Food History

I’m nearly through my sequence of old cookbooks. I’ve got more stacked on my chair, but you’re going to have to wait to meet them, I’m afraid. There are so many other things I have lined up for you between now and then. Guest posts, something special for Jewish New Year, a vast sequence with background and information about the Conflux banquet. Maybe I’ll return to the books about the same time I start talking about blog anniversary giveaways? We’ll see.

Today’s booklet is an advertising one.

Once upon a time I worked in the Department of Primary Industries and Energy. I worked on a lot of agricultural issues, one of which was rice. This meant I got to visit the rice farmers in Leeton and learn a lot about an important segment of the Australian rice industry. The industry bods acted as if everything was new. Yet here I have before me, a slightly nibbled (by silverfish, I presume) copy of “192 of the Best Recipes for Rice. The Food of the People.”

What’s really interesting is that it shows that one of the reasons for the success of the rice farmers in Leeton (apart from the quality of their rice, obviously) is that they’ve been consistently good at marketing their product, both fifteen years ago (to me – I came away from that trip enthused about rice) and in this booklet. It’s chockers with recipes, but it’s also chockers with salesmanship.

The booklet doesn’t have a date, but the earliest version in the national Library is from the 1950s. This fits what I know of the history of the area and it fits the look and feel of the booklet. It’s pre-decimal, so it can’t be the 1974 edition, for instance. It also means that their copy of the booklet lacks a firm date.

Food in Australia in the 1950s was quite different to food in Australia now. I’ve talked about that a great deal elsewhere and will no doubt return to it again, but it’s important to know that not all the recipes devised to fit the promotional needs of the booklet (and there are pages and pages of rice recipes) made the cut into popular culture. In fact, most stayed right on the page.

Right now I’m fascinated by how industries change. How do you get someone to buy a book? If you get them to buy a cookbook, how do you then get them to take up the recipes and make them part of their lives? This is the stuff of cultural dynamics and is exceptionally cool. And this is why this little booklet has a strange importance. Put it next to a handwritten book from the same decade (my grandmother’s, for instance) and you can start to see exactly where that take-up lies. She had recipes for rice pudding, but not for rice gruel or Rice Bliss or Rice Bars and Vanilla Sauce.

The rice booklet came out just when Australian cooking was about to do its amazing seachange, and it shows us a very different direction that the seachange might have taken. We’re big rice eaters now, as a country, and we weren’t in the 1940s. But we haven’t actually taken up the Rice Buns and Rice Rocks and Riceflour Sandwich that the cookbook promotes. We eat rice with any number of SE Asian foods, but if you were to ask for “Indian Rice” or “Rice Novelle” in most homes, explanations might have to ensue.