There is more to Copha than Chocolate Crackles

There are many strange and wonderful cookbooks at the Mitchell Library and you never really know what you will find once you start delving through their catalogue. This promotional booklet for Copha recipes from the 1950s entitled What Shall I Cook Today? proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are many more things that you can make with this ingredient than Chocolate Crackles.

The recipes in this book include such delights as a Copha mayonnaise and kidney pudding with Copha. I dare you to resist the temptation…

Kangaroo Steamer

 

Front plate of The English and Australia Cookery Book

Here is a great recipe from The English and Australian cookery book : cookery for the many, as well as for the upper ten thousand. Published in 1864 this was Australia's very first cookbook. The author was a Tasmanian man by the name of Edward Abbott, who used the pseudonym of 'The Aristologist". Aristology was a word first coined in London in 1835 to describe the art of fine dining.
In his book, Abbott provided a broad selection of recipes including many for English, French and Jewish dishes. As well, he gave many recipes for Australian wildlife like this one for Kangaroo Steamer. Many food historians consider this dish to be the first truly colonial Australian dish. Part of Abbott's intended readership were those belonging to 'the upper ten thousand' or the colonial gentry. It is interesting to speculate whether these readers would have been as interested in the wildlife recipes given in the book as in the description of the hundred guinea dish presented to Prince Albert or the instructions regarding dress and manners at a dinner party.

                                             Kangaroo Steamer (Authors Recipe)

"This is a simple species of braise, and, as its name imports, the meat is steamed. Cut the meat in pieces of about one quarter of an inch square, and put in a pan with a well covered lid, with a spoonfull of milk, an onion shredded into small pieces, and some pepper and salt to taste. When it has been on the fire a short time add about a tenth of the quantity of salt pork or bacon cut the same size as the kangaroo, with a spoonfull of ketchup. Serve hot"

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.