Food History

I think I might have given the same recipe in two quite separate posts. This is the result of pure tiredness. Rather than do a careful check and delete a post, I will leave it and give you an extra post now. Writing is easier than careful cross-checking.

No biscuits and scones to replace the possible duplicate (though I’ve still got lots of recipes and mentions in literature I haven’t posted yet), but some thoughts on what food the tired ought to eat. Maybe thinking about foods that create alertness will help.

Using Medieval foodways as a guide, fatigue might be due to an imbalance in the humours or a body overburdened by … whatever. I’m not at all certain what bodies get overburdened by. Anyhow, if it’s overburdened, you want light food and a cleansing diet acording to Medieval theory. Things like fennel that help purify the system. Or hot pepper that warm it and help drive impurities out. And you want a hot bath strewn with appropriate herbs.

If you want to use food to balance your humours and create more energy, it becomes more complicated. If you have an excess of sanguinity (my face is red, maybe that’s the problem with me?) you want cooling food. Cucumbers, perhaps. Cold cucumbers, straight from the refrigerator.

Using food as an aspect of medical treatment was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.

We do it today. Especially when we’re tired. Food and drink as instant cure-alls. Different medical principles, same urgent desire to get some energy back into a fading day.

Sometimes we eat energy bars for the calories or the fat or the instant glucose kick. Sometimes we drink energy drinks for the sheer glucose kick. We use them as proof of the correctness of medical theory the way people did in the Middle Ages except - instead of the humours - we look to restore vitamin levels and feed ourselves minerals and amino acids and tricksy herbs with useful side effects.

I’m not a doctor, but it looks as if a vitamin drink with lots of minerals and guarana, accompanied by an iced cucumber salad should do *something*. If it doesn’t kill me, you’ll see me tomorrow, hopefully more alert.

It’s been a while since I’ve added to the collection of biscuit and scone recipes. This one is from Mrs Eaton, early nineteenth century. Mrs Eaton believes in cream and is good with spices.

Short Biscuits

Beat half a pound of butter to a cream, then add half a pound of loaf sugar finely powdered and sifted, the yolks of two eggs, and a few carraways. Mix in a pound of flour well dried, and add as much cream as will make it a proper stiffness for rolling. Roll it out on a clean board, and cut the paste into cakes with the top of a glass or cup. Bake them on tins for about half an hour. Another way. A quarter of a pound of butter beat to a cream, six ounces of fine sugar powdered and sifted, four yolks of eggs, three quarters of a pound of flour, a little mace, and a little grated lemon peel. Make them into a paste, roll it out, and cut it into cakes with the top of a wine glass. Currants or carraways may be added if agreeable.

Ambergris used to be a cooking ingredient. I learned about it first as a fixative in perfumes, but it was also used as late as the nineteenth century to add a subtle scent to certain delicate dishes. I had to explain to one of my test team that they wouldn’t be able to use either the ambergris or the musk listed as optional scents. Ambergris is a whale secretion and was found floating on the sea. It still is. This means it theoretically shouldn’t be unPC to use it, but it is and so I’ve never actually tasted it. Maybe it’s still used in perfumery, just quietly, where the politically correct can’t find it. You can find an article with more information (I don’t know how reliable it is, but there’s a great picture) here.

Musk is a far ickier proposition - maybe I’ll talk about it another time.

I didn’t even know the Gode Cookery site gave awards for historic food writing, but they do and I have been given one. What a nice way to start the working year!

Several years ago a Sydney (Australia) organisation that works to make kosher food more interesting asked me to do them a little booklet on Medieval food for Jewish New Year. I kept all my rights on it and not too long after it appeared in print I denuded it of recipes and gave the article to my publisher for her website. It’s not my most popular article on the Trivium Publishing site (that honour belongs to the one that has descriptions of Old French insults) but the number of hits it attracted was one of the reasons I started this blog.

To celebrate my article being the recipient of the January 2007 Gode Cookery Award, I think I’ll give you one of the missing recipes.

