Food History

Today, some Halloween foodways (and a view of Mountain Creek Farm, because I’ve been indoors all day).

Most people who replied to my pleas said “there are no Halloween foodways.”

Three people gave us their Halloween stories. (more…)

I’m incapable of deep intellect tonight. My mind is still in the Middle Ages. (While I remember, hi to any students who managed to find me here – you’ll find the Medieval recipes here. I’ve made a sudden and unexpected decision to make the chicken with orange sauce for dinner on Friday night. I was going to make chicken in herbes de Provence and balsamic vinegar sauce. Now I want to make both. Can four people eat two medium-sized chooks?)

Today’s book isn’t really a cookbook. In fact, it isn’t a cookbook at all.
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I love putting my name down in competitions and draws, but I very seldom win anything. The other week, I didn’t just win one thing, but two and they were both for the kitchen.

The first was a Halloween dishcloth, courtesy Knitting Passions. Thank you Barbara: I know exactly who needs that dishcloth.

The other is more complicated. ProBlogger was celebrating their birthday with a big giveaway. One of the various categories of prizes was foodie. Naturally I entered this category. How could I not?

I won the exact sort of olive oil that I have dreamed about for a long while. I’ll do a formal tasting with friends and post on it separately, which is when I’ll give you the details of the oil (you need some suspense in your lives). I’m not sure when this will be (soon) but in the meantime, thank you so much Bob of Olive Oil Passion!

This isn’t a proper post. This is me bubbling over. I’ll do you that cookbook post tonight and a full post on Bob’s generous gift in a few days time.

Signed

One Happy Little Vegemite

Today I finally found the specimen bags I need for my teaching spices and herbs. I just labelled them and put them away. This means that instead of the next book in my ‘must-out-away’ pile, you get a small celebration of these lovely things. We even get to celebrate the ammonia, though I admit that celebrating ammonia is hard to fathom.

What did I add to my tin tonight?
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Back to the cookbook. Inside the front cover is the frilliest apron yet. Very daytime soap, that apron.

The cookbook has a technical section that explains electrical cookers and their wonder. This is important, because the gas fields of Bass Strait were discovered in the 1960s. I’d love to know if this book predated or postdated gas being so important to Melbourne: that bit of information would change the way I read the cookbook.

The contents are divided into Hotplate Cooking (how to do), Oven cooking (how to work the oven and sort out cooking times), Recipes, Fruit Preserving, Weights and measures, and SEC Advisory Services.

The important category here is Fruit Preserving. Many families did home preserves in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s because fruit was abundant and plentiful and local. We used to go fruit picking every summer then work hard for a few days with our Fowler’s Vacola kit and then eat bottled apricots and peaches all winter. That kind of preserving is making a comeback in Australia, so here’s a recipe for my family’s favourite winter dessert from the 1960s and 1970s and then another scone recipe (from the cookbook – the fruit salad recipe is from my childhood), for our collection.

Flaming Fruit Salad

Mix your favourite preserved fruit in a pyrex dish and heat until quite hot. Bring the pyrex dish to table. Heat some brandy (the amount depends on how much flame you like and how much alcohol you’re prepared to feed your children). When the brandy is hot, pour it over the fruit salad. Turn the lights off (in a hurry – this doesn’t work when the brandy is not hot enough) and put a match to the dish. Admire briefly Serve it forth – by the time everyone has a bowlful of salad the flames will have died and the alcohol content significantly diminished.

Derby Scones

8 oz SR flour
pinch salt
½ tsp grated nutmeg
1 dessertspoon cinnamon
2 tbs castor sugar
2 oz butter
1 egg
1 dessertspoon treacle
½ cup milk

Sift flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Rub in butter, add sugar. Mix to a light dough with beaten egg, treacle and milk. Turn on to floured board, knead slightly, roll out and cut into rounds. Place on greased tray, glaze with milk and bake in oven at 50 degrees, reset to 450 degrees, for 8-10 minutes.

Daylight savings is here and I’m awake at an exceptionally early hour. I lay in bed thinking “What did I forget to do yesterday?� I’d forgotten to blog! I feel like saying, with a dash of coyness “Imagine, Gillian forgetting to blog� because coy has a bit of a 1960s feel but I was so tired last night I forgot a whole bunch of things. If I’m a bit less thoughtful than usual, this odd sleepiness is why. It also explains why – when I finally write it – there is enough for two posts. I’ll post the first part now and the second part tonight. This means you’re guaranteed a post even if I’m still on the wrong side of fatigue.

