Food History

I was doing fine tonight until a moment ago. I have a half dozen interesting topics to choose from for posts. And my neck is close to better. And life was looking pretty good. Then the last two days caught up with me and I need medicine and an early night. Which means you need more recipes from 1950s Melbourne. You can tell just how tired I am by the fact that I’m not even tempted to make the chocolate cake, and when have I not been tempted by chocolate?

Strawberry Tea Cake
1 tablespn butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg ¾ cup milk 1 ½ cups flour,2 level teaspoon baking powder, pinch of salt 1 cup strawberries, extra sugar. Cream together butter & sugar when very light add beaten egg & then milk, sift flour & BP & salt. Add & beat well. Crush strawberries which have been washed & dried with flour & fold them into the batter. Sprinkle with sugar & bake in patty pans.

Steamed Fowl
Put foul onto steam add carrot parsnip & onion. When cooked have white sauce & boiled egg (hard) chopped. Place fowl on platter & pour white sauce all over it seeing all is covered, then sprinkle egg over. Cut carrots & parsnip in rounds and arrange on edge of platter.

Ginger Pudding
1 tablespn butter, 2 tablespns each of sugar & treacle or syrup, 1 ½ cup p flour, 1 teaspn soda (small) 1 teaspn each ginger & spice & a small ½ cup milk. Beat butter, sugar & syrup, dissolve soda in milk & then add to butter mixture, add flour which has been sifted with ginger spice. Put in a greased steamer for 2 hrs. Serve with sweet white sauce.

Chocolate Bake
1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 cup of milk, with ½ teaspoon soda 2 teasp cocoa, 2 cups SR flour. Mix sugar & butter add milk & soda then flour & cocoa. Same for ginger omitting cocoa add 1 teaspn ginger & teaspn cinnamon.

Yesterday I started talking about a cookbook and ended up with a short excursus (drabbit, I’m turning into an academic! forget you saw ‘excursus’ in blogland. In this case shortness of memory can only improve your quality of life. Though, if you liked ‘excursus’ I can scatter ‘deconstruct’ and other fun words through my prose until it is very, very dense and the occasional recipes are the only thing that makes sense) into to historical relativity. All of this was fun, but exhausting.

The thing is, I don’t dare look at the last book until my brain has recovered. The trouble is that my first and deepest university training was in historiography (how people write about the past and include it into their literature) and when I open that door, it’s hard to close. Like a school cookbook, it brings me home, or near home.

The trouble with being near home is I don’t want to write theory stuff today. What I want to do, in all honesty, is to contemplate the bowl of chicken in my refrigerator. I had it hot and fresh roasted last night, and tonight another portion will be warmed and then shared with tabbouli. Tomorrow it will be shredded further and eaten as part of a salad lunch.

Since I can’t get my mind off it, maybe I should just give you a recipe.

Slice lots and lot of onion and place in the bottom of a slightly oiled roasting dish. Make a sauce of 3 tablespoons (or so) of herbes de Province, juice of a lemon (I used a Myer lemon and cut a second one to place in the chicken’s cavity – I like lemon, I’m afraid. Add some salt, a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil, and the same amount of balsamic vinegar. Roast. Eat. Spend the next day contemplating the joys of leftovers. This chicken is actually better as leftovers than as roast, and it makes a delightful roast. Now you know why I’m distracted.

‘Excursus’ vs roast chicken: the chicken wins, every time.

My neck is slowly wending its way to normal. From tomorrow I should be able to spend more time on the computer, which means back to proper posts by Friday at the latest. Until then, all I can say is “Sit down and write all your recipes out, so that you, too can be helpful to grandchildren posthumously.”

Egg-au-Gratin
Poach the eggs & arrange in a fireproof dish on a layer of grated cheese. Add a little butter, salt, & pepper, cream, & a few mushrooms. Cover with grated cheese & a little melted butter & brown in oven.

Vienna Steaks
1 lb lean beef (raw) 2 onions 1 egg, salt & pepper. Mince meat & add finely sliced onion. Bind with the white of egg & form into meat rounds. Dip in the beaten yolk of egg & roll in breadcrumbs & fry in oil.
Serve with slices of lemon & mushrooms.

