Food History

We had our minds set on a steak-a large thick steak served with onions, Desdemona style-that is to say, smothered. It was a pretty thought, a passing fair conception-but a vain one.

“No steaks to-night, sir,” said the waiter sorrowfully.

“All right, then,” one of us said. “How about chops-fat juicy chops?”

“Oh, no, sir; no chops, sir,” he told us.

“Well then, what have you in the line of red meats?”

He was desolated to be compelled to inform us that there were no red meats of any sort to be had, but only sea foods. So we started in with oysters. Personally I have never cared deeply for the European oyster. In size he is anæmic and puny as compared with his brethren of the eastern coast of North America; and, moreover, chronically he is suffering from an acute attack of brass poisoning. The only way by which a novice may distinguish a bad European oyster from a good European oyster is by the fact that a bad one tastes slightly better than a good one does. In my own experience I have found this to be the one infallible test.

We had oysters until both of us were full of verdigris, and I, for one, had a tang in my mouth like an antique bronze jug; and then we proceeded to fish. We had fillets of sole, which tasted as they looked-flat and a bit flabby. Subsequently I learned that this lack of savour in what should be the most toothsome of all European fishes might be attributed to an insufficiency of fat in the cooking; but at the moment I could only believe the trip up from Dover had given the poor thing a touch of car sickness from which he had not recovered before he reached us.

After that we had lobsters, half-fare size, but charged for at the full adult rates. And, having by now exhausted our capacity for sea foods, we wound up with an alleged dessert in the shape of three drowned prunes apiece, the remains being partly immersed in a palish custardlike composition that was slightly sour.

Going up to London we rode in a train that was crowded and darkened. Brilliantly illuminated trains scooting across country offered an excellent mark for the aim of hostile air raiders, you know; so in each compartment the gloom was enhanced rather than dissipated by two tiny pin points of a ghastly pale-blue gas flame. I do not know why there should have been two of these lights, unless it was that the second one was added so that by its wan flickerings you could see the first one, and vice versa.
During the trip, which lasted several hours longer than the scheduled running time, we had for refreshments a few gnarly apples, purchased at a way station; and that was all. Recalling the meals that formerly had been served aboard the boat trains of this road, I realised I was getting my preliminary dose of life on an island whose surrounding waters were pestered by U-boats and whose shipping was needed for transport service. But I pinned my gastronomic hopes on London, that city famed of old for the plenteous prodigality of its victualling facilities. In my ignorance I figured that the rigours of rationing could not affect London to any very noticeable extent. A little trimming down here and there, an enforced curtailment in this direction and that-yes, perhaps so; but surely nothing more serious. Immediately on arrival we chartered a taxicab-a companion and I did. … we rode through the darkened streets to a hotel formerly renowned for the scope and excellence of its cuisine. We reached there after the expiration of the hour set apart under the food regulations for serving dinner to the run of folks. But, because we were both in uniform-he as a surgeon in the British Army, and I as a correspondent-and because we had but newly finished a journey by rail, we were entitled, it seemed, to claim refreshment.

However, he, as an officer, was restricted to a meal costing not to exceed six shillings-and six shillings never did go far in this hotel, even when prices were normal. Not being an officer but merely a civilian disguised in the habiliments of a military man, I, on the other hand, was bound by no such limitations, but might go as far as I pleased. So it was decided that I should order double portions of everything and surreptitiously share with him; for by now we were hungry to the famishing point.

Likewise the English cook has always gone in rather extensively for boiling things. When in doubt she boiled. But it takes a lot of retouching to restore to a piece of boiled meat the juicy essences that have been simmered and drenched out of it. Since the English people, with such admirable English thoroughness, cut down on fats and oils and bacon garnishments, so that the greases might be conserved for the fighting forces; and since they have so largely had to do without imported spices and condiments, because the cargo spaces in the ships coming in were needed for military essentials, the boiled dishes of England appear to have lost most of their taste.
You can do a lot of browsing about at an English table these days and come away ostensibly filled; but inside you there will be a persistent unsatisfied feeling, all the same, which is partly due, no doubt, to the lack of sweetening and partly due to the lack of fats, but due most of all, I think, to a natural disappointment in the results. In the old times a man didn’t feel that he had dined well in England unless for an hour or two afterward he had the comfortable gorged sensation of a python full of pigeons.
I shall never forget the first meals I had on English soil, this latest trip. At the port where we landed, in the early afternoon of a raw day, you could get tea if you cared for tea, which I do not; but there was no sugar-only saccharine-to sweeten it with, and no rich cream, or even skim milk, available with which to dilute it. The accompanying buns had a flat, dry, floury taste, and the portions of butter served with them were very homoeopathic indeed as to size and very oleomargarinish as to flavour.

