Food History

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.