Thirty five years of family recipes scrapbooked
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.
January 16th, 2007 at 5:45 am
I have to confess that I’m really jealous of your scrapbook. I remember, vaguely, back in the 70s when my mom took a bunch of “exotic” cooking classes - Chinese, Greek, some others. That’s also when we got our first microwave oven. It would be great fun to go back and look through recipes in those days (and maybe laugh a little).
January 20th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I realise my good fortune in being allowed to access my mother’s scrapbook and all sorts of ancestral recipes. And yes, there is some laughter involved :).