Food History

Thanks to the canny eyes of Trudi Canavan, I suddenly own a copy of a TV Week booklet of Graham Kerr’s recipes. It isn’t listed in the Wikipedia entry about him. It’s from the mid to late 1960s and was published just before Australian cuisine took its amazing turn and became less mundane.

Kerr did his best to change Australian eating habits to fit his food vision. The curious thing is that - despite his great influence and his TV shows - the final direction our cooking took wasn’t the direction he pushed for.

Firstly, he got the wine right. Every meal he demonstrated had a wine attached. In the sixties Australia was still known as beer-drinking. The switch from Fosters to Chardonnay is not insignificant. I made a little wine list from Kerr’s book: Houghton’s White Burgundy (WA), Hamilton’s Dry Red Hermitage, 1958, Penfold’s Traminer Riesling Bine 202, 1964 Lindeman’s Riesling Bin 23, Thomas Hardy’s Eden Moselle, McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant Hermitage 1962 and McWilliam’s Lovedale Riesling are the ones listed for programs 1 through to 7.

The big change in wines is that with penetration into the international market, Australian winemakers have had to change their nomenclature. We can’t belong to the OIV and ignore them. Wines are named after grape types or local regions now, instead of winegrowing regions on the other side of the world. So no more Hock, Moselle, Champagne, Burgundy. At first there was a great deal of protest: established names were being dumped and it all looked fearfully bureaucratic. Now that we’ve got used to the new names, it all looks straightforward and it’s easy to wonder what the fuss was about. Change is like that.

And now that we’ve got used to a more Mediterranean cuisine, it’s easy to look at Kerr’s recipes and wonder why he thought that his flavour combinations were so very magic. In the sixties, though, they were innnovative. Not directions I would have chosen - difficult for vegetarians, tough for Moslems, almost impossible for Jews. And very few of his dishes are lasting inventions. But at the time he devised the content of the cookbook, Australia was a different country. The big changes were breaking through in suburban Australia and Kerr’s TV enthusiasm for the new and the exotic helped Greek and Turkish and Italian cooks share their recipes with friends. And those shared recipes are where the big changes started to occur. When Indian and Asian and South East Asian techniques and ingredients were gradually added to the mix in the seventies and eighties, and when bushfood crept in a bit after that, the landscape was changed. A world class cuisine had sprung up, seemingly from nowhere. The truth is that our food has always ben malleable and always been constant. We still eat scones and jam and cream on Sunday afternoons. Then we pick up a souvlaki or a kebab or some sushi for a lazy dinner. It’s just that the sixties and the seventies were a time of particular change.

Graham Kerr played a role in this change, despite the faddish nature of many of his dishes. He made it seem normal to push food boundaries. He helped make change comfortable. And now you know why I’m so very pleased Trudi spotted this little booklet.

The family scrapbook is in danger of falling apart. It has spashes of this, that and the other on this page, that page and the other page. In short, it is exactly what a family scrapbook ought to be. It’s like a much-loved pair of shoes - lived in and no longer beautiful, but full of comfort and memories.

The very first pasted recipes are typed on an old portable typewriter (by me, given the particular typos). Everything is pre-metric. Everything was very popular in my family in the early seventies: date bread, coleslaw and Auntie Uschi’s cheese cake. Of these three, the only one we still bake is the cheesecake. It’s a fabulous cheesecake recipe, but drier than many current favourites. Auntie Uschi had the most delicious continental cakes at her afternoon teas, which reflects her own background.

Cheese cake

Pastry
3 oz butter
2 oz sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
6 oz plain flour
pinch salt
1/2 level tsp baking powder

Melt butter. Add sugar, egg, other ingredients. Chill in refrigerator. Roll to fit 8″ tin.

Cake
1/2 lbs creamed cottage cheese (the smooth stuff, not the grainy)
1/2 cup sour cream
2/3 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 lemon (juice and rind)
1 drop vanilla
1 tbs plain flour
1 tb SR flour

Cream cheese with sugar. Add eggs. Beat well. Add other ingredients and beat together. Pour into pastry shell. Use extra pastry to decorate top of cake. Bake 1 - 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees F.