Stuffed Tomatoes
Take a tomatoe to each person. Cut a piece off top & scrape out some of the pulp. Mix the pulp with chopped applies & celery. Refill the tomatoes with this mixture & serve on lettuce leaf with mayonnaise.

Lemon Sponge
Rind & juice of 3 lemons 1 pt water, 1 oz gelatine, 3 whites of eggs, 4 oz lump sugar. Put rind, juice, sugar, & gelatine into water & cook for ¼ hr. Cool. Beat the whites of egg stiffly & add mixtures slowly beating all the time. When it begins to thicken pour into a wet mould & set.
Serve with whipped cream.

I still have neck trouble. My late grandmother to the rescue! Given the speed of healing, I ought to be back to normal Thursday or Friday. Whatever ‘normal’ is. Anyhow, Grandma’s recipes are comforting at times like this.

Egg & Spinach
Pick over some young spinach & wash well. Drain it well, then chop it very finely, & a little chopped onion. Arrange on slices of tomatoe; pour over some mayonnaise, & garnish with hard boiled egg.

Honey Crispies
½ cup chopped peanuts, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup coconut, 2 cups rolled oats, 1 tablespoon honey ½ teaspoon carb soda and 4 oz butter or good dripping.
Put all dry ingredients into a bowl. Melt butter and honey, dissolve soda in a little hot water and mix all together. Pat down flat in a greased tin, and cook in a moderate oven till nicely browned. Cut into fingers while still hot.

Orange Marie Baskets
Six smooth skinned oranges 1/3 rd cup water, 1 teaspn gelatine 2 eggs, 1 desertspn lemon juice, ½ teaspn grated lemon rind 1 oz marshmallows. With a sharp knife cut off top of orange skink leaving handle straps. Cut flesh from oranges leaving neat basket shells. Remove pulp from flesh & chop finely. Dissolve gelatine in water. Mix sugar & lemon rind & juice & add to beaten egg yolks. Cook over boiling water to a custard consistency. Coll & add gelatine & chopped orange pulp. When nearly set add chopped marshmallows. Chill & serve piled in orange baskets. Serve with finger biscuits.

Madeira Salad
1 cup grated carrot, ½ cup each minced cucumber & ripe apple, ½ cup mayonnaise, lettuce, 1 orange. Mix carrot, cucumber, apple & mayonnaise together. Srve in crisp lettuce leaves & garnish with orange slices.

I am very clever. Where any decent person would pull one muscle somewhere like they’re little finger and type round it, I pulled two whacking great neck muscles yesterday. My head hurts; my neck hurts; my ears hurt; my throat hurts. Please feel free to make deeply sympathetic noises in my direction.

In four days time I shall frolic like a lamb. Today it hurts to do too much of anything. Since ‘anything’ includes reading, sitting at the computer or watching TV, my day has been spent doing little bits of things and lying down contemplatively. I didn’t dare ring anyone lest that hurt, too, and lest I complained at them.

What this means is that some of this post will be recipes from my grandmother, and all the posts until my neck feels less nauseating will be extracts of things. This is the most typing I can manage, and even this is not easy, in other words. So please accept my apologies and I’ll try to find interesting excerpts for you while my muscles heal then learn flexibility again.

The special extra for tonight is me giving you a recipe that Grandma actually annotated. It’s nice to know that she particularly liked Lemon Puff Custard. She must have made it often, given that the baking dish is left out of the instructions.

Lemon Puff Custard
Cream 1 tablespoon butter with ½ cup sugar, add yolks of 2 eggs, grated rind and juice of one lemon, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. Fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs and bake in moderate oven in dish of water for 30 to 35 minutes. (Delicious)

Sari gave me a family recipe a while back and I just realised I never gave it to you. I feel rather guilty, because those of you with waffle irons and a love of SE Asian food will want to taste this one.

Australia is culturally mixed. Sometimes we’re culturally mixed up, but that’s another issue entirely.

