Food History

After yesterday’s post I thought maybe it was time to have a post about a foodstuff that has given much calm to many people for a very long time. You can tell I’m a tea-drinker, can’t you? It’s in the way I think about tea and the way I have at least six different varieties for different moods. Right now I’m drinking a Kenyan spiced tea and an Australian plain tea and a really good Japanese powdered tea that I whisk up in a bowl and fall into contemplation over. Tea is a drink of almost infinite possibility.

This isn’t a proper history post. If I were to give you the history of tea, it would take 6 volumes of sturdy size. This post is to get you thinking about tea’s past, no more.

Tea is a camellia variety (well, the botanical name is camellia thea). The different varieties of tea leaves available reflect the way they are processed (pan fried, dried etc).

In the eighteenth century, one of the names for it was bohea, which is my entirely useless piece of information for the day, produced simply because I’ve been doing lots of stuff based in eighteenth century society recently. My Hong Kong friends call the common garden Aussie-favourite tea “red teaâ€? and make a great pickled egg using eggs, salt and very, very strong red tea.

I often hear green tea described as Japanese, but it isn’t confined to Japan. There are Korean green tea, Chinese, and others. My current favourite is, however, Japanese. After what I said earlier, you’d think my favourite was the bitter tea used for the tea ceremony, and, while I love that style, it isn’t my top favourite. I obviously have low taste, because I prefer genmaicha - tea with very cute popped rice floating round in it, and a lovely rounded and slightly woody flavour.

You may wish to note that camellia sinensis and its relatives or melaleuca alternifolia and its relatives are not at all related and do not get confused with each other except in both being called “tea� trees- the Aussie melaleuca was used by early British settlers when tea was unavailable - and is now used for medicinal not culinary purposes. They nearly all go well with scones, though.

I promised you more Barossa recipes, and here they are.

I’m glad I didn’t promise more than a couple of recipes though. Last night I watched five movies with friends in an epic marathon of bad taste and good chocolate. This morning I woke up early and a friend started on my costume for the Regency Gothic Banquet (I didn’t get too much in the way, truly). And so tonight I’m tired. I really need to use a stronger word than ‘tired,’ but the word that comes to mind means quite a different thing in North American English to Aussie English and I’m so terribly tired that I don’t have the energy to be offensive.

Scones are inoffensive, aren’t they?

Brown Scones (courtesy Mrs. Alb. Keil)

1/4 lb wholemeal flour
1/4 lb ordinary flour
pinch salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 oz butter
3/4 breakfast cup milk

Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Rub butter well into this and add milk. Roll out, cut into scones and rush into hot oven*.

Cinnamon Scones (given by A.A. Kuchel)

Put 1 lb 8 oz flour into a mixing bowl, add 1 tsp castor sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, mix well. Add 1 oz butter. Mix all into a moist dough with 1 cup milk. Roll out 3/4 inch thick., Bake in a hot oven.

And that’s it for today! If I had a crystal ball to gaze into, it would be showing me asleep at a terrifyingly early hour tonight. Let this be a warning against watching films with friends….

*Is it a sign of fatigue that I want to put a warning that you won’t fit into your oven and it’s best to rush only the scones there?

food history, The Barossa Cookery Book, scones, recipes

I was so excited about the books yesterday that I forgot your recipes! I’m gadding about in about fifteen minutes, so I only have a very limited time, just to add insult to injury. I’ll do you a post tomorrow with more recipes from The Barossa Cookery Book, to make up.

Let’s start with Ginger Nuts (one of my favourite biscuits) from Miss J M Bartsch, Angaston

Ginger Nuts

1 lb, 2 oz flour
1/2 lb butter
1/2 lb sugar
3/4 lb treacle
1 oz ground ginger

Mix ingredients into a stiff dough. Roll out. Cut into small biscuits. Bake in a moderate oven.

And for the second recipe? How about a classic Australian biscuit, most suitable from this classic Aussie cookbook.

