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.

The most delicious coffee you've ever tasted....

125 Kitchen Tested Recipes c.1930

Cookbooks played a significant role in the actual promotion and diffusion of technologies for use within the home. Manufacturers of kitchen utensils and appliances like Sunbeam, published cookbooks to instruct their customers on the best manner to prepare recipes with the aid of their products. Advertisements contained within their pages were an ideal vehicle to promote a wide range of kitchen appliances directly to the primary consumers of these items.

This coffee maker, featured in an advertisement in 125 Kitchen Tested Recipes (c.1930) from the Sunbeam Company, is notable for its modernist design. The advertisement highlights the practicality, hygiene and versatility of its coffee maker.  They were selling a lifstyle as much as they were selling a product. In the 1930s Australia was a predominantly tea drinking nation but, as Jill Adams has noted, coffee had been drunk since the 19^th century.

A Wedding Recipe

In celebration of my brother in law's upcoming wedding I give you the following recipe for marital bliss:

A Wedding Recipe

Take two half pound packets of love, well sifted (be very careful to see that it is two packets, the whole success depends on this), same quantity of unselfishness, as much forbearance as you have on hand, half pound each of tact, cheerfulness' common sense, good health and energy. Mix well with good cooking, season moderately with good looks (not a necessity). Serve daintily and regularly with plenty of cash sauce. A very palatable dish.

Ladies’ Handbook of Tested Recipes (1905)

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!

Kangaroo Stew and Elephant Consommé

On Christmas day 1870 Paris had been under siege by the Prussian army for 99 days. Food shortages led Parisians to expand their usual larder of ingredients and even the inhabitants of Paris zoo were not spared. A Christmas menu from a Paris restaurant included exotic dishes such as Elephant consommé, Bear chops in a pepper sauce and Camel roasted English style. Amongst the dishes served that day by chef Alexandre Étienne Choron was a Kangaroo stew. This was not the first time kangaroo had been served far from Australian shores. In 1862 the Acclimatisation Society of Great Britain held a banquet in London which featured a dish called Kangaroo Steamer.

Kangaroo Steamer had long been a feature of the Australian colonial culinary landscape. In his account of his rambles through the colonies in the late 1840s, the aristocratic military officer Godfrey Mundy devoted considerable space, and a gourmet's eye, to food. Mundy described, amongst other things, a high society dinner party, bush recipes, the dearth of good cooks and the over-abundance of meat. He showed a keen appreciation for kangaroo meat and provided his readers with a glowing report on the various ways of preparing this marsupial, including one for skewered kangaroo ‘kabaubs’ (sic) and for the slow cooked kangaroo 'steamer'. He described the steamer as 'very popular with those who have time and patience ' and pronounced the dish to be very tasty.