The next few pages of the book are mostly recipes from myself and my sisters, obviously instructing Mum that ‘found’ recipes had to be pasted in. I vaguely remember a stack of recipes cluttering a bench. Anyhow, these recipes include one for Swiss Roll, buttercake, savouries and pots-o’-cream. The pots-o’-cream are a low point. Why did we ever need a recipe for buttercake? we used to make it exceptionally regularly, usually as a base for a fruit flan. Mum called the recipe-from-memory her 2-4-6 recipe, because that was the ratio of the main ingredients.

One more page and I’ll finish for the day. The next page contains my grandmother’s gemscone recipe (think flour, butter, sugar, egg and milk dropped into cast iron pans and cooked for a very short time in a very hot oven - the stuff of instant afternoon tea), my aunt’s gingerbread recipe, my best friend’s mother’s chocolate cake and my own first attempt at reconstructing a recipe from literary references to it (speculaas, using Van Loon’s Lives). All these were collected in the seventies by me. I remember saying “We need to put these in” and my mother asking “How did you get Auntie Joan to give you her gingerbread recipe?”

I didn’t realise until now just how far back my obsession with recording family food traditions extended: I read Van Loon’s Lives when I was thirteen, I think, and I started pestering people for recipes long before that. One of the reasons why this collection of recipes is so much more varied than the other ones I’ve described: I have had a compulsion to record historical contexts since my age could be measured in one digit and quite obviously I was obsessive enough about it to enforce historical contexts onto family scrapbooks.

I begin to pity my family. And I had no idea how personal this exercise would become when I retrieved the book from the family cooking vault. Historical evidence is never neutral, but it seldom looks this egocentic.

If you want any of the recipes I’ve mentioned but not transcribed, ask and you shall receive (but not this weekend).

I will sneak the extra recipes people have requested from the family scrapbook in during blogtime next week, since tomorrow is a bit busy. I will be spending most of it in downtown Melbourne - if anything reportable and fascinating and foodie comes out of my adventures, I will blog it. That’s a promise.

I was right about Melbourne and food. Over twenty recipes are already with friends and family for testing. I still have lots left to share, so if you’re feeling neglected please just say.

Morris dancers are brave and noble beings, because (even though they know what I do to morris dancers in my next novel) two morris-dancing friends have take more recipes than anyone.

It isn’t all about testing. A really interesting dynamic is happening. My friends are giving useful comments on my pre-selection of recipes to test. Some recipes don’t need to be tested and others shouldn’t be tested. The brains of many intelligent cooks are at work here, rather than the sole brain of a slightly dotty historian.

And the creator of Cascade Light says that the last negus recipe I have looks pretty standard. He doesn’t want to test it, though - he and his significant other (who went to school with me - we’re still very close) took all the lemon recipes instead. So we have a potentially suitable negus recipe for testing. It will go to the first person who waves their hand madly in my direction.

Inside many recipe notebooks are some sheets that have escaped the confines of the pages. Free recipes. Not caged by paste or stickytape. This post is for them.

The current family scrapbook has a whole sheaf of pages. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has wielded a paste brush since the family home was packed up, nearly twenty years ago. There are recipes photocopied from cookbooks and newspapers (marmalade, strawberry conserve, black forest pudding, lemon syrup yoghourt cake, chocolate mud cake, stir fried vegetable curry, flatbread, banana and lime cheesecake, glazed orange poppy seed cake, Moroccan red lentil soup, Blitz torte, Dutch almond cake), a series of rather fishy leaflets from 1987 (courtesy of Vic Fish “The Victorian Fishing Industry Council” - my mother sought fish recipes bigtime once I had left home as she had suffered twenty years of not being able to cook it due to my fish allergy), recipes copied twenty-five years ago at my father’s surgery (”Mini fruit cakes” to serve with coffee on Christmas Night -the perfect recipe for a Jewish dentist, chocolate carrot cake), odd pages in my mother’s handwriting (Lumber Jack Cake, Basic Chocolate Cake, Buffalo Cake, Indian Corn muffins - on the back of an airline boarding pass - the ingredients for a fruit cake, Viennese orange biscuits), odd recipes from friends (honey cake, Middle Eastern Orange Cake from June, Mississippi Mud Cake from Betty) and family (Auntie Pearl’s honey cake, Lemon Grass Vichysoisse from Auntie Joan, a range of bushfood recipes from me, Moroccan cholent from one of my sisters), recipes without origin or title (but containing apricot and icing sugar or for baking fish with coriander masala) and Stephanie Deste’s chocolate cake.

