We met at a local coffee shop to share our books of family recipes. My friend’s recipe book was designed and self-published by her sister and featured text and collages of black and white and colour photographs of family members and events. Interspersed with the photographs were images of handwritten recipes reproduced from the pages of her mother’s well-loved but tattered recipe book. The book was part memoir and part cookbook.
Leafing through it, I noticed a photograph of her parents on their wedding day in the 1940s. Her father proudly stands in an Australian military uniform and her mother wears a full length, white wedding dress with a V-neck. Her face, framed by a delicate lace veil, pools to the ground like a graceful waterfall. Vintage black and white wedding photographs are especially poignant to me, capturing the moment when two people agree to embark on a new and hopeful life together.
The pages of her recipe book were sepia-colored with age and offered a culinary guide to everyday life nearly ninety years ago in Australia. There were cost-conscious sweets like Nut Cake and scones, and there was a recipe on how to corn beef. There were careful instructions on the preservation of fruit and vegetables. I was struck by how time consuming preparing many of these recipes would have been and how much this contrasted with my mother’s recipes.
My parents married right after WWII. My mother had attended a Home Economics course at the University of Kentucky that was state-of-the-art for the time. The course encouraged modern homemakers to take a more scientific approach to cooking, child care, budgeting and home management.
Her recipes reflect these ‘newfangled’ ideas, and I imagine that many of them would have seemed very exotic to my friend’s mother with some of the ingredients even stranger. There is a recipe for Quiche Lorraine with Swiss cheese, quite stylish and unusual for the time, and her Bing Cherry Salad with canned dark cherries, black cherry gelatin and cream cheese. ( It is very hard to find black cherry gelatin in Australia. ) Our mother recorded her recipes in a ring binder with a Table of Contents, listing thirty-one family recipes recorded in her careful handwriting.
Scanning the list, I remember cozy winter evenings where we sat around the dinner table feasting on her thick vegetable soup, more like a stew than a soup, with squares of glistening beef. Another dinner treat was her succulent meatloaf made with beef mince and baked in a bread tin. Happily, this always meant leftovers. A slice of thick meatloaf anointed with a generous dollop of catsup and pressed between two slices of white bread would be in our school lunch the following day. Heaven!
There was a summer side salad (not in our recipe book) that mother prepared, which could have featured in a cooking comic book. Two smiling slices of banana were smeared with peanut butter and then topped with creamy Miracle Whip (a modern mayonnaise substitute), and placed on a delicate bed of crisp iceberg lettuce. It felt like the bananas were expecting to be a dessert but ending up masquerading as a salad. I have to give credit to our mother who somehow got the peanut butter to adhere to the surface of the slippery banana.
The two recipe books were like ambassadors from different countries meeting at an international conference and trying hard to speak the same language. They shared a common goal to feed families on a budget, but one was from the early twentieth century (think Downton Abbey without the frills) and the other clearly was from the 1950s midcentury. My friend’s recipes were practical and English-influenced using basic staples, while our mother’s recipes reflected a more affluent, postwar middle class where meals was meant to be more decorative and creative. (I am pretty sure you could not adequately feed a hungry family with mother’s Bing Cherry Salad.)
Our mother’s recipes were a tribute to Betty Crocker, a Martha Stewart precursor, but who, unlike Martha, was a fictional character and never indicted for insider trading. Crocker was invented to be a homemaking expert by the Saturday Evening Post and was an early, if make-believe, influencer.
(Crocker was meant to be a wholesome and comforting presence, offering home bakers trusted recipes and baking advice across the world. I can’t get over the idea that a fictional woman was the epitome of homemaking excellence, setting up another impossible model for women to follow and consequently, making the average ‘real’ woman feel inadequate.)
Passing down these recipes celebrates families and family history ‘sifted’ through memories. These recipes capture the feelings and taste of the past. Above all, they celebrate remarkable women who brought inventiveness, care, duty and discipline to the creation of wholesome and filling meals for their families. Both of these books take us on similar journeys, whether in a ring binder from the United States or a hardback book published in Australia. Two women thousands of miles apart cooked for their families with love as the main ingredient.