Being tired explains a whole bunch of things about my life. Cooking Better Electrically is certain-sure to cure them. It has a woman in a blue print frock and a beehive hairdo on the front cover (also a frilly pink apron – why don’t I covet that apron? I surely ought to, especially since it’s perfectly clean and starched and belongs on a TV set). On the back cover, the lady with the beehive is looking up (coyly, of course) from the white bowl she’s sort-of stirring. This time she has a floral pink dress and 2 inch (white) heels. No apron, but the floor has white and black squares and makes me think that cooking is like playing chess.

For some reason the front cover has my bathroom tiles as the kitchen splashback. I wondered where those tiles came from. Should I give them back?

Cooking Better Electrically says (more…)

My household has strange customs. Saying ‘my household has strange customs’ is much better than admitting that I myself have strange customs. (more…)

One of the commenters on this blog, Neil, has hit upon a really crucial definitional question in his comment on one of those posts where I try to puzzle out the balance between retaining a cuisine and maintaining kashruth. You can find his comment here.

Neil implies that all Jewish cooking must be kosher. He says that my grandmother’s cooking was “non-jewish cooking done by a non-observant (or the kashrut laws) jewâ€?. Except that Jewish cooking isn’t just a matter of eating bacon or not eating bacon, of mixing milk and meat or not mixing milk and meat. (more…)

The Swedish cookbook got me thinking about the cooking of my own grandmother and how close much of it came to being lost. I found out – when I was in Sydney the other day – that only some recipes had been handed down to the next generation. Things change in society and daughters develop their own cooking.

The recipes that would have lasted even without the handwritten books included stuffed monkeys and roast beef. The recipes that hadn’t survived included all the Christmas recipes (because of the family’s shift towards less Anglo-Australian Judaism), most of the cakes, and a heap of small recipes like salad cream. The salad cream is easy to explain: the whole family uses vinaigrette dressing or pure balsamic vinegar most of the time now, and that reflects standard salad dressing in the whole country.

I really want to give the comfort food of memory tonight. (more…)

You need to meet a new cookbook today. Truly, you do. Swedish Cakes and Cookies was given to me at Conflux by some very discerning friends, one of whom has just launched a publishing house. You especially need this book today because it means I can point you to the online course I’m teaching for Eneit Press.

Mostly, though, this book is important in its own right. This is why Mark and Etina brought it for me from Sweden (along with a bar of Swedish chocolate, which I’m saving for a special occasion). It’s a translation of the classic book on Swedish cakes and biscuits and very important in reviving a cultural tradition that I’m told was in danger of being lost. Homecooking, basically. Cuisine grandmère. (more…)

Today I have a special treat. I rather suspect that April, another 451 Press blogger, will particularly enjoy this post. It’s from my friend Glenice Whitting, and I used the excuse of her new novel to extract both recipe and story from her.

Glenice is the author of the award-winning novel, Pickle to Pie. The book is about Frederick, a man caught between the pickle and sauerkraut culture of his German grandparents and the meat pie world of Australia.

“Scripture Cake

‘Fredi. Come! Today we make scripture cake,’ says Grossmutter as she ties her large cobbler apron tightly around her waist and hands me the family Bible.

Recipes. What would life be without them? They are ripped out of magazines, scrawled into dog-eared books, stuffed into draws, handed down through generations and my fad is to weave them throughout my novel. In my great Grossmutter’s yellowing, ingredient-spotted cookbook is a recipe for Scripture cake (sometimes known as Divine fruitcake). Every ingredient is linked to a passage in the Bible.

This is a solid fruity cake that will ‘stick to your ribs’ for hours. It will feed a family of seven, plus visitors, and keep fresh in a sealed tin for over a week. It’s no wonder that it was popular in an era that had not heard of household refrigeration, when bread was kept in a crock pot and butter in a Coolgardie safe.

My great Grossmutter was a God fearing, strict Lutheran midwife and all she would need to make the cake is the chapter and verse of each passage of Bible.

I’ve tried to find the origins of where or when the recipe originated, but can only assume that women migrating from Europe bought it with them as part of a prized collection of recipes, a small, treasured bit of ‘back home’. The earliest record I found of Scripture cake was in a Ladies Home Journal dated 1896 and in Dorcas Dishes (many charitable groups were named after Tabitha/Dorcas in the bible). A Little Book of Country Cooking was printed in America in 1911. For my family, it linked back to a time in Australia before two world wars and a depression. A time when children helped grandma in the kitchen and the wisdom of generations was passed down over the flour sifter and the mixing bowl.