If any reader asks, I am happy to give any of these recipes and to explain why there are so many cake recipes. It doesn’t mean we ate cake all the time, just as the plethora of meat dishes surviving for the Middle Ages doesn’t mean they didn’t eat vegetables. Just ask in the next few days, while I still have access to the recipes.

Tonight I want to give Stephanie’s chocolate cake recipe. She gave me a violin when I was fourteen and she was a close friend of my father’s and terribly, terribly intimidating. She would wheel up to me in the library when I was young and demand I tell Dad this or that. And her voice could be heard throughout the building and I was transfixed by her gaze and was terrified into being polite.

When I was older I discovered that her voice was resonant because she was in theatre. My mother still describes her as an exotic dancer. And just tonight I found out that she was part of the inspiration for Dame Edna Everage (and those glasses were part of the reason her gaze was so transfixing - I coveted them at age five).

Childhoods play the strangest tricks on us. The most exotic people are ordinary to children. If I had seen her like this , maybe I would have thought of her as exotic. She wasn’t ordinary, but I assumed that most older women were larger than life and that Stephanie (we called her by her first name, and her daughter was “Auntie”) was just a bit stronger than the others. I still have the violin she gave me. And my mother has her cake recipe in that old family scrapbook.

Stephanie Deste’s chocolate cake

125 g dark chocolate
100 g butter
100 g caster sugar
100 g ground almonds
3 eggs, separated
1 tbs brandy
1 tbs black coffee

Melt chocolate, brandy and coffee in double boiler. Stir. Add butter and sugar. Mix well.

Remove from heat. Stir in almonds. Stir in lightly beaten egg yolks.

Beat egg whites until stiff. Stir a spoonful of the whites into the mixture to lighten it, then gently fold in remainder.

Pour into a buttered, paper lined 19cm round cake tin. Bake at 160 degrees C for 45 mins. Cool completely before turning out.

Sprinkle with icing sugar if desired.

Over the next two weeks I have a couple of interesting things to explore. The first is some more test results for the Regency Gothic banquet. The second is a very particular scrapbook.

This scrapbook is a cut and paste job. It’s one of those early 70s cheap supermarket products. It cost 39c. Coarse paper and a cover bright enough to blind. “Scrap ‘n Scribble” are the only words on that cover, and the picture is of a stuffed animal that looks as if it narrowly escaped Muppet Asylum. This tattered volume is the first place my family looks when there’s a recipe we half-remember from years gone by. It’s the story of a family growing up.

My mother and I hauled it out tonight and identified handwriting and where our tastes have changed and even who insisted on pasting a particular recipe into the book. There are recipes from relatives, including another version of my grandmother’s raisin wine. There are recipes copied from school and from newspapers and a whole series given by my father’s patients. I don’t give my dentist recipes, but neither do I get recipes from Beauty technicians. My father was as assiduous as the rest of us in collecting and pasting and growing the family tradition.

What I love about scrapbooks llike this is that they trace the culinary path of a particular family. Food fads appear and new ingredients. The Great Australian Culinary Shift was happening right about the time we started this particular scrapbook, and it’s worth looking at just for that.

I can’t bring you the whole scrapbook in a few short sessions, but I can share some of the highlights with you. Not only the recipes, but some of the stories behind the recipes. I’m hoping to find biscuit or scone recipes in there. If I don’t (and we mostly made biscuits and scones without recipes so they will definitely be under-represented in the scrapbook) I brought a recipe or two from Canberra.

So that’s most of your Melbourne diet. Retro recipes from the seventies and eighties and niceties along with their oral history. Regency Gothic test reports. And scones or biscuits.

Tonight my parents and I went to a Chinese place in Ormond for dinner. Tea and Rice was its name, and my mother and I went there a couple of years ago and we had both turned all kinds of nostalgic. It has a more extensive menu now and maybe a change of management, but then it served very much the sort of Australian Chinese food that we both thought was long-gone. Bland, a little over-cooked, but very emotionally satisfying. It harked back to Australia-past, where the Australian Chinese (Chinese Australian?) population had to adapt their public cooking to majority food tastes. There have been Chinese Australians (Australian Chinese?) here since the 1850s or earlier and the restaurant tradition is not new.