Spiced mushrooms

500 g small button mushrooms (Swiss brown are ideal, but will need to be cut into quarters)
1 small onion
olive oil
1 pinch ground pepper
1 pinch powdered ginger
1 pinch nutmeg
2 pinches coriander seed (ground)

Peel and wash mushrooms. Boil until they shrink (c 10 minutes).

Cut onion finely, then fry it in olive oil. Keep the heat high, add the mushrooms and cook for maybe 2-3 minutes. Add salt and spices, lower the heat and cook covered until golden.

Today I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is that I can’t finish with the scrapbook until August. I promised a red lentil recipe and I will find another one sometime soon and post it in recompense. Promise.

The good news is that I’ll be back at my desk. And that means I get to move a bit more widely than Melbourne’s foodways. I think I might return to the Middle Ages for at least one post this week, and there are a bunch of URLs I have waiting. Anyhow, expect a return to more varied posts. Melbourne won’t go away, but other countries and cuisines will return. All this happens tomorrow, when I’m home.

If you have a favourite cuisine (Ancient Roman? Medieval French? London cooking during the Blitz?) and you mention it in the comments below in the next 72 hours, I will do a post on it within the fortnight. If you find food I hate, just watch how snarky I can get :).

Today has a real story-telling feel to it. All around me, I’m hearing tales of food past and family past. And then my teen testers gave me written and detailed notes backing up the verbal report they gave yesterday. I have to give you the notes, because I promised. Then I need to tell you about royal icing, because I also promised.

What particularly impressive about the notes is a facet I can’t reproduce here - In Johanna’s report every single taster was noted in a different style of handwriting. I wish I could reproduce the artistry, particularly the spiky serifs representing their father. I’ll describe the styles instead. Miriam reported rather differently…

Transparent Pudding

Delicious (very big writing).

Mum doesn’t like it. Thinks it’s too rich (miniscule writing).

Miriam suggests cut down the butter (slightly larger but still miniscule writing).

Apparently the Apple Fool goes well with the pudding (decorate writing, normal size).

Miriam disagrees (normal script, normal size). Dad says it’s okay. Bland. (normal size writing, spiky serifs).

Apple Fool

Opinions

S ‘Great flavour’

J ‘Gritty’ ‘Terrible flavour’

M ‘Good flavour, but consistency of baby food.’

Time consuming.

Royal Icing

With all the food fun of this weekend (my stepfather’s eightieth birthday) my sister reminded my mother of my father’s fiftieth. We had to explain it to my stepfather.

I received a bunch of photos, because I was overseas. I thought there was a joke when my father was pictured in front of the birthday cake with a hacksaw.

When I returned from Canada, I asked about those photos and told my father off. “How could you play such a joke on Mum?” My father was a bit of a joker and my mother is a superlatively wonderful cook, you see.

Except it had only partly been a joke. My mother had made her royal icing a bit too soon and it had set more than a bit too hard. The hacksaw was the only way of cutting that cake open and the sole practical joke had been in posting me those photographs.

Two more results of Regency Gothic banquet testing, and both a bit sad. Apple Fool which was entirely unmemorable and transparent pudding, which was OK, but not wonderful. The apple dish apparently tasted gritty. This is a great pity, because I had terrific punnish intentions - the name ‘Apple Fool’ was obviously too good to be true. And Transparent Pudding was apparently a perfectly ordinary pie and not very transparent.

Neither go on the long list, but the pudding might be revisited if we don’t get a few more good dessert reports in. I would rather have more desserts and be able to leave the ordinary ones in a land far away. It all depends on the remaining testers. (I wonder if that was a big enough hint?)

What’s really cool about this set of tests is that it was by teenagers. Thank you, Miriam and Johanna (and yes, it must be said that teenagers rock).

Firstly and most urgently, we’ve only got a month left for the initial tests. From 1 March if it hasn’t been tested and found delicious it hasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell of seeing the final menu. If it has been tested and found abysmal, it also hasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell, but at least we get to enjoy wondering how our ancestors ate such things.

So far the worst recipe appears to be gingerbread. Any gingerbread. I’m still waiting for the unbaked results and for three other tests, so it may be that there will be a redemptive gingerbread. Right now, I am a tad doubtful. It’s a shame. It looked and tasted like potting mix, but the spices were perfect :).

