Food History

Back to the cookbook. Inside the front cover is the frilliest apron yet. Very daytime soap, that apron.

The cookbook has a technical section that explains electrical cookers and their wonder. This is important, because the gas fields of Bass Strait were discovered in the 1960s. I’d love to know if this book predated or postdated gas being so important to Melbourne: that bit of information would change the way I read the cookbook.

The contents are divided into Hotplate Cooking (how to do), Oven cooking (how to work the oven and sort out cooking times), Recipes, Fruit Preserving, Weights and measures, and SEC Advisory Services.

The important category here is Fruit Preserving. Many families did home preserves in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s because fruit was abundant and plentiful and local. We used to go fruit picking every summer then work hard for a few days with our Fowler’s Vacola kit and then eat bottled apricots and peaches all winter. That kind of preserving is making a comeback in Australia, so here’s a recipe for my family’s favourite winter dessert from the 1960s and 1970s and then another scone recipe (from the cookbook – the fruit salad recipe is from my childhood), for our collection.

Flaming Fruit Salad

Mix your favourite preserved fruit in a pyrex dish and heat until quite hot. Bring the pyrex dish to table. Heat some brandy (the amount depends on how much flame you like and how much alcohol you’re prepared to feed your children). When the brandy is hot, pour it over the fruit salad. Turn the lights off (in a hurry – this doesn’t work when the brandy is not hot enough) and put a match to the dish. Admire briefly Serve it forth – by the time everyone has a bowlful of salad the flames will have died and the alcohol content significantly diminished.

Derby Scones

8 oz SR flour
pinch salt
½ tsp grated nutmeg
1 dessertspoon cinnamon
2 tbs castor sugar
2 oz butter
1 egg
1 dessertspoon treacle
½ cup milk

Sift flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Rub in butter, add sugar. Mix to a light dough with beaten egg, treacle and milk. Turn on to floured board, knead slightly, roll out and cut into rounds. Place on greased tray, glaze with milk and bake in oven at 50 degrees, reset to 450 degrees, for 8-10 minutes.