I didn’t remember eating Chinese food as a child, but that was because it wasn’t kosher back then. These days there is a kosher Chinese restaurant in Melbourne. And these days Chinese food can be regional and sophisticated and all kinds of special. My stepfather remembered back to the plainer food of of the 1940s. The changes are good, but what’s even better is remembering how important Chinese culture and cuisine has been to Australia for the last 150 years.

I will be doing a blog comment with a bit more content soon. I am in Melbourne and pestering everyone in sight for their memories of Melbourne food past. Since Melbourne is one of the world’s great foodie cities and my stepfather was born above a greengrocer’s and my sister is a wine expert, the only possible glitch is my capacity to weasel information out of people.

While you wait, check out this competition and then come back and make lots of comments on my blog, just to get your name in for the draw. Let me lure you with my very first picture, too. I’ve never posted piccies before, so I hope you will bear with any glitches.

The Carnival of the Recipes this week is all about people who hate to cook or can’t cook. It doesn’t matter how much you hate cooking, you still need to eat, so when I saw the topic, it made me think.

It struck me that some common assumptions about food history are a tad unfair to those who genuinely lack an affinity for cooking. The rich might have had servants, but what did an ordinary person do? Cooking could be hard labour prior to modern equipment and it’s frightening to think of hours of daily effort to produce something you really didn’t enjoy creating or care about eating.

There have always been alternatives to cooking in the big cities. We know this about societies from Medieval Londons to Ancient Rome.

There’s a heap of evidence for takeaway pies sold round London Bridge (I think we’re talking about the bridge in Arizona and its predecessors, not any of the bridges currently spanning the Thames - I don’t know if the tourist services there sell meat pies or just give rides on red doubledeckers) and for food joints that flirted with the fire authorities in the Middle Ages. Think of it, the need for no-cook meals led to great fires of London.

Paris was as well off as Rome and London from at least the twelfth century. A function of big cities has always been a population that didn’t have a household fire (due to poverty or sub-renting), or couldn’t cook, or was itinerant. You can still buy full meals at the Paris street markets, and there is a lovely set of Paris street cries from the thirteenth century.

You can read about the street cries here. They’re in a poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve, with a modern French translation. No modern English translation. Some of the foods mentioned as having their own street cries are waffles, salted meat, honey, hot pureed peas, lots of lovely salad vegetables all fresh and crispy, cheese from Champagne and Brie, butter, deliciously ripe fruit, pate, dried fruit and nuts, cake, hot Breton pancakes, bread, good strong wine. Enough for a feast. Enough to save a non-cook with money from any kind of hunger.

In the home, there were failproof recipes too. The famous Sephardic baked egg may have originated as completely foolproof food for the religiously compliant non-cook.

Baked egg

Just place an egg (with its shell still on) in warm ashes and go away and do other things. The resulting egg has a gorgeous texture and the only skill required is cracking it open once it has sat long enough and maybe finding some salt to eat with it.

My family in Melbourne has just finished a roast dinner. Chicken or lamb, plus vegies, plus salad. Preceeded by some sort of soup or hors d’oeuvre (my mother’s favourite summer hors d’oeuvre is avocado fanned on small plates and served with a mango-ginger sauce) and ending with a dessert. If guests come there will be cake as well, either a flourless choc-nut cake, or a Mediterranean orange-almond cake. This is a pretty standard Australian Jewish Friday night.

Eighty years ago the equivalent dinner was chicken soup with rice (or maybe noodles), a roast and vegies and salad, followed by icecream. Not very kosher. But given the weather, I could use the icecream.

Actually, my mother has recently gone back to serving icecream, except it’s a family sorbet recipe, dairy free and terrifyingly kosher. The tradition of something cooling last thing on a hot night just refuses to stay dead. And rapsberries are just so good at the moment. I will lay bets I get to eat some next Friday night.

Kosher Icecream

1 punnet soft fruit (if you use blueberries, it’s best to freeze them first)
up to 1 cup sugar (depending on how sweet your tooth is)
1 egg white

Beat everything together for 8-20 minutes (less time if you use a more powerful mixer, 20 minutes with a hand-held electric beater). Freeze for 24 hours.

January is supposed to be a quiet time in Australia. All those holidays. This year I promised myself two weeks off, but it’s just not going to happen. I need it, but it’s not going to happen. What happened today was 1,500 pages of recipes. I had to bring it forward because I need to find pictures for this blog - that’s tomorrow’s endeavour, since once teaching begins time to chase pictures will be entirely non-existent.

