Cooking for King and Country

The War chest cookery book

Following Australia’s entry into the First World War cookbook authors and publishers responded as befitted their patriotic duty and which was reflected in the titles of their publications. The War Chest Cookery Book, published in 1917 for the Australian Comforts Fund, featured an Australian soldier in full uniform on the cover. The foreword to the book declared that all profits from the sale of the book would benefit the ‘fighting men who have gone out in defence of their country’.

The Australian Comforts Fund was one of a number of organisations created to provide aid and relief to soldiers in the frontlines as well as those impacted by the war on the home front. These organisations also played an important role in allowing women to feel as if they were taking an active and important role in the war effort and fulfilling their patriotic duties. The Comfort’s Fund legacy has been a long lasting one, at least to the nation’s culinary landscape. Members of the Victorian branch of the fund requested biscuits in sealed tins that could be sent to the front. Historian Sian Supski argues that given that these biscuits needed to be easy and cheap to make and needed to survive the long journey to the front that this is the most likely birthplace for that Australian icon-the Anzac Biscuit.

Poor Man's Goose

Harriet Wicken The Kingswood Cookery Book c.1900

Poor Man’s Goose

Take a sheep’s heart and liver, wash well, and slice them up; slice up also 1lb. of raw potatoes and one or two onions; butter a pie dish, put in a layer of potatoes, then one of liver and some onion, then some more potatoes, and so on until the dish is full, seasoning each layer with pepper and salt; pour in half a pint of water or gravy, put a piece of buttered paper on top, and bake in a moderate oven for about  two hours.

Australian housewives were continuously asked to exercise thrift and economy in the home. While these notions were a fiscal imperative for those on limited incomes, they were also considered a moral imperative for middle class households. This recipe comes from Harriet Wicken’s The Kingswood Cookery Book. Wicken arrived in Australia in 1886 after having worked as a cookery teacher in London. After teaching cookery classes in Victoria and Tasmania she moved to Sydney, where she was appointed as teacher of cookery and instructor of domestic economy at the Sydney Technical College in 1889. Here, as well as in other technical colleges throughout Australia, she would play an instrumental role in the training of cookery instructors who then went on to teach the new domestic economy courses instituted by education departments across the colonies. She was the author of numerous cookbooks and The Kingswood Cookery Book would go through six editions and be published into the second decade of the twentieth century.

Mock Brains

Brown & Polson's Cornflour, Uncle Toby's Oats recipe book: containing tested recipes for the preparation of many delightful summer and winter dishes, sauces, biscuits, puddings, etc. C.1930

One of the most prevalent types of cookbook to appear in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century was that intended to promote a particular service or product. These have been estimated as representing 46 percent of the overall market. Companies like Uncle Toby’s and Sanitarium produced many cookbooks to promote their wares. The Seventh Day Adventist Church, the owners of Sanitarium, even had its own publishing house; the Echo Publishing Company. They saw great value in cookbooks as a means to disseminate the church’s particular approach to diet and to cross promote its manufactured food products to a wider audience that might not otherwise have come in contact with them.

Many of the recipes in these types of promotional books tried to expand on the traditional uses of their products. Uncle Toby’s Oats, for example, saw oats as more than just a breakfast dish and provided recipes for lunch and dinner dishes. This recipe for Mock Brains comes from a 1930s cookbook published in conjunction with the manufacturers of Brown & Poulson’s Cornflour. I leave it up  to you to decide if this is a dish you wish to serve up to your family!

Old cookbooks are a window into our past

As the Nancy Keesing Fellow for 2014 I am very lucky to be able to spend time over the next 12 months exploring the wide and diverse collection of Australian cookbooks at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The John Hoyle Cookery Collection contains over 600 hundred Australian cookbooks.

One of my personal favourites in the collection is The Antipodean cookery book and kitchen companion by Wilhelmina Rawson, first published in 1894.

Mina Rawson

 Mina Rawson is one of those great characters from our nations past. She was the first female cookbook author in  Australia with the publication of Mrs Lance Rawson's Cookery Book in 1878. Not only was she the author of over half a dozen cookbooks she also wrote fairy stories, worked as a newspaper editor and was the first female swimming teacher in Queensland. You can read more about her and her work here.
A strong advocate for the consumption of native fauna and plant species, Rawson gained much of her knowledge from local Aboriginal people. She wrote appreciatively of the wild mushrooms and of the edible young shoots of the wild rough-leaved fig which had been pointed out to her by Aboriginal women in the Maryborough area. And, in the Antipodean Cookery Book, Rawson clearly stated that: ‘I am beholden to the blacks for nearly all my knowledge of the edible ground game’.

I will be posting a lot more over the coming months highlighting some of my discoveries at the Mitchell Library .