The Royal Cake was as much of a success as the gingerbread was a tragic failure. We wanted to love the gingerbread and had to throw it out. We wanted to find the Royal Cake dull (because the recipe looked very much like a pound cake) and we ended up proudly serving it to guests and then mourning its demise. It lasted well, and everyone who tasted it had a slice, then another slice and then maybe a third. It was fragrant with mace and currants and looked perfectly even and professional, despite having been made on a crotchetty hot day.

The salad dressing ought to have been called a mustard cream. Thicker than mayonnnaise, and far more yellow. A hint of heat and a little sharpness and perfect on greens. It’s the excuse I needed for getting a green salad on the table for the banquet, and I found the same style dressing in two (possibly three) cookbooks, so this is one of the rare dishes I don’t have to check alternates.

The really handy thing about this dressing is that it sits at the bottom of the dish until people want to eat, so clever diners who knew how rich the food was going to be could skip the dressing or have only a very little bit of it. I didn’t do that for dinner tonight. I had a big, big bowl of salad and entirely enjoyed every bite. The dressing goes particularly well with hard boiled eggs, and takes about three minutes to make (if you’ve already boiled your eggs).

And that’s an end of the recipes I am testing in Melbourne with my mother. Lots of Melbourne friends now have recipes and I will report on their results as I get them.

I need to find more victims. Um. Let me rephrase. Enthusiastic cooks willing to help try these old recipes are still very welcome to join. I will be in Canberra next week and can email recipes to anyone not local. I still have 60 unassigned recipes just begging to be tested. And we have till the 1 March for the tests.

My mind is brimming with cooking statistics. I have read 4000 pages of cookbooks, from 1800-1830. I have 250+ useful recipes. Now it’s just a matter of diminishing the list into “brilliant or essential”, “useful fallback” or “don’t even think of it.” In March I will return to my table layouts and move to the next stage. Mapping food - yum.

Watch this space for incoming test results. Everything from transparent pudding to lemon puffs.

If I sneak the family scrapbook into my luggage and take it home I suspect the family will notice, so this is my second last scrapbook post. My last one will be all the recipes anyone has asked for from the scrapbook, which right now is just the red lentil one.

One of the things I love about scrapbooks is the number of different ways to read a page. Looking just for recipes in the one handwriting is one approach, or just recipes from newspapers is another. Looking for dated recipes, or recipes with photos (and when did those pictures become colour?). Looking at changes in how recipes are copied over time, or where recipes are copied from. Looking at patterns of ingredients or method or types of food.

In this scrapbook, every now and again there is a hint of the wider life of the family e.g. on the page open before me is a recipe for Fudge Cake, which is all about apricots and prunes. On the same piece of paper is written:

Health - criterion of perfect health is when breath right down in stomach and out.
Ad. Georges Gallery 23-29 July
August - house
Mrs Cooper

It’s in different handwriting to the recipe. I didn’t say that the notes about daily life will always make sense, thirty or forty years on. That’s another of the joys of history: trying to make sense of ordinary tangles and to tease out hints and tiny mysteries in order to recreate lives.

On one page there’s a dated recipe, typed on letterhead. It gives us more clues than the note of what a physiotherapist told a young asthmatic and what that young asthmatic did with that day (my interpretation of the list - Mrs Cooper’s recipe comes after her name, and in her handwriting and my background knowledge informs me that the family was into physio for asthma around then).

The letterhead is beautifully informative. In orange and black it proclaims “Geraldine Dillon’s Recipe of the Week. Demonstrated on the Western Star Home Advisory Service Network. TV Kitchen. GTV9, Mondays, 11.30 a.m. 10th June, 1974.”

Australians can still buy Western Star butter and there is still a channel Nine (though I don’t think it’s GTV any longer). And the format of the date gives you standard punctuation of the period. The recipe typed in is for Chocolate Butternuts.

A handwritten note on schoolpaper is the opposite, but just as telling. I’ll give you that recipe today.

In the seventies, Australia was just as rabid about sport as today, but Olympic and Commonwealth athletes were genuine amateurs. Judy Peckham was a well-known hurdler, who earned a living as a teacher. She taught at the same secondary school as my mother.