ANZAC Biscuits (from A Heidenreich)

1 cup sugar
1 cup cocoanut chips
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup SR flour
2 tbs water
1 tbs golden syrup
2 oz butter
1/2 tsp baking soda

Put water, golden syrup and butter in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add baking soda. Pour over the dru ingredients while hot (care must be taken so that it does not boil over), put teaspoonsfull of the mixture on greased trays and bake in a slow oven for 20-30 mins.

Notes: 1. I’m obviously giving you Aussie biscuits, not US - one day I will give you US biscuits as well. I intend to have such a vast collection of biscuit and scone recipes that your lives will be forever changed. Or something.
2. ANZAC should never be put in lower case: it being an acronym.
3. Excuse me while I gad for an evening - happy baking!

Look what a kindly person sent me - a link to a recipe for ship biscuits with a nice reference to a Medieval version. One thing my very slow foray into biscuits and scones is that the hard cracker type of biscuit that was used on board ship has a continuing history. This we could have deduced, but it’s nice to know, and not to rely on deduction. So far it’s the oldest type of attested biscuit and the type that continues regardless of other developments. I still don’t know how the twice-cooked element fits.

While I’m thinking about longterm slow-but-small projects, there is my little collection of biscuit and scone recipes which one day will be big enough to help me work out the geographical limits of the terms biscuits and scones and a hundred subtle interpretations appertaining unto each of the words. Or maybe it will just provide many yummy recipes. Either is good.

Anyhow, another 451 blogger (Kelly, of Kidsdish) has kindly added to my little haul. Her biscuits are of the Southern US variety, so not sweet and not at all hard. I always thought that biscuits made like this were just poor scones, but the recipe is quite different. Lard and buttermilk. I’m not sure about the lard - but I might follow Kelly’s recommendation and make them with vegetable shortening. I can’t even imagine what they’ll taste like with butter and molasses. Warm in this autumn chill, I suspect.

It’s far too long since I’ve added to the scone and biscuit tally. For new readers, I started collecting scone and biscuit recipes and references in a rather desultory fashion late last year. All contributions gratefully received, as long as they include a country (and even a region, if you can) and a rough date.

These recipes are from Jewish Melbourne in the 1950s. Yep, you guessed it, it’s more of my grandmother’s recipes. I should have looked for biscuit recipes in her cookbook ages ago, but tonight I remedy the deficit. Note the use of lard - this is definitely part of Jewish Melbourne past, not present.

This is the lot of them (as they were written down - I haven’t modernised at all) from this one book, which is the handwritten one we found hidden in the back room of my father’s dental surgery after he died. Also hidden there was a 1903 disarticulated skull which sits comfortably on a shelf in my lounge room and I call Perceval. You probably really didn’t want to know about the skull.

Tea Biscuits

1 cup SR flour, rub in 1 large tablespoon Butter, mix into stiff dough with lemon water, leave 10 mts. Roll out as thin as possible cut and bake in moderate oven until golden brown.

Ginger Biscuits

1 ½ cups flour, 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons golden syrup, 1 tablesp milk, ½ teasp cream of tartar, 1 teasp soda, 3 heaped teaspns ginger, 1 teaspn essence of lemon.
Method: - Mix butter, & sugar, egg golden syrup milk flour, ect, and lastly lemon essence. Put in ½ teaspoon on greased slide and cook in slow oven.

Gem Scones

Firstly heat gem irons and grease them well so as when the mixture will sizzle with a spoonful is put in. Beat 1 tablespoon sugar and 1 tablespoon butter, then 1 egg a pinch of salt. Then add 1 cup of milk and 2 cups S.R. flour. Drop in a spoonful in the iron and bake in oven 4 minutes. If oven and irons are right temperature scones will not take longer.

Drop Scones

Beat 1 egg and 2 oz until creamy add ½ cup milk and mix in 1 cup S.R. flour. Heat a frying pan and grease well. Drop mixture by teaspoons into hot pan and cook quickly. When little bubbles begin to rise turn scones with a knife and brown other side. Serve hot with sugar.

Fruit Scones

Sift 2 cups flour 4 teaspoon baking powder, pinch salt, and rub in 4 tablespoon butter. Add ¼ cup sultanas, chopped figs and chopped dates. Mix with milk into a soft dough. Cut into shapes and bake in a hot oven for 12 minutes.