This recipe is a small illustration of how some recipes survive when cultures combine into a family and some don’t. In my family, as you’ve seen, the festive meals have a touch of central and Eastern Europe about them, but everyday we have eaten a very Anglo cuisine for as long as I can remember. My family, however, has been here at least 150 years (on my father’s mother’s side, at least) – many families tended to Anglo-centrism a hundred years ago. These days things are different. Sari’s family has kept many more dishes from more diverse cuisines, which means that some of their food is just fantastic. Kue Kape is one of those dishes.

Kue Kape
Ground fresh sticky rice (ground in a shop, 2 days in advance and soaked overnight before cooking), fresh coconut cream, eggs and white sugar. Mix dough.

Light coals and put the waffle iron on coal and heat until hot. Add batter and tip over base. It cooks almost instantly, especially if you use the preferred thin layer of dough. Excess batter runs into a bowl. Close the iron for maybe 2 minutes. Peel off thin wafer with fingers. Person sitting next to you folds it after you have cooked it. It will cool and crisp very quickly, less than a minute.

This dish is a very social one. Creating it is a family event, like Australian Italians making passata. Sari’s family makes their own and stores it in a tin.

PS I’m making oxtail soup, which means my whole unit smells of … oxtail soup.

Tonight I don’t feel at all well. If I knew why, I’d do something to improve my lot, but I don’t, and my magic wand for mysterious and ick happenings is unaccountably absent. So, while I go off and feel unaccountably not up to much, here are some of those 1950s recipes from my grandmother. That’s the thing about family, they can sometimes be there for you even when they don’t know what they’re doing. Since my grandmother has been dead for nearly fifty years, so it’s particularly nice of her to help out, under the circumstances. Please enjoy the Flummery in particular, since Flummery is such a gorgeous name.

Passionfruit Flummery
One tablespoon gelatine 1 cup cold water, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 cups cold water, 1 cup sugar, juice of 2 oranges and 1 lemon, pulp of 7 passionfruit.

Soften gelatine in 1 cup cold water. Blend flour with little of remaining water. Heat remainder of water and sugar, stir in flour and cook over boiling water for 10 minutes. Add gelatine, stirring until dissolved. Add pulp of passionfruit and whisk until thick and creamy.

Date Sponge Pudding
1 oz butter, 2 egg half cup sugar, 1 teaspn of baking pwd, 1 cup flour, ½ cup of dates & almond mixed. Beat butter & sugar & eggs well together add dates & almonds finely chopped, then add flour & baking pwd, & mix enough milk to make it as thin as batter; put into a well greased basin, steam an our; serve with sweet sauce flavoured with almond

I’ve been watching Eurovision and have completely forgotten what I was going to post about tonight. I nearly gave you a food history vision of Eurovision instead, but decided that was pushing things a bit far.

It’s been a long time since I’ve given you an overview of a particular ingredient. In fact, it’s been such a long time you’ve probably forgotten I promised more. This means I need to be very sweet to make up for lapse. This can only mean sugar as the topic of the day. So here’s some stray information about sugar, in no coherent order.

Sugar maple is acer saccharum. Maple sugar is boiled down from the sap of the sugar maple, in autumn.

Sugarcane (saccharum officinarum) is that green stuff that grows on the side of the road in Northern NSW or Queensland, you know, the stuff that always used to be burning. Fresh sugarcane has a high water content and is squeezable by the very strong. This makes sugarcane juice a very sweet alternative to fruit juice in Singapore and other tropical places.

In less-interesting countries like Australia, people use the processed results to cook with. The white sugar we use is very processed sugar, as cane sugar naturally has a great amount of ‘other’ stuff in it, some of which gets marketed as molasses and some of which gets added back into the sugar to create blends such as ‘raw’ sugar, ‘brown’ sugar and demerara.

Beet sugar (produced in Europe) reaches its state of pristine whiteness much more easily. It comes (obviously) from beet(beta vulgaris). Beethoven was famous for growing up among them (“Beet hovenâ€? = “Beet fieldsâ€? - sorry, but it really was about time for a bad joke); related to the mangel wurzel which is such a resonant name I had to include it somewhere here. It is also related to Swiss chard which is the leafy bit, not the root. The classic beetroot soup is, of course, borscht. The cheat’s way of making borscht is with the juice from a tin of beets, a bit of shredded beet, and sour cream. And that’s your recipe for the day.

