Food History

My late aunt was famous for her home-made liqueurs.  I still make fruit brandies and liqueurs using her technique, which she had from her mother and which is identical to the one in some seventeenth and eighteenth century recipes.

One I haven’t made is her version of Tia Maria.  It isn’t hard, and it looks scrumptious (except that I would replace the instant coffee with some of the real stuff - Mocha Harar bean to give it chocolate undertones - to get a richer and deeper flavour), so it’s my Saturday recipe. 

It’s not as old a recipe as those for fruit liqueurs.  In this case what gives the youth away is the instant coffee.  The measurements are a dead giveaway that it is at least forty years old, since the recipe is definitely Australian and the metric system has been in use here that long.  Cup sizes are old-fashioned Australian, which means the cups of sugar are 6 oz each.  

I love it that even the smallest handwritten note has so much history lodged in it.  This note is ripped from a cheap notepad and has a six digit Sydney phone number for a Mr Smith on the back.  If I could be bothered checking when Sydney numbers were six digit, I could be more precise about when Auntie Joan made this note.  (I know it was before 1966, because there is a small financial calculation in a corner and it is definitely not metric.)  Mr Smith’s phone number was 24 1226.  An old phonebook would give us the suburb and show us something about Auntie Joan’s Sydney acquantaince.

Reading an old recipe is as much fun as reading a good detective novel.  In this instance I can add oral memory to the process of detecting the history in the recipe: we were all hunting this particular note a few years before my aunt died.  She couldn’t find it anywhere and had promised her favourite liqueur recipe to someone and so a great hunt was had. 

When my cousin let me borrow various volumes of family recipes (he’s the oldest of our generation, so he inherits them, but I’m the family custodian of cooking and food history, so I get as much time as I need to document them and make sure everyone gets copies of the recipes - it’s very fair) I found the missing recipe slipped in between two blank pages of Claire Polack’s  notebook.  I’ll blog about Claire Polack’s notebook another time - call today a celebration of finding this little gem three years after we thought it was gone forever.

Tia Maria Liqueur

 2 oz instant coffee

1/2 vanilla bean

4 cups sugar

2 cups boiling water

1 pint brandy

Pour boiling water over sugar - dissolve.  Add other ingredients then add vanilla bean.  Tightly cork.  Let stand 30 days.