What I did with those 1,500 pages was evaluated and culled and sorted and they are down to fifty-one pages. One page is notes on menu design and the rest are all recipes for testing. I think I might print the fifty pages out and see who I can talk into trying what in Melbourne. Melbourne people are enthusiastic cooks, after all.

The vexed question of vegetables for the Conflux dinner is solved and vegetarians will not starve. I think I might have enough dishes for coeliacs. Out-of-season stuff is off-the-menu. Recipes with isinglass and other out-of-fashion key ingredients have been dropped, which lost us a lot of yummy stuff. I know there are modern alternatives for isinglass, but I don’t know what isinglass tastes like or how firm it is, so using carageen or agar-agar is not going to happen. It’s just as well that the big periods of popularity for jellies and aspics were either earlier or later.

Isinglass isn’t the only problem. Lots of dishes that ought to be there to make it authentic have had to be dropped because there’s no way the restaurant will agree to recipes that take two weeks to make or anything (like most pies and stuffing) that requires walnut ketchup. Walnut ketchup is in so many dishes and young walnuts are so hard to find - one thing I don’t want in the negotations is a series of battles we lose. The most I can do is comment how important walnut ketchup is and that I do have recipes if they have walnuts. I have a separate set of notes for important cooking elements that I think are unachievable but which I would love to see in an ideal world and yes, walnut ketchup is on that list. Isinglass is not.

In the final menu, I suspect there will be a couple of aspects that will have the knowledgable shaking their heads. The compromises are more obvious for an early nineteenth century table than for a late fourteenth century one, because so many more recipes and table notes are available for the more recent period. Still, considering that we’re on the other side of the world; that it will be catered by a hotel; and that the seasons are all confused and we don’t have many ingredients (Australia is a mecca for good food, but when it comes down to it, we only use about ten vegetables and five kinds of meat to create most of it), it will be pretty good. I mourn salsify and have plovers’ eggs on my wish list.

I have almost given up on negus. I know it is one of the important drinks of Regency Gothic, but it may not have been as everyday in the actual historical period. I have discovered a few drink recipes to try but really, not that many. Most of the good ones took ingredients that can’t be found here or require lengthy brewing time. Our dinner may be wine and port all the way. Which is fine. Wine and port are perfectly suitable, just as long as we go with a Portuguese style rather than a liqueur port.

What all this means is that the worst of the recipe trawl is done. And if you think I sound tired, it’s because I’m exhausted. This is a big milestone. Altogether I have read something like 4,000 pages of recipes and dinner instructions. I know what the table ought to look like and some of the options and I know what ‘filler’ food needs to go out to make the flavours balance and work together in the right fashion for the early nineteenth century.

Now the only thing we need is between 90 and 120 recipes tested, so that I can balance that table and make the whole thing delectable. And then we start talking to the restaurant.

Mrs Eaton doesn’t just give recipes in her book. She is full of useful advice on how to take 2 oz glass phials of cream with you when travelling and how it can be kept fresh and on how to prevent chimneys from smoking. Her advice on eating salad is particularly interesting from a food history point of view, because her strong views sing forth on why certain foods are better and why certain times of year produce more potent greens.

It’s fascinating to see world views colliding in this period and people sorting it out their way. It’s almost as if our modern culture could have gone in quite different directions with the whiff of the right egg recipe or a sip of tea or a bite of salad.

One of the interesting things to emerge in some of Mrs Eaton’s views is the remnants of the Ptolemaic universe. It’s easy to think that modern views and modern science go back earlier than the nineteenth century, but the more I read the more I realise that we don’t fully follow modern scientific views even now and in the early nineteenth century (and right through until after the 1860s) the four humours played their part in regulating the human body (even if it wasn’t admitted openly or often).

Society was on the crux of several choices in the early nineteenth century and it all comes out in the advice given in popular cookbooks and household guides. To put it in modern parlance, this stuff is why culinary history rocks. The great thinkers are very seldom as useful on everyday life and thought as a good cookbook or guide to housekeeping.

I’m having a cup of hot tea to celebrate, even though it’s quite bad for me.