As far as I can find out, beet wasn’t a source of sugar until Napoleonic times. The story as told to me (which one day I do need to check out) was that all the main sources of sugar during the Napoleonic Wars were either controlled by Britain or blockaded by Britain and so Napoleon encouraged the development of a local source of sweetness. Why this needs checking is that the French had access to all the regions they governed, which included quite a bit of turf where sugarcane was grown in, say, the Middle Ages.

PS There are lots of other sources for sugar, but not today. Today all sugar is found in obvious palces. One such place is not the picture, which is of heritage carrots.

No new drink tests today. I don’t know whether this makes me very happy (return to normal posting!) or terribly sad (after all, watching other people get drunk at my behest isn’t something that will happen often in my life) but I’m resigned. Expect more reports when they appear.

Tonight’s normal posting is a cook book. I wanted it to be a meme; there’s a fun one going round asking everyone to say one word about the person blogging – I thought it would be cool to ask everyone to say amazingly over-the-top wonderful things about my blog, then evilly use them for promotional purposes – but this would be very wrong and so there is no meme tonight.

I have made up for my disappointing virtue by selecting a community cookbook that has a picture of a cannibal boiling a balding man. It suggests novelties that don’t eventuate inside the book, but it satiates the obviously evil inner Gillian that has emerged tonight. (I know where it’s come from, too – today was migraine day.)

This is a celebratory cookbook, despite the cover. It was put out last year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Gymea North Public School (NSW, Australia, for anyone who needs to know). Initially the school had four teachers and 118 pupils. Right now it has 300 pupils, but it doesn’t say how many teachers. Or if any of the original four are still active.

The book is an important aspect of the social history of the school. All of the recipes are from students (part and present) and teachers. They were selected to show us the family recipes linked to the school and, as such, they show us an important element of the foodways of this particular community. This sort of book is a godsend for helping understand the culture of a particular community group. All primary schools have foodways, and outsiders very seldom get to see what they look like.

What I like particularly about this book is the chapter dedicated to 1967 recipes. I was at primary school in 1967, and some recipes are very familiar (French Onion Soup) and some are very alien (Portmanteau Steak).

My second favourite bit of the book is the advertisement on the back inner flap. It gives a recipe for File Cake (cake specifically created to smuggle a file into prison). I do hope that this doesn’t suggest that the any student of Gymea North Public School might have need of such a thing.

You want a recipe from the book, don’t you? The best one of the lot is one that almost every Aussie primary school child has made at one time or another. Some of us lost teeth over these delicacies. Some saucepans were burdened. Some fingers and hands were burned. It’s good to know that the recipe for toffee hasn’t changed since I was a child.

Old Fashioned Plain Toffee

2 cups sugar
¾ cup cold water
1 tablespoon vinegar

Place all ingredients in a saucepan. Stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Bring to boil – do not stir. Cook until syrup is golden brown. Remove from heat and let bubbles settle. Pour into small paper patty pans. Sprinkle with 100s and 100s. Refrigerate until set.

We all need a break from unlimited alcohol. In fact, we need something solid and sobering, because we’re heading for mid-week and sobriety is terribly important during the middle of the week. I thought some more recipes for the biscuit and scone collection would do the trick.

A question the other day made me realise that some of you don’t know why all these biscuit and scone recipes keep appearing. It’s because I’m collecting (slowly and a little sporadically) recipes and mentions and, one day, when we’re all completely sick of it, I’m going to make a special map. I’ll chart biscuits and scones over time and geographically. I’ll compare names and ingredients, if it ever gets to that stage, and we’ll come up with interesting results.

Until then the recipes are lovely. Today’s lovely recipes are from Foods that will Win the War and How to Cook Them, by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, 1918.

SOY BEAN MEAL BISCUIT
1 cup soy bean meal or flour
1 cup whole wheat
1−1/2 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon corn syrup
2 tablespoons fat
1 cup milk
Sift dry ingredients. Cut in fat. Add liquid to make soft dough. Roll one−half inch thick. Cut and bake 12 to 15 minutes in hot oven.

