Food History

Today is the first day for recipes from one of my grandmother’s notebooks. One grandmother didn’t keep notes of recipes and the other kept two books of them, so it all evens out.

Belle died when I was a cute toddler (I know I was a cute toddler because one of my uncles reminds me regularly and yearningly that I was so cute when I was a toddler). She is the link between our family and its nineteenth century recipes, as Belle was born in the late nineteenth century to a very large Melbourne family. The age gaps between the generations on my father’s side of the family are immense, which is something that really helps in preservation of some traditions.

Her notebooks show us Australian Jewish cooking prior to World War II and in some cases prior to World War I. In a few instances the recipes are older still. Watch the cuisine unfold as I give you samples from her red notebook and her green one. Her green one is the disorderly one, the one with newspaper clippings and blank sections. The dates of the clippings are all from the 1950s and the cooking methods are all pre-blenders and metrication.

The green book is speciality-printed to house family recipes. It has coloured dividers with right hand tabs: soups, fish; poultry, meat; entrees vegetables; puddings jellies; savouries cakes; preserves jams; pickles sauces; sundries. The shape of Australian 1950s and 1960s cooking. A pudding with every main meal. Formal or semi-formal afternoon teas on weekends. Girls learning to cook starting from age four, but in the kitchen banging pans together for as long as we can remember. It’s funny how classifying dishes brings forth the shape of the family foodways.

What’s even more funny is that my grandmother Belle didn’t bother with the classifications half the time. This is her overflow book, and it’s fun to see what’s not there. Soups and fish are empty. Meat and poulty contain nothing apart from a clipping with various cherry recipes. I’ll give you the cherry icecream recipe below, because cherry season starts with Melbourne Cup Day here, the first Tuesday in November.

There are no entrees and no vegetables, and the only pudding or jelly is an Austrian apple pie. Savouries and cakes contains eighteen recipes, some written on the cardboard of the next divider while there are four recipes for jams and preserves. The single recipe under pickle and sauce is actually a soup, while “Sundries” contains the top-secret and amazingly important historically raisin wine recipe as well as recipes for lemon butter, honeycomb toffee, how to whip evaporated milk, how to make mock cream, and a recipe for marmalade.

These are going to be my Friday recipes for a little while. My grandmother was an interesting lady and her recipes reflect a lot of the Australian past. For instance, the Madeira Cake recipe was brought out from England in the 1850s. From the memories encapsulated by the notebook to the clipping, that little green book contains a hundred years of Melborune Jewish cooking.

Cherry Ice Cream

1 pint milk
4 heaped tbs powdered milk
1/2 cup cold, cooked cherries stoned and chopped
1 tsp gelatine
3 tbs water
3 tbs sugar

Gelatine and water and sugar need to be dissolved over low heat. Bring the mixture to the boil. Set it aside until cool then bat until it is thick and white. Beat the powdered milk into the fresh milk until they are evenly mixed then gradually beat in the gelatine mixture. Pour into refrigerator trays and freeze for an hour or until the mixture is set. Turn the ice cream out and beat it until smooth. Add the cherries. Return to trays and freeze until firm. Goes well with cherry sauce.