On a scrap of classroom paper, floating unstuck in the middle of the book is:

Judy Peckham’s Easy Chocolate Cake

3 tbs butter
1 cup SR flour
1 cup sugar
2 level tbs cocoa
3/4 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs

Melt butter.

Mix other ingredients, add butter, beat hard for 3 minutes. Bake in moderate oven, about 40 mins.

This cake became my personal favourite in my twenties, because it was so simple and beacuse it only took 15 minutes from start to finish if I baked it in patty pans. I lost the source of the recipe and thought it was a family one from years before, but in the scrapbook the truth came out, and the cake came into the family in the 1970s, from Judy Peckham, elite athlete, high school teacher and entirely nice person.

I’ll also give you Linda Phillip’s sponge. Linda Phillips lived across three centuries. This is the sponge her mother and grandmother made (my grandmother and great-grandmother), which takes it back to the mid nineteenth century.

My family very seldom makes sponge cakes these days, so it’s very interesting to see that even thirty years ago we were asking cousins for sponge recipes. Family cuisines change, and if it weren’t for this scrapbook and Linda’s memory, this sponge would have faded entirely from the family foodways.

This recipe is very much notes from a conversation - whoever asked Linda for details of the sponge cake was assumed to know the full method for making a sponge and to be able to modify the recipe accordingly. As indeed we did. All of us could make sponges by the time we were ten - and hardly any of us have made a sponge cake since. Thank goodness for writing, to remind us of all those slow afternoon teas where we served sponges filled and topped with whipped cream and strawberries.

This recipe is also in Imperial measurement - the scrapbook documents very nicely the transition from Imperial to metric in Australia. As scrapbooks can do. I love scrapbooks.

Linda’s sponge

4 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
1 tbs butter
3 tbs cold water
vanilla

Beat eggs and sugar. Melt butter in water. Gently stir in butter and water. Add sifted flour. Cok in sandwich tins. Oven 350 degrees, 15-20 mins.

Greaseproof paper base of tin. Dredge with castor sugar.

My day in the city didn’t bring me any great insights, except on the ubiquity of olives. Emma and I visited a range of chocolate shops and sat down at several cafes. We visited two major upmarket department stores and looked into about 3 miles worth of windows.

Along the way we paid a visit to Vic Market, but only to the delicatessen area and the organic food section. The olive shop was a great deal of fun and we discovered orange balsamic vinegar.

The organic food section of the market had almost as much wine as organic food. The most curious wine was a range that had chilli. I asked the stallowner and he said that the chilli was steeped in the grapes from the early stages. A sip of chilli white port gave me a curious metabolic lift and my brain went walkabout until we got to an Asian grocer. It was reported to be the best in Melbourne. I did find three new types of pickles, but I need to check out Victoria Street and Springvale before I judge how good this shop actually is.

All of this was great fun and we had a tremendous day, but I had no great insights. Some of the shops are there because of a residential population that didn’t exist in central Melbourne forty years ago, and some of them exist to service the cafe society that the city is famous for. Some of the specialist shops hang on at Vic Market, but they have diminished.

Most of the rest is for tourists. Food for tourists. Food souvenirs for tourists. Lord of the Fries selling Aussie-cut chips with all sorts of international toppings. Instant (and good) Indian food on platters for about the price of a drive-in-take-away. Chocolate cakes of the most divine. And round the corner franchise outlet after franchise outlet after franchise outlet, all in a row.

Putting it all together, food outlets mainly show the current zones of the city centre and what they’re used for. You can see food reflecting the student area and tourist central and the busy office zone and the walkways. Lots and lots of cafes. Alleys seem to have cafes strewn further and further each time I visit. I haven’t yet seen a cafe that’s the old type - Italian and seventies and big machines and gentle pace. One near Degraves Street comes close. The rest must be there, but I didn’t spot them. What I saw is less what has been than an entire refurbishment of food-Melbourne. Not food-past, but ever-changing food-present.

The history is there, but I may have to dig for it a bit. Melbourne looks like a straightforward city. Cosmopolitan. Multicultural. Modern. Under the surface it’s a whole bunch more. I just have to look from a new angle.