EMERGENCY BISCUIT
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 tablespoon fat
1/2 teaspoon soda
1 cup sour milk
1 teaspoon salt
Mix as baking powder biscuit. Drop by spoonfuls on greased baking sheet. Bake 15 minutes in hot oven.

I’m taking a break from drinking. I promise to get back to it, though, and write more curiously influenced posts.

Today I have two things to talk about: search terms and one of the community cookbooks. They are in no way linked, nor is the fact that I spent this morning looking at stoves.

Normally search terms for this blog aren’t at all interesting. Everyone who comes is practical and sensible and looks for good stuff. This time, when I checked the stats, things were a bit different. That’s why I’m sharing. Everyone else gets strange terms to chuckle over so it’s about time we had some, too.

Right up the top is ‘brad and butter pudding’. I do wonder what Brad tastes like in a pudding, but I don’t want to kill him to find out. A few entries under Brad is ‘pleasure revenge food’ – if it was the same person who used both search terms and you are that person, please own up. There has to be a story in it.

Just for the record, photography was invented in the nineteenth century. This means that the poor soul who looked for ‘medieval beef photos’ was entirely out of luck. I hope that the person who keyed in ‘middle evil times people how to cook food’ had better success, though I can’t promise anything for ‘names of a Jewish butcher.’ I have met a Jewish butcher and I don’t think I called him names at all.

The rest is pretty sane and sensible. I’d really love to know what the person who googled ‘jewish herb garden’ found out. Why should a Jewish herb garden be any different from a non-Jewish one? Colour me mystified.

The next cookbook on my little pile of must-reads is The Tried-and-True Cookbook. It has a lovely blue cover and was put out by the Wesley Deep Creek Uniting Church in order to help primary school children at risk. It comes from the bottom end of mainland Australia rather than the top end, but it’s still about children and their needs.

Melbourne has a Mediterranean climate, and its food has a Mediterranean influence. Instead of tropical flavours, there is minestrone and Chinese barbecue pork, pilaf and lasagna. There is, however, also macadamia chicken, tomato curry and some truly wonderful-looking desserts that could be from anywhere European. In other words, the cookbook doesn’t reflect Melbourne, it reflects the congregation of that particular branch of the Uniting Church.

To celebrate that congregation and its efforts in helping children, how about a recipe? This one calls itself “Impossible Pie” and, despite the name, it looks delightfully simple.

Impossible pie

4 eggs
½ cup butter
½ cup plain flour
2 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 cup coconut
2 tsp vanilla

Blend all ingredients together and pour into a 25 cm greased pie plate.

Bake at 180 degrees C for about 1 hour or until centre is firm.

I promised my grandmother’s recipes and, after racking my brains to think what I should talk about tonight, I remembered my promise. It’s a pity I remembered that I had promised recipes, though, because I had just about decided that it was time to talk about the gabelle. Salt is important, after all. Anyhow, there’s world enough and time for a post on French salt taxes and their extraordinary effects on world history. Another day. If I remember.

The baked egg recipe is identical to a recipe that appeared in the 1920s in the US, which just goes to show that US cuisine and Australian aren’t so far away from each other as they sometimes look. The only difference between my grandmother’s recipe and the US version is that my grandmother’s follows the Jewish technique of breaking the egg into a cup first, to check for blood spots or embryos. I find it works best with the perfect rich tomatoes of high summer.

The main course of tomato and egg is so light and healthy that I’ve given a rather decadent dessert to match it.

Baked Eggs & Tomatoes
Allow 1 egg & 1 tomato to each person. Slice about 1 ¼ off the top of the tomato, scoop out the pulp. Break an egg into a cup & pour it into the tomato. Add a little butter, pepper & salt. Bake slowly until egg is set. Warm the pulp, season, and pour around each egg.