To make this historical cake and to play the game as our grandmothers might have played it, hide the ingredients and read only the Biblical list. Write down, to the best of your knowledge the actual food ingredients. Then, to be on the safe side look in the King James version of the Bible to verify your answers.

To make it easy I’ve added the ingredient beside the scripture.

SCRIPTURE CAKE

1 cup Judges 5: 25 butter
3 ½ cups 1 Kings 4: 22 plain flour
2 cups Jeremiah 6: 20 sugar
2 cups 1 Samuel 30: 12 raisins
2 cups 1 Samuel 30: 12 figs
1 cup Genesis 24: 16 warm water
1 cup Genesis 43: 17 chopped almonds
6 eggs Isaiah 10: 14 eggs
1 tbsp Genesis 43: 11 honey
pinch of Leviticus 2: 13 salt
1 tsp 1 Kings 10: 10 mixed spice
2 tsp 1 Corinthians 5: 6 baking powder

Method
Follow Solomon’s advice for making good boys, Proverbs 23: 14, and you have a good cake
Thou shalt beat him with the rod and shalt deliver his soul from hell
Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then mix in flour, baking powder and spices alternately with water. Add honey, raisins, figs and almonds. Beat well. Place in two 9×5 inch loaf pans. Sprinkle top with slivered almonds and decorate with glace cherries. Bake about an 1 to 1 ½ hours.

Pickle to Pie is dedicated to the children of German descent who lived in Australia during the last century and struggled to come to terms with their opposing worlds.”
Available at Ilura Press.

I need to do you an index to take you through the Regency year. I keep meaning to do it and life keeps catching up. I rather suspect I ought to do you that index in the next few days. I now have a pressing reason.

What’s my pressing reason? And why do I suddenly sound like a character from Cold Comfort Farm? (more…)

Today Kate (of the Mountain Creek Farm photos) took me to the EPIC Farmers’ market. I love it that they are at EPIC – it makes a simple farmers’ market sound like a three part trilogy, full of love and death and despair followed by hope and success and more love. Instead of love and death and despair followed by hope and success and more love, what the EPIC markets give on Saturday mornings are two big sheds full of stalls and a flutter of stalls trailing outside.

I collected leaflets assiduously while I was there, because I meant to do a follow-up to the slow food posts and to talk about other sorts of biodynamic meat production in the region. I still have those leaflets and one day I might do that post, but life diverted me with interesting thoughts and I can’t resist sharing them.

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I forgot to say. The last of the magnets went into the post today. Most of them will take about a week to arrive, though a couple may take a bit longer. If yours hasn’t arrived by, say, Halloween (since it’s an easy date to remember) let me know and I’ll try again.

Even with the time difference between Australia and the US it isn’t Halloween here yet. I saw a few Halloween candles in my favourite candle shop today (when I need cheering up and chocolate won’t do it, I buy candles). Everywhere else is already selling Christmas stuff.

It got me thinking. Halloween wasn’t around here at all when I was a child. It has entered Australia in recent years mostly via pop culture. This means that most Australians only know (to be honest) limited amounts about Halloween. We especially know what horror movies and Buffy and US chat shows have to say about it. The only food associations I have are empty pumpkins and bags of sweets.

I’d like to know more, and, given there are readers of Food History on every continent except Antarctica, I rather suspect I‘m not alone.

North American readers, if you could tell me about favourite foods (and recipes!) from your childhoods and tell us all how you celebrate Halloween in your family, I’ll compile all your thoughts and post something on 31 October. If no-one gives me any cool anecdotes or great recipes or sad and sorry stories, then I’ll make something up.

Drabbit, I can’t even say ‘make something up’ without feeling guilty. I write fiction elsewhere, why not on this blog?! OK. I shall avoid that feeling of being harried by my historian’s conscience and I shall refrain from making anything up. If I don’t get anecdote and history I’ll link to it elsewhere on the web, or explore my book collection, or something. I can guarantee that the stories from you and your home recipes will be way cooler than anything my google fu will provide.

You can contact me by clicking on “Contact me” under the “About Food History” box, or by leaving comments in the comments section. You have until October 30. There are no prizes this time - the reward is showing the rest of us what actually happens in US families over Halloween. Just think, you could be correcting the historical record in the minds of vast hordes of people!

PS The picture doesn’t reflect Halloween. Candles and Anatolian kilims go together in my mind, so it’s purely for my own comfort. Tomorrow I shall be less in need of either candles or kilims because I’m off to a farmers’ market. Yippee!