Beginning to explore
Today we’re starting at the very beginning.
Oddly, the first recipes in the new handwritten book (new old book – it gets confusing) are inserts. I’m being very careful to retain the order of them and have them stay where they were put by previous owners until I can work out if there is any sense in the places odd scraps of apper have been put. If this was an archival copy, I would be even more careful. You never know when evidence is going to announce “Look at me” – but if you destroy it by getting rid fo scraps of paper or rearranging by size, well, it never will.
The first recipes are all advertisements. “Easy-to-make home style sweets” – GWS Almond and Soft Icings. They’re quintessentially Aussie sweets, too: coconut ice, whirls, date and prune creams, peppermint creams, coffee and walnut creams and so forth. Date and prune creams have been out of style for a fair while. I may be able to use that to pinpoint dates, if I really want.
The second set of recipes is also a random page, inserted. This one has come from a cookbook. Page 126 of “Our cookery book.” A puddings page. Here’s the recipe for Bread and Butter Pudding.
Bread and Butter Pudding
Bread
Butter
1 tbs sugar
1-2 eggs
Grated nutmeg
1 pint milk
1 tbs sultanas
Little candied peel
Grease pie dish. Cut bread in think slices, spread butter on. Place in pie dish in layers. Sprinkle each layer with a few sultanas, cut up candied peel, sugar and nutmeg. Beat egg and stir in milk. Pour all over bread and butter in pie dish. Put in dish of cold water into hot oven. Bake until set (about 25 mins). Place pie dish on meat dish and fold table napkins round to hide dish.
And then the real book starts, with a recipe for pumpkin soup. We’ll look at that tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m going to ponder why the folding napkins instruction would be in the bread and butter pudding recipe. It sounds fifties. The layout and typeface of the page it’s on could be anything from the 40s to the 70s. It’s not as late as the 70s, though – there’s no metric measure.
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