Food History

Inside many recipe notebooks are some sheets that have escaped the confines of the pages. Free recipes. Not caged by paste or stickytape. This post is for them.

The current family scrapbook has a whole sheaf of pages. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has wielded a paste brush since the family home was packed up, nearly twenty years ago. There are recipes photocopied from cookbooks and newspapers (marmalade, strawberry conserve, black forest pudding, lemon syrup yoghourt cake, chocolate mud cake, stir fried vegetable curry, flatbread, banana and lime cheesecake, glazed orange poppy seed cake, Moroccan red lentil soup, Blitz torte, Dutch almond cake), a series of rather fishy leaflets from 1987 (courtesy of Vic Fish “The Victorian Fishing Industry Council” - my mother sought fish recipes bigtime once I had left home as she had suffered twenty years of not being able to cook it due to my fish allergy), recipes copied twenty-five years ago at my father’s surgery (”Mini fruit cakes” to serve with coffee on Christmas Night -the perfect recipe for a Jewish dentist, chocolate carrot cake), odd pages in my mother’s handwriting (Lumber Jack Cake, Basic Chocolate Cake, Buffalo Cake, Indian Corn muffins - on the back of an airline boarding pass - the ingredients for a fruit cake, Viennese orange biscuits), odd recipes from friends (honey cake, Middle Eastern Orange Cake from June, Mississippi Mud Cake from Betty) and family (Auntie Pearl’s honey cake, Lemon Grass Vichysoisse from Auntie Joan, a range of bushfood recipes from me, Moroccan cholent from one of my sisters), recipes without origin or title (but containing apricot and icing sugar or for baking fish with coriander masala) and Stephanie Deste’s chocolate cake.

If any reader asks, I am happy to give any of these recipes and to explain why there are so many cake recipes. It doesn’t mean we ate cake all the time, just as the plethora of meat dishes surviving for the Middle Ages doesn’t mean they didn’t eat vegetables. Just ask in the next few days, while I still have access to the recipes.

Tonight I want to give Stephanie’s chocolate cake recipe. She gave me a violin when I was fourteen and she was a close friend of my father’s and terribly, terribly intimidating. She would wheel up to me in the library when I was young and demand I tell Dad this or that. And her voice could be heard throughout the building and I was transfixed by her gaze and was terrified into being polite.

When I was older I discovered that her voice was resonant because she was in theatre. My mother still describes her as an exotic dancer. And just tonight I found out that she was part of the inspiration for Dame Edna Everage (and those glasses were part of the reason her gaze was so transfixing - I coveted them at age five).

Childhoods play the strangest tricks on us. The most exotic people are ordinary to children. If I had seen her like this , maybe I would have thought of her as exotic. She wasn’t ordinary, but I assumed that most older women were larger than life and that Stephanie (we called her by her first name, and her daughter was “Auntie”) was just a bit stronger than the others. I still have the violin she gave me. And my mother has her cake recipe in that old family scrapbook.

Stephanie Deste’s chocolate cake

125 g dark chocolate
100 g butter
100 g caster sugar
100 g ground almonds
3 eggs, separated
1 tbs brandy
1 tbs black coffee

Melt chocolate, brandy and coffee in double boiler. Stir. Add butter and sugar. Mix well.

Remove from heat. Stir in almonds. Stir in lightly beaten egg yolks.

Beat egg whites until stiff. Stir a spoonful of the whites into the mixture to lighten it, then gently fold in remainder.

Pour into a buttered, paper lined 19cm round cake tin. Bake at 160 degrees C for 45 mins. Cool completely before turning out.

Sprinkle with icing sugar if desired.