Caramel Custard
3 eggs, 1 qt milk, 2 oz lump sugar, vanilla essence. Make a custard with eggs and milk in a shallow dish, cooking it very slowly so that it will not curdle. Put sugar in a pan with a little water and warm until it is a dark coffee colour. Add vanilla. Take the brown skin off the custard when it is cold and arrange in a glass dish and pour the cold caramel sauce over it. Serve with cream.

Today’s biscuit recipes are from The American Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book by Mrs EA Howland. It was published in Cincinnati in 1845. For saleratus you can use baking soda, and everything else is pretty obvious. Is it equally obvious that I’m falling asleep at my desk? I hope not.

“17. Brown Bread Biscuit.
Two quarts of Indian meal, a pint and a half of rye, one cup of flour, two spoonfuls of yeast, and a table-spoonful of molasses. It is well to add a little saleratus to yeast almost always, just as you put it into the article. Let it rise over night.

18. Bread Biscuit.
Three pounds of flour, half a pint of Indian meal sifted, a little butter, two spoonfuls of lively yeast; set it before the fire to rise over night; mix it with warm water.

19. Tea Biscuit.
* Take one pint of sour milk, one tea-spoonful of saleratus, flour enough to knead up, a small piece of lard or butter, a little salt; roll it out, and cut it into small biscuits.

20. Light Biscuit.
Take two pounds of flour, a pint of buttermilk, half a tea-spoonful of saleratus; put into the buttermilk a small piece of butter or lard rubbed into the flour; make it about the consistency of bread before baking.

21. Rice Biscuit.
Two pounds of flour, a tea-cupful of rice, well boiled, two spoonfuls of yeast; mix it with warm water; when risen enough, bake it.

25. Rich Milk Biscuit.
Two pounds of sifted flour, eight ounces butter, two eggs, three gills of milk, a gill and a half of yeast. Cut the butter into the milk and warm it slightly, sift the flour into a pan, and pour the milk and butter into it. Beat the eggs and pour them in, also the yeast; mix all well together with a knife. Flour your moulding-board, put the lump of dough on it, and knead it very hard. Then cut the dough in small pieces, and knead them into round balls; prick and set them in buttered pans to rise till light, probably about an hour, and bake them in a moderate oven.

26. Butter Biscuit.
Eight ounces of butter, two pounds of flour sifted, half a pint of milk or cold water, a salt spoonful of salt. Cut up the butter in the flour and put the salt to it, wet it to a stiff dough with the milk or water, mix it well with a knife. Throw some flour on the moulding-board, take the dough out of the pan, and knead it very well. Roll it out into a large, thick sheet, and beat it very hard on both sides with the rolling-pin. Beat it a long time, cut it out, with a tin or cup, into small, round, thick cakes. Beat each cake on both sides with the rolling-pin, prick them with a fork, put them in buttered pans, and bake them to a light brown in a slow oven.”

Sharyn’s children are all christened. I couldn’t be there, because seventh day Passover and christenings really don’t match, but my thoughts were with them all.

She says that she has a couple of posts to take us through the missing food elements and then that’s it: we will have a complete documentation of a rural Australian christening with stories. Although I admit, I wasn’t expecting the Mayan aspect of today’s post.

“Perhaps this one should be called ‘Recipes from before a Country Christening,’ because when you have a wedding, 21st, christening etc in rural Australia, you have people coming from all over the place, and you are never catering for just the one meal. We already have friends here, from both interstate and overseas, more family and friends are expected today, although precise numbers are unclear. So, not being one hundred per cent certain of how many I’ll be feeding, I decided late last night, while roasting the chicken for the ‘Chicken, Leek, and Tarragon Pie’, to make pumpkin soup, and get the makings out for a casserole.

It then made sense, while I had the oven on, to prepare the bread cases for the ‘Smoked Salmon Tartlets’, and one of my houseguests decided to pitch in with her own favourite recipe, what she calls her ‘Sinking Mud Muffins’, so we’ll have something to offer with coffee & tea today. And after all, doesn’t everyone make muffins at midnight?