Wholemeal Date Scones
Sift 2 cups fine wholemeal; 2 tablespoons cream tartar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Rub in 2 tablespoons butter. Add 2 tablespoon brown sugar and ½ cup chopped dates and mix into soft dough with ½ cup milk. Cut into shapes and bake in hot oven for 15 minutes.

Oatmeal Nut Scones

9 oz plain flour, 4 oz fine oatmeal, 2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 oz lard, 1 ½ oz butter, 1 ½ oz chopped walnuts, 1 ½ oz castor, sugar, milk.
Sift dry ingredients and rub in lard and butter. Add walnuts and sugar and mix to a soft dough with milk. Cut into shape and brush tops with milk and bake in hot oven for 15 minutes.

I was 2/3 of the way through a long post about Anne-Marie Nicols and Women’s History Month when my computer misbehaved and ate the post. It must’ve been the mention of chocolate within it and the analysis of why it was highly unlikely that choc chip cookies could have been invented much before they were actually invented. Nothing else explains the sudden gobbling sound and the disappearance of the post.

Anne-Marie has a series of Women’s History Month posts - one very foodie - starting here. Don’t wait for my computer to behave - just enjoy them now!

When people talk about Jewish food it all sounds so easy. For Passover in two weeks we might have matzah brie and chicken soup and choc-nut cake and all kinds of wondrous stuff. Charoseth and chopped liver and pickles and edelbitter chocolate.

I don’t often hear people talk about the food before Passover. Finishing up food for Passover is never glamorous.

I grew up in an Orthodox household (which means we kept a kosher kitchen) in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s. Because we were a biggish family and each of us kids had numerous friends, getting the place ready for Passover entailed biscuits. Lots of biscuits.

The biscuit recipe was adapted to meet the ingredients that needed to be used up. The tins of biscuits we took to school started off as full of fruits and nuts and chocolate chips and ended up butter or coconut. By a week before Passover there was no more flour in the house and we finished up the last sugar and vinegar with a tin or so of toffees. We might have a dish of sago or something else a bit more unusual to finish up other odds and ends, but really, the only food we had to get rid of (in the caravan, technically sold to my father’s dental nurse for the duration) were mostly food colourings and essences.

I did my cupboard just now, ready for furious finishing-up over the next 2 weeks and the results couldn’t be more different.

I have enough flour for precisely one batch of biscuits. I had enough polenta for two batches of pancakes and enough honey for two, so I made one for lunch today and have diminished the polenta, the honey and the eggs all at once. Yay me. Not all the food is finishable, so I have a shelf of the cupboard that I shall simply seal off and pretend it doesn’t exist. There is only one of me, after all. And I’m not nearly as religious other members of my family.

I threw out all the out-of-date food. There wasn’t too much of that, though how I managed to get 3 boxes of pudina chutney mix and let them all get three years beyond their use-by date is a mystery.

I will be eating quite a bit of nori maki this next fortnight - rice and seaweed and wasabi and soy sauce were most plentiful. Also heat-and-serve spinach curry. I have enough for two meals of that. I have Vietnamese spring roll wrappers and some sheets of lasagne. Great Northern beans, chickpeas, one meal worth of pasta shells, three of spaghetti and one small roll of buckwheat noodles. Enough red lentils for one dish of dhal (to go with both the spinach curries, I think, since my dishes of dhal are large) and some ground almonds. Ground almonds and flour = almond biscuits, of course. The sweetest things there are a tin of unsweetened peaches and some almond-flavoured agar-agar jelly mix from Singapore, which will go very nicely together if someone drops in. And I really can’t face those lasagna sheets: I’ll give them to a very fortunate friend.

My mother, on the other hand, is making biscuits as usual.

Mum’s Biscuits

Ingredients:

150 g butter or equivalent amount of oil
1 large egg
1 small cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
1 drop vanilla (optional)
any flavouring/additional ingredient you feel like (eg mixed dried fruit, coconut, chocolate chips)

Method:

Melt butter. Add everything else. Mix well. Drop a teaspoon at a time on well-greased trays. Bake in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes.