But, so far as the joys of the table are concerned, I think I shall be able to wait for quite a spell before I yearn for another whack at English eating. I opine Charles Dickens would be a most unhappy man could he but return to the scenes he loved and wrote about. Dickens, as will be recalled, specialised in mouth-watering descriptions of good things and typically British things to eat-roast sucking pigs, with apples in their snouts; and baked goose; and suety plum puddings like speckled cannon balls; and cold game pies as big round as barrel tops-and all such. He wouldn’t find these
things prevailing to any noticeable extent in his native island now. Even the kidney, the same being the thing for which an Englishman mainly raises a sheep and which he always did know how to serve up better than any one else on earth, somehow doesn’t seem to be the kidney it once upon a time was when it had the proper sorts of trimmings and sauces to go with it. At this time England is no place for the epicure. In peacetime English cooks, as a rule, were not what you would call versatile; their range, as it were, was limited. Once, seeking to be blithesome and light of heart, I
wrote an article in which I said there were only three dependable vegetables on the average Englishman’s everyday menu-boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, and a second helping of the boiled potatoes. That was an error on my part; I was unintentionally guilty of the crime of underestimation. I should have added a fourth to the list of stand-bys-to wit: the vegetable marrow. For some reason, possibly because they
are a stubborn and tenacious race, the English persist in looking upon the vegetable marrow as an object designed for human consumption, which is altogether the wrong view to take of it. As a foodstuff this article hasn’t even the merit that attaches to stringy celery. You do not derive much nourishment from stale celery, but eating at it polishes the teeth and provides a healthful form of exercise that gives you an appetite for the rest of the meal. From the vegetable marrow you derive no nourishment, and certainly you derive no exercise; for, being a soft, weak, spiritless thing, it offers no resistance whatever, and it looks a good deal like a streak of solidified fog and tastes like the place where an indisposed carrot spent the night. Next to our summer squash it is the feeblest imitation that ever masqueraded in a skin and called itself a vegetable. Yet its friends over there seem to set much store by it.

To be exactly correct about it, I began mapping out this campaign long before I took ship for the homeward hike. The suggestion formed in my mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have another kind of meat card, I know, to get cooked meat in a restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances. Before I left, every one was carrying round a sheaf of cards. You didn’t dare go fishing if you had mislaid your worm card. The resolution having formed, it budded and grew in my mind when I was up near the Front gallantly
exposing myself to the sort of table-d’hôte dinners that were available then in some of the lesser towns immediately behind the firing lines; and it kept right on growing, so that by the time I was ready to sail it was full sized. En route, I thought up an interchangeable answer for two of the oldest conundrums of my childhood, one of them being: “Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see,” and the other, “Opens like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can’t guess that.” In the original versions the answer to the first was “A watch,” and to the second, “A corset”-if I recall aright But the joint answer I worked out was as follows: “My face!”

Such was the pleasing program I figured out on shipboard. But, as is so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury ragoûts we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces, where the cooking was the home sort and good honest American slang abounded. They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked “What the la hell does that sacré-blew cook mean by serving forty-fours at every meal?” you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans. And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons you knew he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you didn’t weaken-and nobody did.