My family and I visited the Museum of Melbourne the other day. I’ve been mulling over the visit: it left me with a great deal to think about.

Melbourne today is a great food-loving city. You’ve seen some of it in this blog: I’ve given you home recipes from Anglo-Jewish Melbourne; I’ve talked about shifts in Australian cuisine; I’ve talked about iceboxes - though I forgot to explain how kids whose families only needed half a block raced after the iceman to pick up the shavings and chips that scattered in his wake.

What I did at the Museum was try to see what the Museum specialists made of it all. My nieces helped me with the detective work and I suspect there’s more than one post in it. Our big discovery is that the Museum doesn’t integrate food with the rest of life very comfortably. It’s a dimension that exists, but is only partly-explored.

Little snippets emerge from the explanations to displays. In the 1870s, for instance, Victorians drank five times more spirits than today, but less beer and less wine.

These snippets are unsatisfying. What sort of spirits did they drink? How much did the spirits cost? Was the drinking the same in all social groups? When were spirits drunk? There’s a big difference between a drink after work with friends and a late night drink with your spouse. Speaking of spouses, did women drink as much as men? Did they drink in the same places as men? How did women’s and men’s drinking operate socially?

If the Museum had answered these questions, we would have begun to get a better understanding of what drinking meant to people who lived in Victoria in the 1970s. As it is, the single statistic blinds us. We think we know something, but the knowledge isn’t enough to help us understand people and their lives.

The Museum has a set from the TV show, Neighbours. A complete kitchen. My mother looked at it and compared the appliances one after the other with her own kitchen. Lots of similarities. The big difference is that nothing’s operational - no wear and tear showing usage patterns. No almost-invisible stains from the enthusiastic efforts of children cooking or worn patches from a favourite cup being put back in the one spot time after time after time for forty years. The only almost-food in the kitchen is in the refrigerator. That food is the wedding cake from the famous Kylie wedding episode.

The kitchen is all stage props. Very good stage props. It has the air of reality. But if you had to use that kitchen, you would starve. If you rely on the food history the Museum presents, you will glean some interesting data but you won’t get a good understanding of how Melbourne became what it is, foodwise. Snippets of history. Not nearly enough of the richness of human lives for my personal happiness.

Tomorrow I’m going to Victoria Market. Food history central. Vic Market is an old covered market that changes subtly each generation to meet current needs. Maybe I’ll find more there.

Jane’s and Mik’s dishes look as if they were a great deal of fun. A bit of a mixed bag, though. First, Jane. She sent this to me a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to get to them till now. Sorry, Jane!

Jane wrote of a Staffordshire Syllabub that it was “Nice enough, but nothing special.” She thinks the problem might lie in Australia’s lacklustre ciders. Since most English local ciders have way more character, this sounds highly likely.

Windsor Syllabub was nicer. She tried it a couple of times, just to see what happened with different ingredients. She tried it first with medium sherry, but sweet sherry was the winner. Her comments on the first batch included “Milk doesn’t look quite right - almost like it might separate. Nice served chilled. It needs plenty of sugar and nutmeg and cloves to get the flavour balance right.” She also said, even of the first try “Tastes good. Not hard to make. Has a nice little kick, but leaves a too-sweet aftertaste.” The aftertaste was more pleasant with the sweet sherry. Her notes on her second version were “Very nice. Very drinkable. Could become habit forming.” She suggests using a bit of cream with the milk, because modern milk is lower in fat than milk then. So Windsor Syllabub makes it to the long list, but Staffordshire doesn’t.

Jane also made an apple pie. The traditional way of eating it (with butter) was too rich for her guests. Cold cream (not the stuff you put on your face) or icecream might be better. The pie itself was “Yum. Apple pie was very very nice.” It goes to the long list with the caveat that we need something to serve alongside it.

Two out of three to the long list. Thank you Jane :).

Mik wrote:

The Mushroom and Egg dish is, as mentioned, an ancestor of devilled eggs. Very intense, but I suspect slightly less vinegar might be more palatable.

The Lemon Puffs are good, but unless we can actually get them to puff, I suggest dropping them.