PS The picture is of bread because for eight days in April I won’t be able to eat it. That’s another thing about pre-Passover preparations. Bread becomes the dream food that will soon become the stuff of painful denial. I’ve already started wandering longingly through the bakery part of the supermarket eyeing off shelves of ciabtta and pitta with wisful gluttony. I can’t buy any though. Too much to finish up. Too little time.

It will all be over in three weeks. If I say it often enough I might believe it.

It’s been a while since I’ve added to the collection of biscuit and scone recipes. This one is from Mrs Eaton, early nineteenth century. Mrs Eaton believes in cream and is good with spices.

Short Biscuits

Beat half a pound of butter to a cream, then add half a pound of loaf sugar finely powdered and sifted, the yolks of two eggs, and a few carraways. Mix in a pound of flour well dried, and add as much cream as will make it a proper stiffness for rolling. Roll it out on a clean board, and cut the paste into cakes with the top of a glass or cup. Bake them on tins for about half an hour. Another way. A quarter of a pound of butter beat to a cream, six ounces of fine sugar powdered and sifted, four yolks of eggs, three quarters of a pound of flour, a little mace, and a little grated lemon peel. Make them into a paste, roll it out, and cut it into cakes with the top of a wine glass. Currants or carraways may be added if agreeable.

Today’s venture into scrapbookiana is going to be a bit different. I will skip the recipes that were cut and pasted magazines and newspapers. I’m going to play with a few of the handwritten recipes.

The first one is in my sister’s handwriting when she was pre-teen. I am just amazingly good at reading handwriting? No. I remember her making this particular recipe in class and insisting it become part of our family heritage. I don’t think we ever made it once she lost her initial enthusiasm. Oatmeal cake, with oatmeal, a little egg, some sugar, coconut, butter and vanilla. We all moved on to bigger and better things rather quickly.

Next to it is another handwritten recipe, and rather earlier. It’s in my grandmother’s writing and has her distinctive spelling. This particular grandmother died in the early sixties, so the recipe predates that. A biscuit recipe and proof that quite early Australians sometimes used the term ‘cookie’. Not baking a cookie seems wrong, though, somehow.

Unbaked cookies

1 tbs butter
1 cup castor sugar
2 eggs well beaten
1 cup dates finely chopped
2 cups rice krinkles
1 cup chopped nut
1 cup coconut

Melt butter in saucepan. Add sugar, then eggs and dates and cook slowly for 5-6 mins until well blended. Add rice krinkles and nuts and stir the mixture. Moisten hands with cold water, then when mixture is cool shape into balls, roll in coconut and place on tray to cool.

The next page has recipe for cream cheese pastry, from the other grandmother and in my writing (teenage, messy and a bit obscured by absorbed honey) is that same grandmother’s honey cake.

One the following page is my aunt’s recipe for icecream. It was not kosher, so we never made it. We ate it at my aunt’s house and politely pretended we didn’t know that it contained gelatine.

Then follow two more of my sister’s recipes: Anzac biscuits and pizza pie. The pizza recipe was another that was stuck into the book as a prompt or because of the memories it elicited rather than because it was someting we made according to that recipe. It combnes milk with bacon and cabanossi. I sometimes wonder how my parents handled my sister bringing that recipe home as one she had cooked at school? I remember us inventing our own pizza recipes (vegetarian) and working on bases till they worked. Which just goes to show that scrapbooks reflect recipes collected, not recipes cooked.

Then comes an orange squash recipe, written down by an enthusiastic child one very hot summer. It was a very hot summer. Too many days over 100 in a row led to a surfeit of oranges - halves frozen for snacks, in drinks, in iceblocks. We were not lacking in vitamin C. This heatwave explains why that enthusiastic child (mentioning no names) wrote “Drink” in big letters down the bottom and drew double lines all the way around the word to make sure it would not go unnoticed. We only made one batch of the squash and then turned our attention to ginger beer. The ginger beer has a story all its own.