Over the next few days I’m involved in gustatory activity. In fact, it’s Jewish New Year very shortly. This year I wanted to give you a slightly different present for the season. It’s the first section of a book called “Eating in Two of Three Languages” by Irvin S Cobb, from 1918. It reflects a moment in time when there was war and deprivation and travel was slow and Cobb was inspired to write. What attracted me first to this was Cobb’s dedication “TO B.B. McALPIN, ESQUIRE, WHO KNOWS A LOT ABOUT EATING.” I was going to give it to you in one enormous post, but, truly, it’s the sort of thing that you’ll enjoy in small snacks, a bit each day. If you want to read it all at once, then just wait till the final day and read through all the posts.

So, from tomorrow, instead of me, you meet Irvin S Cobb and his marvelous dedication to food.

He reminds me a bit of another writer I have blogged (though I interviewed the author of The Shameless Carnivore rather than giving you extracts, as it’s just been published and there are all sorts of copyright restrictions). If I wanted to compare books, I would compare Gold’s with Cobb’s for all sorts of reasons. There is an underlying similarity in their deep passion for their subject and their attribution of personality by foodlove, for instance.

So, from tomorrow, a few Cobb days, in celebration of food at a very celebratory time of year. Soon after that (not much longer to go at all) you’ll find out a whole bunch about the Conflux banquet. This year, you see, I’ve decided to let you in on some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. And after that this blog turns three and there will be prizes. Of course there will be prizes. I don’t know which I’ll be giving out yet, because no-one has jumped up and down and said “Me! Me! I want the picnic wrap!!” I think maybe I’ll give them out over a few weeks and let my whim and fancy decide. That’s not till the second half of October though.

Have a good and sweet New Year – and enjoy the Cobb!

Today I’m still thinking about the Melbourne Show. There’s so much food for thought there. Oh dear. Sorry about that. I’ve been making puns since about lunchtime the day before yesterday. I shall try to stop.

Anyhow, back to the Show.

What I was thinking about this year was people. I did a great deal of talking with the folk who ran stalls. The Melbourne Show is big enough so that I could makes cateogires of how they approached their tasks. It’s yet another approach to the multifaceted and amazing thing that is food history: looking at those who work in the industry and understand how they do what they do and why they do what they do.

If I had a time machine, I would go to the St Giles Fair in Medieval Winchester and chat with the stallowners there and see if they fall into the same groups as the people I met the other day, but I don’t and we have very little evidence for this particular aspect of Medieval foodways. This is the real reason I’m making bad jokes: it’s one of the ways my brain deals with intractable problems. While my frontbrain annoys people, my backbrain is running through potential sources and what they might have that would help me think about Medieval fairs and stallholding attitudes. I won’t have time to investigate the sources for a while, to find out if I’m right, but I do the backbrain work anyway, because mysteries are for solving and this is a mystery.

Anyhow, what were the categories I have from my expyrerience of the other day?

1. Producers.

Growers and makers who were proudly sharing their dream. They’re wonderful people to talk to, because they care so very deeply. The olive and olive oil people were particularly cool, and the honey blokes. I’m hoping to write more about them one day, but we’ll see.

I was exepcting more cheese, since Victoria is a famous dairy state, but olives and honey dominated. The knowledge that these people have is often narrow and intense and their eyes lit up when they talked. They’re fonts of knowledge, waiting to be tapped and showgoers walked past, oblivious. It says something about our relationship with food, but I need to think about what.

2.Administrators and public sevants

Popular stereotpyes say ‘avoid these people – they are dull.” My chats on Tuesday proved exactly the opposite. The people who run the Yarra Valley Regional Food Group and those who run the Farmers’ markets and the foodies (and the park and wildlife people in the government pavilion) were all passionate about their subjects. They know their stuff and they care about it. They have a very different kind of knowledge to the farmers and the small business owners, too. It’s more strategic and global.

3.Paid staff

Here I’m referring to the people (often young) who don’t have a gret deal of industry knowledge, but are at the Show because it’s a job. They give away samples and chat to potential customers and, basically, sell a product.

What was interesting about them is the lack of industry knowledge. Most of them seem to have been chosen for their personallities, which makes sense. Oodles of charm and a need to entertain and be entertained. One young man (from boredom and this need to entertain) made my niece and I a healthshake that met our very specific dietary needs rather than a standard one. We were all rather astonished when an assault of passers-by descended on it and drank it up!