TEA. The habit of drinking tea frequently, and in large quantities, cannot fail to be injurious, as it greatly weakens and relaxes the tone of the stomach. This produces indigestion, nervous trembling and weakness, attended with a pale, wan complexion. When tea is taken only at intervals, and after solid food, it is salutary and refreshing; but when
used as a substitute for plain nourishing diet, as is too commonly the case amongst the lower classes, it is highly pernicious, especially as large quantities of a spurious description are too frequently imposed upon the public. The policy which compels a very numerous class to purchase
this foreign article, for procuring which immense sums are sent out of the country, while the produce of our own soil is comparatively withheld by an exorbitant system of taxation,
cannot be too severely condemned, as alike injurious to health, to the interests of agriculture, and to the comfort and industry of ‘the people’. The duty on foreign tea has indeed been greatly encreased, but at the same time, so has the duty on malt and beer ; no encouragement therefore is
given to the home consumption, but the money which ought to be paid for the production of barley and malt is given to the foreigner, while by the enormous price of the article, a powerful stimulus is furnished for attempting an illicit importation, and for the pernicious adulteration of what is now esteemed almost a common necessary of life. It is desirable to lessen the injurious effects of tea as much as possible by mixing it with milk, which will render it softer and
more nutritious. With the addition of sugar it may be made to form a wholesome breakfast for those who are strong and live freely, operating as a diluent for cleansing the bladder
and kidnies, and the alimentary passages. Persons of weak nerves ought however to abstain from tea, as they would from drams and cordials, as it causes the same kind of irritation on the delicate fibres of the stomach, which ends in lowness, trembling, and vapours. Tea should never be drunk
hot at any time, as it tends still more to produce that relaxation which ought to be carefully avoided. Green
tea is less wholesome than black or bohea.

Just when you thought I had entirely forgotten my vague desire to document a vast array of biscuit and scone recipes, I found two recipes from the early part of the nineteenth century. These biscuits are English, I think. I’ll post a correction if the book turns out to have been published elsewhere.

I’m working through Mrs Eaton’s book alphabetically for entirely differnt purposes so you may find scones appear on the blog when I get to ’s’. Or you may not. I’ve been working on heightening levels of suspense in my fiction and I intend to practise wherever I can :).

BISCUIT CAKE.

One pound of flour, five eggs well beaten and strained, eight ounces of sugar, a little rose or orange flower water. Beat the whole thoroughly, and bake it one hour.

BISCUITS.

To make hard biscuits, warm two ounces of butter in as much skimmed milk as will make a pound of flour into a very stiff paste. Beat it with a rolling pin, and work it very smooth. Roll it thin, and cut it into round biscuits. Prick them full of holes with a fork, and about six minutes will bake them. For plain and very crisp biscuits, make a pound of flour, the yolk of an egg, and some milk, into a very stiff paste. Beat it well, and knead it quite smooth ; roll the paste very thin, and cut it into biscuits. Bake them in a slow oven till quite dry and crisp. To preserve biscuits for a long- time sweet and good, no other art is necessary than packing them up in casks well caulked, and carefully lined with tin, so as to exclude the air. The biscuits should be laid as close as possible ; and when it is necessary to open the cask, it must be speedily closed again with care. Sea bread may also be preserved on a long voyage, by being put into a bag which has been previously soaked in a quantity of liquid nitre, and dried. This has been found to preserve the biscuits from the fatal effects of the wevil, and other injurious insects, which are destructive to this necessary article of human sustenance.

Discussion among friends often turns to food, especially during the couple of weeks in the year when too many of us overeat. One particularly interesting discussion this year was about Chess Pie. Two friends (one from Arkansas and one from Oklahoma) remember it fondly, while others asked “Does it look like a chessboard?” “Is it related to grammar pie?”

After hearing various descriptions, Chess Pie sounds to me very like an early nineteenth century cheesecake. The sort with no cheese. The sort that Nicole and I tested for the Regenecy Gothic Banquet (which is now this year - woohoo!!).

If anyone has any experiences of chess cakes and grammar cakes, let me know and I’ll add them to the mix. In a few days time I’ll put a chess cake recipe up here, specially for the sharers of the original discussion.

Why a few days? I don’t think I can stand to see another cake recipe just now. I’ve hidden the sugar. Having Chanukah and then Christmas and then New Year in quick succession was just a bit much. At least next year two out of the three overlap…