And now comes a recipe from another sister. That lock jaw toffee recipe was our favourite to make for school fetes for over a decade. Enterprising sisters spoke of stuffing my face with it to make me stop talking.

Lock jaw toffee

1 pint water
4 cups white sugar
1 tbs brown vinegar

Bring water to boil. Add water and stir till dissolved. Add vinegar. Cook till mixture thickens (we tested this using a cold saucer). Put into patty pans. Allow to set. Decorate with hundreds and thousands or dessicated coconut.

The final recipe for today (out of the dozens more in handwriting) is my grandmother’s raisin wine. Maybe this version will work better than the last? Maybe it’s a mysterious code and if you combine both recipes you get a wine that works?

Raisin wine

10 tbs raisins chopped finely and put into a jar with 11 bottles of water. Let it stand in a warm place for a week. Then strain off the raisins and put juice back into jar with 1/2 nutmeg, 2 pieces of cinnamon bark. Mix thrugh well and let stand till a big skin forms.
5 tbs sugar, 1 bottle of water and one bottle of wine dissolve over fire. Pour into jar and mix well. Brown sugar for colouring or 1 tb white sugar and a lttle water. Boil this over slow fire til dark brown. Add slowly one cup of water.

What one does after this is a mystery, because the recipe ends there. One day I will decode it and make that raisin wine.

Over the next two weeks I have a couple of interesting things to explore. The first is some more test results for the Regency Gothic banquet. The second is a very particular scrapbook.

This scrapbook is a cut and paste job. It’s one of those early 70s cheap supermarket products. It cost 39c. Coarse paper and a cover bright enough to blind. “Scrap ‘n Scribble” are the only words on that cover, and the picture is of a stuffed animal that looks as if it narrowly escaped Muppet Asylum. This tattered volume is the first place my family looks when there’s a recipe we half-remember from years gone by. It’s the story of a family growing up.

My mother and I hauled it out tonight and identified handwriting and where our tastes have changed and even who insisted on pasting a particular recipe into the book. There are recipes from relatives, including another version of my grandmother’s raisin wine. There are recipes copied from school and from newspapers and a whole series given by my father’s patients. I don’t give my dentist recipes, but neither do I get recipes from Beauty technicians. My father was as assiduous as the rest of us in collecting and pasting and growing the family tradition.

What I love about scrapbooks llike this is that they trace the culinary path of a particular family. Food fads appear and new ingredients. The Great Australian Culinary Shift was happening right about the time we started this particular scrapbook, and it’s worth looking at just for that.

I can’t bring you the whole scrapbook in a few short sessions, but I can share some of the highlights with you. Not only the recipes, but some of the stories behind the recipes. I’m hoping to find biscuit or scone recipes in there. If I don’t (and we mostly made biscuits and scones without recipes so they will definitely be under-represented in the scrapbook) I brought a recipe or two from Canberra.

So that’s most of your Melbourne diet. Retro recipes from the seventies and eighties and niceties along with their oral history. Regency Gothic test reports. And scones or biscuits.

Just when you thought I had entirely forgotten my vague desire to document a vast array of biscuit and scone recipes, I found two recipes from the early part of the nineteenth century. These biscuits are English, I think. I’ll post a correction if the book turns out to have been published elsewhere.

I’m working through Mrs Eaton’s book alphabetically for entirely differnt purposes so you may find scones appear on the blog when I get to ’s’. Or you may not. I’ve been working on heightening levels of suspense in my fiction and I intend to practise wherever I can :).

BISCUIT CAKE.

One pound of flour, five eggs well beaten and strained, eight ounces of sugar, a little rose or orange flower water. Beat the whole thoroughly, and bake it one hour.

BISCUITS.