Some of these paid staff were good learners. I made a seller of corn chips happy because she really had wanted to know that blue corn was natural, but had no-one to ask. Others couldn’t care less – one young girl handed out icecream scoops and shrugged off any questions. It was a luck-of-the-draw thing.

There were people who didn’t fit any category, too, like the lady who knew more about marmalade than me. I need to do a post on marmalade one day – the truth is that I thought I knew more and she thought she knew more and we came to no agreement – but my knowledge comes from the primary soruces and hers from secondary and tertiary . I was going to bask in my primary source superiority until I realised that I had forgotten bits and pieces of it – so I can’t bask until I do you a marmalade post – maybe over summer. Until then, we’re both relying on memory and general knowledge, so even if she says she’s right and I say I’m right, we can’t know. (Why is marmelade such a vexed questions? There are good reasons – I do need to do a post on it one day.)

I need to think about my three categories and work out whether people jump between them. I know that in Canberra, for instance, there is overlap between producers and public servants: quite a few small farmers make ends meet with day jobs.

While I think, I’ll leave you with a few places to visit. This is a random sampling of the owners of the stalls I used for establishing the categories. I visited a lot more stalls, though, and sampled an awful lot of food. Mostly, I met some amazing people, passionate about farming, about food and about the region they live in.

http://www.maffra.com
http://www.vicfarmersmarkets.org.au
http://grampiansproduce.com.au
http://www.thewickedvirgin.com
http://www.redrockolives.com.au/

I love the different directions food history can take me. Today’s direction is pure and unadulterated happiness, for instance. My niece is taking me to the Royal Melbourne Show. I know there’s a focus on some regional Victorian food (mostly from the Yarra Valley and the Grampians) but there’s also the various food competitions to suss out. I doubt I’ll be as lucky as I was at the Canberra Show, where I got to taste the best mead I’ve ever come across (it’s one thing being a food historian in a town of 350,000 and another entirely being one visiting a city of many million) but I can check out cake categories and find out just what traditions are being maintained by the Show competitions. I can also do the tasting trail: this is one of the great food cities in the world, and it was inevitable that tasting was going to be part of the event. I might blog about it tomorrow. Or I might be too exhausted.

My post today is really about the homework I did last night, in preparation for today. I checked out the exhibitors and pavilions to find out which ones I shouldn’t miss. I also checked out the showbags.

While I was checking out the showbags, Mum and I had our usual discussion. We may have had this little exchange many times, but it never ceases to fascinate. Every year (whether I get to an agricultural show or not) we talk about cahnges in showbags. Every year I add a little to my knowledge of that particular cultural dynamic over time.

In the 1940s, at the Royal Melbourne Show, showbags were free. They were sample bags and introduced kids to all sorts of foodstuff, basically. These days the cheapest showbag is $5 and the most expensive $999. The ‘best value’ $5 showbag is several rolled into one and mainly sweets (lollies for you US readers). They’re marginally cheaper than the same bought in a supermarket on sale. The joy for modern children is that they’re in a pretty platic showbag – the joy for children 65 years ago was not knowing what the would find in the paper bag. (OK, so it’s more complicated than that – but that illuminates the basic cultural dynamic and progression, at least.)

Regulations now say that the true value of the bag has to be stated and last night I checked out the contents lists for the 340 showbags that will be on sale today (the Showbag Pavilion is not a good place for that kind of research as it’s forever massing with hoardes of kids chasing their showbag dreams and the online showbag listing has a search function). Producers always estimate the worth at the expensive end of things and then tell you how very much you’re saving. The amount they claim depends very much on the type of showbag.

There are some almost-genuine sample bags around. They’re produced by magazines. You get a nice bag (not plastic – I use an old magazine tote to carry teaching equipment) and you get a few old magazines, one recent one and a bunch of samples of whatever cosmetics or snack food are currently undergoing a massive marketing push. It’s a very good way of finding out who’s marketing what to a particular target audience. These bags seem to have replaced my old favourite, which were full of old comics. I do miss the Phantom showbag, with its mysterious batch of back isses.