But she couldn’t have chosen a better comfort food for me. Chocolate has been used as important parts of people’s social and religious lives, since the Mayans grew it in Mesoamerica (250-900 AD). Modern studies have proven what is in it that makes us feel so good, and as a child, my best friend’s mother used to make the darkest, moistest, absolute best chocolate cake. She knew I was somewhat partial to it, so weekends when I stayed over there would always be a big slab of frosted chocolate cake to have with our morning tea mugs of Milo.

As a teenager I moved to Wodonga for work, and my friend moved to Benalla. Whenever she came home, even unexpected visits, she’d ring me, and I’d head straight out to see her. It took me half an hour to get out there and I’d walk in the door, just as her Mum would be removing a freshly baked chocolate cake from the oven. “I knew you were coming�, she’d grin, “so I made you a cake.� It’s not really any wonder I named one of my daughters after this woman.

So today, while I raise a glass in honour of the Anzac’s, make ‘Frangelico Truffles’ as gifts for my boys god-parents, eat chocolate muffins, and my house fills with more of the people I love, I’m sharing my recipe for the truffles. To my mind, nothing else could quite say thank you, to those people for making the commitment they have chosen to make to my children, like handmade chocolate.

Frangelico Chocolate Truffles

Ganache
8 oz (230 g) dark sweet chocolate
2/3 c. heavy cream
2 Tablespoons Frangelico.
Dipping
16 oz. (450 g) dark sweet chocolate
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Garnish
2 cups chocolate shavings.

When chocolate and cream ganache have cooled to room temperature, stir in sherry before refrigerating. Roll dipped truffle in chocolate shavings. “

Culcairn is heating up, as you can see from this post. By Saturday, there will be enough food in that town to feed double the usual number. Enjoy Sharyn’s latest post!

“Recipes from a Country Christening

My childhood memories of food at parties may well be different from people the same age in other areas. With the migrant camp at Bonegilla http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/national/sites/bonegilla.html introducing a wide variety of people to our region, we had an incredible amount of choice.

Pot-luck dinners run by the CWA might have French style ragouts; sweet and sour sausages & rice (the rice was always cold and gluggy); stroganoff; homemade pizzas on scone dough; homemade spring rolls; kransky; tuna mornay; and my favourite, lasagna. Big, solid layers of meat and tomato sauce, nutmeg flavoured cheese sauce and homemade pasta. Sweets could range from platters of fairy bread and honey joys; bread and butter pudding; to fresh apple strudel. I have fond memories of watching the strudel pastry being made.

Making fresh pasta, and tomato sauce, for a lasagna always takes me back to the aromas of my friends mum’s kitchen, when I was a kid. It takes a bit extra time, but the flavor is always well worth the effort.

Home-Made Pasta Dough

INGREDIENTS

400g plain flour (strong/bread flour is best, but you can get passable results with ordinary plain flour)
4 whole eggs, lightly beaten
salt to taste
METHOD

Place flour onto the work surface, and make a well. Add eggs, salt and gradually work into the flour until a soft and pliable dough forms. Knead the dough until smooth and consistent - 5 minutes should do.
Allow dough to rest for an hour, covered in cling wrap, in the refrigerator. Divide dough into 4 balls. Flatten each ball into a disk and pass through the pasta machine on the widest setting, Fold in half lengthways and repeat. Keep rolling twice on each setting until you reach the narrowest setting.
Cut pasta if it gets too long.

* To roll by hand, divide mixture into manageable balls. Roll each portion evenly onto a well-floured board. A marble rolling pin is best for this job.
Dust rolled pasta with extra semolina and allow to rest for 10 minutes before using, or air dry the pasta until required.

Pasta Sauce

INGREDIENTS

10 large tomatoes
1 heaped tablespoon dried basil, or half a bunch of finely chopped fresh basil leaves
1 teaspoon butter
1 onion, finely diced
1 cup stock (chicken or vegetable)
½ cup red wine

METHOD

In a medium sized stockpot (you can use a deep-sided saucepan) melt the butter, and fry onion til soft. Add roughly chopped tomatoes and stir for several minutes. Add stock, basil and wine. Bring to the boil, and stir while tomato flesh breaks down. Season to taste, and simmer for approx half an hour, or until sauce has reduced. For a smooth sauce, blend for a few minutes with a stick blender.”