To make hard biscuits, warm two ounces of butter in as much skimmed milk as will make a pound of flour into a very stiff paste. Beat it with a rolling pin, and work it very smooth. Roll it thin, and cut it into round biscuits. Prick them full of holes with a fork, and about six minutes will bake them. For plain and very crisp biscuits, make a pound of flour, the yolk of an egg, and some milk, into a very stiff paste. Beat it well, and knead it quite smooth ; roll the paste very thin, and cut it into biscuits. Bake them in a slow oven till quite dry and crisp. To preserve biscuits for a long- time sweet and good, no other art is necessary than packing them up in casks well caulked, and carefully lined with tin, so as to exclude the air. The biscuits should be laid as close as possible ; and when it is necessary to open the cask, it must be speedily closed again with care. Sea bread may also be preserved on a long voyage, by being put into a bag which has been previously soaked in a quantity of liquid nitre, and dried. This has been found to preserve the biscuits from the fatal effects of the wevil, and other injurious insects, which are destructive to this necessary article of human sustenance.

I promised you a scone recipe today. This one isn’t a family recipe. In fact, my family complained when I made this recipe in the early 1980s (it’s from “Take it on Trust” a book put out by the Tasmanian Branch of the National Trust which I keep near my desk because it has the simplest metric/imperial tables of any of my books): it has some unusual ingredients. My family is full of scone purists. It’s an interesting variant, though, and adds to this blog’s gradual accumulation of scone and biscuit recipes.

Scones

150 g SR flour (white)
150 g wholemeal SR flour
1 heaped tbs full cream powdered milk
1 level tsp salt
60 g soft margarine
375 ml water

Sift dry ingredients and rub in the margarine. Stir the water into the mix and turn the mixture onto a lightly floured board. Knead lightly (just until smooth). Roll out from the centre (but not right to the edge - leave some air in your dough!). Cut scones and cook in a 250 degree C oven for 12-15 mins.

From a c1956 Melbourne newspaper clipping.

Soften 2 oz butter or margarine. Beat in 1 oz sugar. Work in 3 oz SR flour, using a little lemon juice to make the texture like putty. Knead smooth. Chill 10 minute. Form into small balls and roll the balls in sugar. Place on minimally greased oven trays then press each ball flat with a fork. Bake in a moderate oven for 15-20 minutes.

This is what Australians thought of as biscuits in the 1950s. Not very different from British biscuits. Now I need a 1950s US biscuit recipe. Next week, perhaps. I’m off to spend my Saturday in the world of science fiction.

Cookbooks have personalities and are mobile. The minute I need a particular one, that is the single one that cannot be found. This is how I know about their mobility. I mention my little Louisianan book (which was the product of a church women’s group, from memory) and lo, it goes into hiding. I know it’s a church book because it’s polite and doesn’t taunt me.

When it appears then I will blog it. Until then, I have another 70s booklet called “Recipes”, produced by the Glasshouse United Guild. It might even be a bit earlier than the 70s as it’s typewritten and possibly gestetnered. In fact, it probably *is* earlier. It has Australian spelling and measurements (’S.R. flour’ is unAmerican, I believe). It has 50c boldly written on it in texta. I wonder if it came from south-east Queensland?

Salads don’t make an appearance. There is a whole category labelled ‘Biscuits’ (be still my beating heart) and another called ‘Scones and Loaves.’ I really think this booklet needs exploring, don’t you? I rather think that it emerged into the world just before the Great Australian Cuisine Shift. No salads, you see. And very conservative recipes.

I’ll give a biscuit recipe today and explore the rest of the booklet gradually. I bet it has casseroles. Oh, but I hated the casseroles of my childhood. Except goulash. I find good goulash hard to hate. And yes, it has goulash *and* a casserole *and* … wait for it … meatloaf. It also has choko pickle. I will go out on a limb and claim this booklet is from the sixties.

Apricot Coconut Biscuits

4 oz butter
4 oz sugar
1 egg
1 cup SR flour
salt
1/2 cup chopped nuts
1/2 cup apricot jam
4 tbs coconut

Cream butter and sugar then add egg. Fold the nuts in then the rest of the dry ingredients. Spread on a flat tray then spread the jam over then sprinkle with coconut. Cook in a moderate oven.

I used to make something very like this when I was very young, but without the nuts. If my family made it with nuts, it would have been with almonds. These days I would see the word ‘apricot’ and immediately add macadamias.