There are a bunch of promotional showbags, and some silly ones (I once bought a friend one full of plastic blow-up furniture and was amused to find it’s still for sale this year – and then there’s the “Don’t Hassle the Hoff” bag, where you get everything you need to look like David Hasslehoff, including a wig).

The big change in showbags here, though, are the foodie ones. There is a whole new range of showbags with gourmet food at discounted prices. Honey and lavender and chutnies and spice blends. These are the ones my niece and I shall investigate in a couple of hours. I want to find out more.

I have watched showbags for many, many years. They’re one of the odd little cultural indices I keep an eye on to see how things are changing and where they change. They’re also immense fun.

If you happen to turn 21 on International Talk Like a Pirate Day: I guess party theme and cake design are pretty obvious. Bandanas and eye patches, even for those who don’t need them, and a cake that may, or may not, look something like this I suspect I’d be more inclined to use pieces of chocolate rollettes to indicate the cannons rather than white smarties, and I’m debating whether to use ribbon to represent the ocean, or go with the about to turn 21 year old’s suggestion of placing the cake into a serving bowl of blue jelly

The cake would, of course, have to be a mud cake. There are a lot of mud cake recipes out there, but my all time favourite is the Mississippi Mud Cake recipe, laden with chocolate, coffee and bourbon!

250g butter, chopped coarsely
150g dark eating chocolate, chopped coarsely
2 cups (44og) castor sugar
1 cup (250ml) hot water
1/3 cup (80ml) Jack Daniels (you can use other liqueurs or spirits)
1 tablespoon instant coffee powder
1½ cups (225g) plain flour
¼ cup (35g) self-raising flour
¼ cup (25g) cocoa powder
2 eggs, beaten lightly

Preheat oven to moderately slow (170°C or 150°C fan-forced). Grease deep 20cm-round cake pan: line base and side with baking paper.

Combine butter, chocolate, sugar, the water, liqueur and coffee powder in medium saucepan. Using wooden spoon, stir over low heat until chocolate melts.

Transfer mixture to large bowl; cool 15 minutes. Whisk in combined sifted flours and cocoa, then eggs. Pour mixture into prepared pan.

Bake cake in moderately slow oven about 1½ hours. (Cover cake loosely with foil during baking if it starts to overbrown.) Stand cake in pan 30 minutes before turning onto wire rack; turn cake top-side up to cool. Dust with sifted cocoa, if desired.

I’m writing this under the white dome of the State Library of Victoria. It’s one of those lovely Victorian buildings Melbourne seems to specialise in and the library has many food history strings to its bow. I personally have a thing about its gorgeous ephemera collection, but one of the information librarians has been enthusing about some new cookbooks, and there are lots of other things. There are even records of a dental practice, so you can trace the side effects of eating habits.

Why am I here? I was trying to find out ways of accessing specific parts of the collection for my students. I teach many short courses and students emerge from them wanting more, and I want to find out what sort of paths to set them on and get further research off to a good start.

I lucked out bigtime today. The SLV is in the process of setting up a series of research guides online. They’re nearly ready and will be up in the next couple of months, all going well. I was shown one that had a series of historical food prices for Melbourne over a period of time, plus where to go if you want something more. It’s perfect.

It was very well worth the visit today, even if it means I no longer have time to be a tourist. I’ll be keeping an eye open for those research guides, and I promise that I’ll link to any that have food history elements. They’ll be brilliantly useful for anyone planning a research visit to Melbourne, but, because they will include general information, they’ll be handy starters for someone just thinking about a subject generally. Handy starters that are online, at that.

Writing this blog in a room I spent many, many hours as an undergraduate in, though, is passing strange. The last time I was here I was reading 16 volumes of late 17th French historiography. A lot of water has passed under bridges since then. I never even thought to read those volumes with a view to extracting their food history elements. Maybe one day…..

So the bbq side is easy, right? All you need is a couple of kilos each of sausages and steaks, a few dozen meat skewers, and the same for rissoles. Well, yes, but how boring is plain barbequed meat? Marinades, my friends, we need marinades, and sauces, and homemade is always better, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t shortcuts available.