The heart cake was very good. I tried it out last night; one of the guys mentioned that he didn’t usually like fruit cakes, but he liked this one.

Two out of three for two lots of testing isn’t at all bad. Thank you Mik, too :).

I have another recipe for lemon puffs, if anyone is willing to give them a try. I’m really happy about the heart cake, because we need more dessert possibilities that aren’t made almost solely with cream. I was having visions of only cream desserts and they were bad, bad visions. Imagine, delicious cream dish after delicious cream dish after delicious cream dish. We would all end up very ill.

The last dish to report on today is a pea soup. It’s a bit rich, but passes if we cut down the butter. It has a lovely array of green vegetables and is a perfectly respectable vegetarian soup. Suitable for coeliacs. Not hard to make. Not magic, but solid. Of the tasters, two were happy with it and one said it was “interesting”. I don’t see it as a raving success, but as a fallback if we can’t find a better vegetarian soup. Evne though meat-based broths are typical of the period, I feel that since there were vegetarian soups made we should try to have one as the soup so that everyone can eat it.

Total? Four recipes go to the long list and one recipe is noted as suitable if we can’t find something more magic.

I have lots of test results to report. I’ll post them all over the next twenty-four hours, as time permits. Many thanks to Jane and Mik and my mother and all our respective tasters.

Suddenly, from having two dishes on our long list, we have eight. And my ‘must be tested’ list is significantly less. As a recipe comes up trumps, I can go through and dump all the potential alternate versions of it. I wish we could do this for gingerbread, but the gingerbread Mum and I tried this week had perfect seasoning and would - as two people have said - have made perfect plant mix. It has a bizarrely dark lumpy texture and it won’t hold together. My feeling about it is that it’s a fabulously fragrant failure.

Fortunately for us, three of the other dishes we made are much nicer, and a vegetarian soup is in the fridge, glowing with potential.

Rice custards are like a wonderfully superior and super luxury gourmet rice pudding. Definitely on the long list, though I’m not at all sure what to match it with to make it work on a menu.

The almond cakes have a marzipan flavour and a dense cakey texture.. Nice but not glorious to my taste, but other tasters ate and kept eating and eating, so it’s on the long list. It’s perfect for lovers of almond.

What’s amazing abut this recipe is that it has so many possible variants. Everyone who tasted it said “Um, wouldn’t it be nice like…” While less rich than the other small cakes and custards, it’s still very rich.

Almond custards when warm and fresh from the oven to die for (and in large portions to die from the recipe starts with 45% cream and then boils it down). Cold, its nice but no more than nice. It loses that magic it has when slightly warm. It also loses the lovely almond texture it had when it was straight from the oven: it felt like roughened cream. There’s something almost citrus about it. Very yummy. Perfect eaten with a spoon in tiny portions. What I most loved about this was the mouth feel it had when war. Even ten minutes later, that creamy almond lingered.

Jane sent me her comments three weeks ago, so I’ll post hers next and then Mik’s.

Just for the record, I’m not blogging the recipes which are identical to modern eg there is a nice asparagus recipe that’s basically steamed vegetable served with butter. I’ll include them on the full long list in March.

March. Five more weeks and all those recipes. Thank goodness for all of you who are trying these things out - it’s not a job for just one person.

Today’s venture into scrapbookiana is going to be a bit different. I will skip the recipes that were cut and pasted magazines and newspapers. I’m going to play with a few of the handwritten recipes.

The first one is in my sister’s handwriting when she was pre-teen. I am just amazingly good at reading handwriting? No. I remember her making this particular recipe in class and insisting it become part of our family heritage. I don’t think we ever made it once she lost her initial enthusiasm. Oatmeal cake, with oatmeal, a little egg, some sugar, coconut, butter and vanilla. We all moved on to bigger and better things rather quickly.

Next to it is another handwritten recipe, and rather earlier. It’s in my grandmother’s writing and has her distinctive spelling. This particular grandmother died in the early sixties, so the recipe predates that. A biscuit recipe and proof that quite early Australians sometimes used the term ‘cookie’. Not baking a cookie seems wrong, though, somehow.

