Each Christmas, Janet Gunn lovingly creates a pound cake based on an old family recipe included in a 1930s cookbook that was first owned by her grandmother.
It’s a simple fruit cake recipe — a pound of fruit, a pound of flour, butter and so on — that has become an enduring food tradition for the family.
During World War II, Janet’s mother made the same cake and had it delivered by the Red Cross to her father, who was serving in New Guinea.
“In the column beside the pound cake recipe my mother has written the prices for the ingredients, which is very cute compared to today,” she says.
“I have my grandmother’s and mother’s and mother-in-law’s handwritten recipe books, and they are quite special.
“I love to touch them, I love to feel I am with them when I have those things in my hand. They are also a wonderful social history.
“I love the handwriting, and the fact that I can see what they ate in those times.”
Janet’s pound cake recipe is safely stored away among her cookbooks at her home in Port Macquarie on the New South Wales Mid North Coast.
Often worn and tattered, filled with notes and other clippings, cookbooks such as Janet’s are treasured among households across the country.
The food brought to life from these pages brings people and generations together, and with a bit of detective work, old cookbooks can provide rich insights into our past.
Culinary literature
Adele Wessell specialises in the field of food history.
An associate professor of history at the Southern Cross University, she says people often underestimate the importance of old cookbooks.
“They are more than a blueprint for a meal. They say so much more about our culture and society,” she says.
“You can tell so much about the economy, about ideas about health and nutrition … politics, ideas about relationships and labour; they are nearly always directed at women, for example.
“Cookbooks are also a way of charting things such as changes in migration, the availability of different sorts of ingredients, technological change as well.
“So, if we think about them as culinary literature, rather than cookbooks that are meaningless, I think we would probably elevate them.”
The historical value of cookbooks is not lost on the National Archives of Australia (NAA), which meticulously stores an extensive selection as part of its copyright collection.
NAA curator Emily Catt says that recipes clearly reflect the challenges of different eras.
“Particularly during wartime and the Great Depression, you have very austere-type cooking; people wanting to save money, people cooking with less popular cuts of meat if they are using meat at all, things like mutton appear a lot.
“You see quite a few cropping up in that post-war period, particularly in the 1930s. You’ve got servicemen who might have come back home and are being cared for in the home.
“One of the cookbooks I came across also encourages the use of dried fruits that were being made by soldiers who had come back to Australia and were turning their hand to farming through the soldier settlement scheme.
“So people were saying, ‘We can use more dried fruit to support these returned servicemen’.”
The wartime women of the Barossa
One of Australia’s oldest community cookbooks is The Barossa Cookery Book from South Australia.
It has remained in continuous print since 1917, with a revised edition released in 1932. It was created as a way to raise money to establish a soldiers’ memorial hall in Tanunda.
The proceeds from the Barossa Cookery Book, with its line drawing cover, still maintain the original building, which is now the Barossa Regional Gallery.
A project is underway to highlight the value of the book and the women who contributed recipes.
It’s being led by Sheralee Menz and Marieka Ashmore, who are developing a companion Barossa book. Theirs will complement the original and, where possible, will include the story of the women who provided recipes.
“The women who put together those community cookbooks, we can’t keep those women alive, but we can keep their work alive and we can keep their recipes and pass them forward to new generations,” Sheralee says.
“One of the things that stood out to us while researching this project is that in the cookery book initially, women didn’t even use their own name, the protocol was she was referenced by her husband’s initials.
“So, an important thing for us was to say, ‘Who was she? What was her name?’… so, we are telling the story of those women: where did she live [and] what sort of contribution did she make?”
For Marieka, preserving the old recipes helps nurture a sense of belonging and identity within families.
“When a family recipe is passed down from one generation to another, it can become so much more than a meal. It can tell a story and evoke the feeling of home,” she says.
“I think food is one of those powerful things that can transport you back to another period in time. Sometimes, a bite of an old-style biscuit can transport you back decades to your grandma’s kitchen.”
Cooking binds communities
Dr Adele Wessell says organisations such as the Country Women’s Association highlight how cooking has helped contribute to the solidarity of Australian communities through the creation and selling of their cookbooks.
“The CWA community cookbooks started in the 1930s, and one of the things that’s great about them is that the recipes come from ordinary people,” she says.
“Cookbooks are an important inheritance, they tell us about our family and traditions.
“School cookbooks are often used as well. It’s a way of raising money, it’s also a way of sharing recipes within the community, which is important.”
Pattie Herrod has a collection of cookbooks from her mother, including a CWA cookbook published in the 1960s by a branch at Wanaaring in outback NSW.
Growing up on a station west of Bourke, Pattie says the collection reflects the harshness of life during times of drought, and the ways in which women supported each other.
“They were an amazing group of women, so resilient, so capable,” Pattie says.
“It is lovely to see women’s names attached to a recipe, remember the station they came from.