Bnet’s discussion on marinades tells us that marinades date back to the 1600s when fish were cured in brine, however today they are used for so much more. One of my favourite homemade marinades for steak comes from the US:

1 cup Jack Daniels Sour mash whiskey
1/2 cup peanut oil
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup tomato sauce
2 tablespoons nutmeg ground fresh
3 tablespoons instant coffee powder
1/4 cup honey
3 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons Tabasco sauce
3 tablespoons lemon juice fresh only
2 teaspoons black pepper
2 tablespoons cloves ground
Preparation:
Mix all liquid ingredients together in a sauce pan over med-heat. Add dry ingredients and continue to stir for 1-min. Reduce heat to Simmer for 5-mins., then remove from heat. Pour over meats, poultry, or mushrooms, cover, and then refrigerate for 4-24 hours. Use as a basting sauce or as a dipping sauce.

Sauces have been around almost forever, it seems, this article gives you a good all round view of many types of sauces, and tomato sauces were first made by the ancient South Americans. I cheat and use a basic pasta sauce as a base for a variety of bbq sauces, including this one:

Homemade BBQ sauce:
500g tomato pasta sauce
1 clove of garlic, crushed
Half an onion, finely diced
Two tablespoons Stones green ginger wine
¼ cup Worcestershire sauce

Put all ingredients into a larger pan, and simmer, til onion is soft and transparent. Take the lid off, and continue to simmer til sauce reduces and thickens. Cool and pour sauce into serving bottles.

For the next three days we have something special. While the key rights (voting, drinking and driving) all descend on Aussie teenagers at age 18, the big party is always the 21st. My wonderful rural NSW correspondent (who gave us the christening recipes not so long ago) has a daughter who is turning 21 this week. She has given me three posts, so today and tomorrow and the day after we celebrate a very special occasion, with recipes, and you get to share in another aspect of her famuly foodways. Thank you, Sharyn!!

A 21st BBQ

“A barbeque, shortened by all to bbq, is a great way to feed a lot of people at once. And for an Aussie country 21st, where the guests might be sitting at trestles in a freshly swept out shearing shed, or seated on plastic chairs in a backyard, a bbq is a perfect match.

According to our friends at Wikipedia, etymologists believe that the word barbeque derives from the word barbacoa. Barbacoa, a method of cooking over a fire pit, on a platform of sticks, was used by the Taino people, who were the Pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas.

While an Aussie bbq is traditionally sausages, steaks, and maybe rissoles or meat skewers, served with salads, the 21st I’ll be helping to cater for this weekend is well in September. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be spring here in the southern hemisphere, try telling that to the night times, as its still jolly cold. So we’ll replace the salads with vegetables, and have a fire bucket going to keep people warm. Simple, right?

Vegetables to feed a crowd

The absolute easiest vegetable dish to serve is potatoes:
5kg bag of chat potatoes, any of the red skinned varieties on offer at the moment will do.
250g tub of sour cream
Half a bunch of fresh chives.

Boil the potatoes in a large stock pot til tender, and cooked through
Mix sour cream with finely sliced chives, place into an unbreakable serving bowl (21st, people drinking, small children, everyone helping themselves, you do the maths)

Drain potatoes and divide in to two large bowls (see above) serve immediately with cream.

A close second would have to be corn on the cob:
12 fresh corn cobs, de-silked and cut in half, boiled til tender, serve immediately, dotted with butter

And finally, a bit of effort, but well worth while is honey carrots:
Top and tail six bunches of baby carrots. Scrub carrots and place in a large pot of boiling water (this can be done early in the day) Drain carrots when just tender, place in a large casserole dish (a roasting pan or lasagna dish is perfect for this) cover with water, half a cup of honey and dot with about 50g butter. Cover with foil, and reheat when needed.”

Dieting is a part of food history, and so are food advertisements. That’s my excuse for giving you a media clip!

I’m nearly through my sequence of old cookbooks. I’ve got more stacked on my chair, but you’re going to have to wait to meet them, I’m afraid. There are so many other things I have lined up for you between now and then. Guest posts, something special for Jewish New Year, a vast sequence with background and information about the Conflux banquet. Maybe I’ll return to the books about the same time I start talking about blog anniversary giveaways? We’ll see.