Unbaked cookies

1 tbs butter
1 cup castor sugar
2 eggs well beaten
1 cup dates finely chopped
2 cups rice krinkles
1 cup chopped nut
1 cup coconut

Melt butter in saucepan. Add sugar, then eggs and dates and cook slowly for 5-6 mins until well blended. Add rice krinkles and nuts and stir the mixture. Moisten hands with cold water, then when mixture is cool shape into balls, roll in coconut and place on tray to cool.

The next page has recipe for cream cheese pastry, from the other grandmother and in my writing (teenage, messy and a bit obscured by absorbed honey) is that same grandmother’s honey cake.

One the following page is my aunt’s recipe for icecream. It was not kosher, so we never made it. We ate it at my aunt’s house and politely pretended we didn’t know that it contained gelatine.

Then follow two more of my sister’s recipes: Anzac biscuits and pizza pie. The pizza recipe was another that was stuck into the book as a prompt or because of the memories it elicited rather than because it was someting we made according to that recipe. It combnes milk with bacon and cabanossi. I sometimes wonder how my parents handled my sister bringing that recipe home as one she had cooked at school? I remember us inventing our own pizza recipes (vegetarian) and working on bases till they worked. Which just goes to show that scrapbooks reflect recipes collected, not recipes cooked.

Then comes an orange squash recipe, written down by an enthusiastic child one very hot summer. It was a very hot summer. Too many days over 100 in a row led to a surfeit of oranges - halves frozen for snacks, in drinks, in iceblocks. We were not lacking in vitamin C. This heatwave explains why that enthusiastic child (mentioning no names) wrote “Drink” in big letters down the bottom and drew double lines all the way around the word to make sure it would not go unnoticed. We only made one batch of the squash and then turned our attention to ginger beer. The ginger beer has a story all its own.

And now comes a recipe from another sister. That lock jaw toffee recipe was our favourite to make for school fetes for over a decade. Enterprising sisters spoke of stuffing my face with it to make me stop talking.

Lock jaw toffee

1 pint water
4 cups white sugar
1 tbs brown vinegar

Bring water to boil. Add water and stir till dissolved. Add vinegar. Cook till mixture thickens (we tested this using a cold saucer). Put into patty pans. Allow to set. Decorate with hundreds and thousands or dessicated coconut.

The final recipe for today (out of the dozens more in handwriting) is my grandmother’s raisin wine. Maybe this version will work better than the last? Maybe it’s a mysterious code and if you combine both recipes you get a wine that works?

Raisin wine

10 tbs raisins chopped finely and put into a jar with 11 bottles of water. Let it stand in a warm place for a week. Then strain off the raisins and put juice back into jar with 1/2 nutmeg, 2 pieces of cinnamon bark. Mix thrugh well and let stand till a big skin forms.
5 tbs sugar, 1 bottle of water and one bottle of wine dissolve over fire. Pour into jar and mix well. Brown sugar for colouring or 1 tb white sugar and a lttle water. Boil this over slow fire til dark brown. Add slowly one cup of water.

What one does after this is a mystery, because the recipe ends there. One day I will decode it and make that raisin wine.

Today my mother opened a jar of olives to go with lunch and a story tumbled out.

Jacob Friedman dreamt of olive groves and vast wealth in the Mt Gambier region in the 1920s. He took wild olive stock (seeded naturally, the wild trees had reverted to kind) and grafted olive varieties imported from the country that was to become Israel. Olives take a long time to fruit and he went bust. Eventually, the trees fruited and new owners saw the olives to market.

The current bushfires devastating that region aren’t the first. When the fires turned the groves into charcoal, the owners thought all that time and work was in vain. Then there was a little miracle. The roots of the wild stock turned out to be hardier than the grafts and the trees grew back.

Mount Zero Olives now sells a lovely line in preserved wild olives, which is what we had with lunch.

These tiny olives have a duskier feel than modern varieties to my taste, and I keep thinking that if they were combined with preserved wild cucumbers (available from groceries that sell food from the Middle East - think of long, thin and rather pale variants of Lebanese cucmbers) the overall effect would be of familiar flavours with a muted undertone of something a tiny bit acrid.