not-very-bright-but-motherly-and-sweet Tahina and there was Cinnamon and there was Pitta. Everyone assumed that Felafel was really Fluff and that we had speech impediments. They also assumed that Pitta was male, especially (for no reason that I can see) when she opened doors. Only our neighbours had any trouble with Cinnamon though.

Cinnamon was a big, sweet, shy cat. We had to spend ages calling her in for dinner every night, because she hid at the merest glimpse of a shadow. “Here Cinnamon,” we would call at first. As we grew impatient, we shortened it, “Here, Cinna, Cinna, Cinna.”

Our neighbours heard that as “Here, Sinner, Sinner, Sinner.”

We’re in between seasons here. The stone fruit is still a bit sharp (except the cherries, which are almost at their best) and other fruit is either tropical or half-hearted.

I keep looking for Seville oranges. When they appear I’ll give you a recipe for one my my favourite Medieval sauces. Seville oranges are the closest we have to the oranges used in France and England in the Middle Ages. They have a tiny season in Australia and it will be sometime soon. Soon being a euphemism for “probably in late Summer, but if I watch the shops hard they might come early.”

My friend says:

I can give you the recipe for my grandmother’s cornbread — although I don’t know that the measurements will make sense!

Mix dry ingredients, then add egg and buttermilk. Stir until well mixed. Bake in hot oven (425 degrees F) until lightly browned.

This recipe was first writen down in 1979 - until then things were just put in a bowl until they looked right. The family taught me (Gillian) to make cornbread by sight and feel when I visited them in Arkansas.

Important Note 1: The recipe doesn’t say it, but bake them in a “cured” cast iron cornbread skillet.

P.s. I don’t know why the recipe calls for different types of leavening (self rising flour, baking powder and baking soda), but it does and it works. Go figure.

And then my friend added a bit more:

If you really want Thanksgiving recipes, then I thought you might want one for making the dressing out of the cornbread too. The source of this one is my own handwritten notes of a recipe given to me over the phone by my other grandmother in 1987 when I was cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner.

In a large skillet over medium heat, melt the butter and saute the celery and onion until soft. Combine celery, onions, 3 cups crumbled corn bread, eggs, chicken broth, sage and salt and pepper to taste; mix well. Bake in a greased 9″ by 13″ baking dish at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.

I asked about collard greens, because they were so very exotic to me when I first ate them.

We would have been more likely to have black eyed peas than collard greens, but prepared the same way. Boiled until tender (chopped greens about 45 minutes, peas about an 1 1/2 hours) and seasoned in a way that would disgust
you — ham or salt pork added to the water and boiled along with them. Lots of times we’d have ham rather than turkey, which might account for that.

Although I don’t know the exact age of the recipes, both my grandmothers used very similar ones and there are others that seem quite different, so I suspect their recipes are common to Arkansas, but may not be the same ones common in other parts of the south.

The one grandmother I have met is an awesome cook, so I do recommend trying that cornbread at least!

New books are happiness. New food books are even greater happiness. An anthropological study of the meaning of food in Early Judaism and Christianity is sheer joy. And yes, that’s what arrived in the mail yesterday.

It begins with a quick look at anthropology and Biblical scholarship and the anthropology of food. From there it works systematically through a few big background issues (”Who Is the True Israelite?” is my favourite) and then into key notions such as water and wine, gluttony and food symbolism. It seems a little weighted on the Christian side from the table of contents and it’s only a little book (I’ve just been reading young adult books that are six hundred pages long, and now I’m faced with a scholarly book of less than two hundred!) but I am very happy to have this on my shelves. Even the bits I disagree with will be interesting, I suspect.

I’ve just had a flurry of emails from Sydney, regarding the Freecon (science fiction convention) there next Saturday. It made me think about how different societies frame their future food.

The Star Trek universe has a whole range of different foods envisaged by its creators, but not normally in a way that would entice cooks. Early Star Trek episodes had a lot of chopped up vegetables and the occasional lurid jelly, for instance. The Babylon 5 series has its own cookbook, with current US Italian and Russian food alongside some more unusual recipes. This is food attached to specific worlds ie hobby food. It’s a section of how we see our future eating, not the whole picture. It’s the imaginative projection of our current eating into new and distant worlds.

In the seventies we played with those terrible sachets of dehydrated icecream. We drank Tang and thought we were sharing experiences with space explorers. This is another element of the same projection.

Manufacturers dream of new ways of doing things. Scientists and medicos dream of perfect diets. Agriculture specialists change what we eat and create the plants of our future.

One day I’d like to be part of a symposium that brings all this together: the dreaming and the science and the culinary arts and the ethnography and how it fits into foods past. Bringing it all together is the way to get a good idea of how future food fit with foods present and foods past.

Future food is all this and more. It’s how we see ourselves in the future, what we eat and what we dream of. Our food history is an essential part of this. It trains our tastebuds and our expectations of when we will eat, how we will eat and why we will eat.

All this is my roundabout way of saying I am taking most of the rest of the day away from food history and will be revising a novel. It combines food past (Medieval) and food present (modern Katoomba) but not, alas, food future. So my speculative fiction self has caught up with me from two directions and you get speculation instead of history. I’ll make up for it later in the week with lots of recipes and maybe a funny story. Promise.

Thanksgiving dinner is so not something that Australia does. We hear about it a lot, but we tend not to celebrate it. Why? Maybe because mayflower is rare around here. (should I apologise for puns?)

Actually (and more seriously) it is a lot to do with the nature of the early English settlers and the level and type of religion they bore with them. At one stage in our (Australian) history the most important religion was rum. We even had a Rum Rebellion (which was a pretty rummy rebellion at that). No, I’m not apologising for bad jokes today. I’m obviously unreclaimably silly.

Where immigrants come from affects the food their descendants eat - look at the Dutch foodways still present in parts of New York State or the German-style wines made in the Barossa Valley (South Australia). Don’t look at the French-style cheeses from Tasmania - some foodways come later. Much later.

What immigrants believe affects foodways. Melbourne has a lot of dyed eggs available around Easter, and has had them since the 1970s. New York has mostly-kosher bagels (oy, does New York have bagels! - which reminds me that every single bagel recipe I’ve found comes out as cakey - I am on a quest for the perfect bagel dough).

All of this is by way of background, to explain that Thanksgiving is many things to many people and that most of those people are in the USA.

A friend has given me some Thanksgiving recipes, which I’ll put in another post. Not enough recipes for a feast. And there lies the rub (no, I’m going to refrain and *not* make a cooking joke). How can an Australian Jew blog a Thanksgiving Feast?

Here’s how. I will post my friend’s kind comments and recipes sometime soon. If there’s anything you enjoy during your Thanksgiving, any family recipe that’s begging to be shared and that’s missing, please feel free to add it in the comments or send it to me in the next couple of days (if you send it in the next couple of days I can give it its own post and you will be famous for 10 full seconds). We will start with cornbread from Arkansas and by the time Thanksgiving is over, any sane turkeys will be hiding under their beds. (Do sane turkeys have beds? )