“At times, water was so precious you couldn’t grow vegetables, so these women had to cook for very hungry men with very little, and a lot of tinned food was used in the recipes.”
Pattie, who now lives in Wagga Wagga, also values the personal connection that the recipes provide to her mother. She still makes her mum’s pumpkin fruit cake from the recipe included in the CWA Wanaaring cookbook.
“It’s been in our family for years … it’s one of the things she always cooked which went into the tucker boxes for the men working in sheds or mustering,” Pattie says.
A part of who I am
In many Aboriginal cultures, food collection and preparation is a means of connecting to the past through traditions that are passed down over the generations.
“There is very much a hierarchy when it comes to the preparation of food within our culture,” Nardja Davies says.
Nardja is a Birpai woman who grew up in the Camden Haven area on the NSW Mid North Coast.
“Your position within the family, within the group, how important you are, how old you are, all relates to how you contribute as far as getting the food, and then preparing and cooking it at home,” Nardja says.
One tradition is the harvesting of pipis, which has long been a staple for east coast Aboriginal families.
“While we are gathering, collecting and preparing our food, we are talking and engaging and solving problems or issues we are having as women,” she says.
“You start off as a small child going along with your aunties, your mum, your grandmother — learning and observing and watching the women, and how they gather and collect.
“When you reach late teens, early twenties you are one of the women who does most of the gathering, as you tend to be young and fit then.
“Then, when you get on in years it is our aunties and grandmothers who are sitting up on the sand dunes who do the cleaning of the pipis.
“It’s their role, it’s the revered job. It’s the one role everyone wants to get some day.”
Nardja says gathering, preparing and eating food provides an opportunity for social connections, support and the sharing of information.
“It’s a huge part of knowing who you are and how you are connected to the other women, and what part of the chain you are a part of,” she says.
“It’s my connection to my past, to family members who have been doing it for generations … at the same beaches where they have been doing it for thousands of years,” she says.
“And to know that I am still a part of this tradition that carries on, and that I am now part of teaching that next generation and they will continue doing it, just makes me feel so amazing.”
Bringing memories to life
In a grandma’s kitchen at Kempsey on the NSW Mid North Coast, a labour of love is underway.
Janelle Adamson is compiling old family recipes into a book that will be passed on to her children.
In it are hand-painted illustrations that accompany the many well-loved recipes. There are also photos of Janelle’s mother, grandmother and mother-in-law, and the back page where she wants to include a photo of her five children.
“I was constantly getting phone calls asking, ‘Mum, can I have the scone recipe? Can I have Nan’s Chinese mince recipe?’… so that was what triggered it all,” Janelle says.
“Having five children who live in different parts of the country, they know what food they grew up with.
“It’s from generations back and now they can have something to show.”
She included each of her children’s favourite recipes. For her eldest son, it’s the Weetbix slice.
And for Janelle: “I think Mum’s caramel tart and Mum’s sponge cake are my favourites.”
“She used to make it in a fuel stove and stick her hand in the oven to see if it was hot enough, it was just amazing.”
As wrens twitter in her flowering spring garden, Janelle’s paintbrush moves deftly across the page, bringing to life watercolour images of favourite foods and meals from her childhood.
When food traditions aren’t written down
In a Port Macquarie kitchen where Pragadee Shwari is showing her daughters how to prepare a traditional Indian curry, the smell of spices fills the air.
Passing on food traditions is a hands-on process in Pragadee’s family, as very few recipes are written down.
“I do have a few measures written down,” she says.
“During our traditional festivals we have a few sweet dishes and savoury items that we cook, and that’s like a formula, an equation, and I have written that down.
“But for everyday cooking, like a curry, I don’t have exact measurements … it is what my eye perceives, and that’s how I do it.
“I think it’s more about exposing and involving your children while you do it, rather than giving them a written set of instructions.
Pragadee says what she’d like to pass on is the love of cooking and how fulfilling the whole process is.
“In our household, allowing our children to help us cook is a form of bribery as they love cooking so much,” she says.
“In our culture, food plays a huge role. It brings people together, it heals, it’s just everything. It’s a huge part of our life.”
Helping her mother to crush ginger and garlic to prepare meals is one of Pragadee’s earliest and most treasured childhood memories.
“When I grew up my mother would make something called dosa. It’s a savoury pancake,” she says.
“As she was making that, I would sit down and eat it, and that’s the place I would open up and those conversations and memories I will always hold close to my heart.
“It’s so beautiful for us to come together now and do the one thing … and it’s like that’s our world for that time they are in the kitchen with me.
“And that’s a very precious memory I am going to hold, that will bring warmth to me always.”
Credits
- Reporting: Emma Siossian
- Photography and video: Emma Siossian
- Illustration & animation: Sharon Gordon
- Digital production: Susan Oong
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