Today’s booklet is an advertising one.

Once upon a time I worked in the Department of Primary Industries and Energy. I worked on a lot of agricultural issues, one of which was rice. This meant I got to visit the rice farmers in Leeton and learn a lot about an important segment of the Australian rice industry. The industry bods acted as if everything was new. Yet here I have before me, a slightly nibbled (by silverfish, I presume) copy of “192 of the Best Recipes for Rice. The Food of the People.”

What’s really interesting is that it shows that one of the reasons for the success of the rice farmers in Leeton (apart from the quality of their rice, obviously) is that they’ve been consistently good at marketing their product, both fifteen years ago (to me – I came away from that trip enthused about rice) and in this booklet. It’s chockers with recipes, but it’s also chockers with salesmanship.

The booklet doesn’t have a date, but the earliest version in the national Library is from the 1950s. This fits what I know of the history of the area and it fits the look and feel of the booklet. It’s pre-decimal, so it can’t be the 1974 edition, for instance. It also means that their copy of the booklet lacks a firm date.

Food in Australia in the 1950s was quite different to food in Australia now. I’ve talked about that a great deal elsewhere and will no doubt return to it again, but it’s important to know that not all the recipes devised to fit the promotional needs of the booklet (and there are pages and pages of rice recipes) made the cut into popular culture. In fact, most stayed right on the page.

Right now I’m fascinated by how industries change. How do you get someone to buy a book? If you get them to buy a cookbook, how do you then get them to take up the recipes and make them part of their lives? This is the stuff of cultural dynamics and is exceptionally cool. And this is why this little booklet has a strange importance. Put it next to a handwritten book from the same decade (my grandmother’s, for instance) and you can start to see exactly where that take-up lies. She had recipes for rice pudding, but not for rice gruel or Rice Bliss or Rice Bars and Vanilla Sauce.

The rice booklet came out just when Australian cooking was about to do its amazing seachange, and it shows us a very different direction that the seachange might have taken. We’re big rice eaters now, as a country, and we weren’t in the 1940s. But we haven’t actually taken up the Rice Buns and Rice Rocks and Riceflour Sandwich that the cookbook promotes. We eat rice with any number of SE Asian foods, but if you were to ask for “Indian Rice” or “Rice Novelle” in most homes, explanations might have to ensue.

Today’s little beauty is much loved. It’s an old cookbook that has been so very much used that it stops suddenly at page 86 (we may never know their recipe for Loganberry Conserve) and has various slips of paper thrust inside. One of the slips of paper has no name, but is a drink recipe – a rather Aussie summer punch. I think you need it straight away – it’s a warm day outside and you may be thirsty.

1 ¼ pints orange juice
½ pint pineapple juice
1 pint cold water
2/3 cup castor sugar
2 tbs grated lemon peel
2 pints white wine
1 tbs honey
6 cloves
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
3 pints ginger ale
crushed ice

Make up and strain. Refrigerate until cold. Add ginger ale and ice just before serving.

The book itself is The Willow Housewife’s handbook on Cookery, Second Edition. It’s old and tired and a bit mouldy, but it really has been used. On every page the cookbook says “Obtainable at all Stores” (left hand side) and “Obtainable at all Ironmongers” (right hand side). It’s pre-decimal, and it’s hard to date. The paper is cheap and the stapled side mean that it’s a bit rusty in places.

Fortunately for me, the National Library of Australia has several copies, all dating to the 1930s. Once I see the 1930s as a publication date, the art deco-ish feel of the cover becomes strikingly obvious. This is what I meant the other day by being aware of biases – am I seeing Art Deco because it’s in the design (and the woman’s haircut is 1930s?) or because I want to see Art deco in everything right now because of Conflux?

Anyhow, rust and all, this is a nice little book to possess. And if I ever decide that my life is incomplete without that Loganberry Conserve, then I can go to the national Library for the recipe. The National Library is a single bus ride away, and I need to get back into the habit of going regularly. My reader’s card needs a workout from time to time, to keep it fit.