Food History

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.