A pile of books and a long ago school
- rosemary
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
"a reminder that people are at the heart of a good meal." Stone Soup
I normally have a small pile of books and magazines on my desktop awaiting attention, either because of something interesting in a magazine, a new book or a first recipe or lucky dip book. Normally it's no more than three, sometimes four, but currently the pile has grown. It has grown because of a visit to the Greensborough Savers, a purchase of Noor Murad's first book, a Coles Magazine, a newspaper article and two more op shop gifts from Monika. It needs attention.
So I have decided to tackle this one - a very unexpected lucky dip, selected by David. I gave up lucky dipping myself some time ago, because fundamentally they were not lucky dips, because even with my eyes closed I almost know what I'm picking out.
When he presented me with this I had no idea what it was - so I opened it, to be reminded that P.O.P.S stands for Park Orchards Primary School, my two sons' first school. They were there for the first few years of schooling. My older son would have been 8 or 9 when we moved to Adelaide, so this little book dates from the late 70s, maybe early 80s - around forty years ago. Almost vintage, but a long way from antique - I think that's 100 years.
It's a very humble publication, typed by some faithful soul - maybe the school's secretary or maybe a dedicated mum, and each chapter has a hand-drawn title page, and the opening page gives thanks and a small somewhat sentimental poem in the form of a recipe.
I flicked through it's yellowing and irregular pages, and found that even though I was a member of that Parent Association, I only contributed two recipes - for French french beans and Gratin dauphinois, which seems somewhat mean of me since Helen Dingli and Rosemary Kavadis, to name just two, contributed several. As always, the volunteers who contribute to things like school parents committees are sadly often few and far between. I should have contributed more.
I found an interesting article from New Zealand and the Stone Soup Syndicate which had perused a collection of them and said:
"These cookbooks present the types of recipes that were guaranteed on school camp or at a potluck dinner at the local hall. In every book that I leafed through, it was certain that the baked goods section would have recipes for lolly cake, biscuit fudge, carrot cake,and a quick eggless chocolate cake. The index for savoury dishes and sauces would include some slightly scary mince dishes, fish pie, and that mayonnaise dressing that is made with condensed milk. These books acted as a sort of kitchen handbook: a homely checklist of dishes that should have been in everyone’s culinary repertoire."
And indeed my book has recipes for the carrot cake and the quick eggless chocolate cake and probably some of the others too - a few in fact, as the article pointed out - there were often several different versions of the same thing. The article concluded with a recipe which it claimed was in every one of these books:
"The condensed milk and packaged biscuit slice is surely the quintessential community cookbook recipe."
So I checked and yes there it was - in this particular version contributed by a man - Daniel Kirby and called Jelly Slice and I'm pretty sure it would have looked like this. This version is on a website called Cooking with Nanna Ling. There's a base of crushed Marie biscuits and butter, a filling of that condensed milk, lemon juice, and gelatine, and a topping of jelly from a packet. How very, very old-fashioned and homely. How very Country Women's Association, or the old Women's Weekly.
In fact today's Women's Weekly still has a recipe shown here, although it's much more complicated - freshly made jelly, strawberries and marshmallows are in the mix which doesn't include condensed milk, but includes milk and cream instead. The the glammed up version in The Guardian however, only glams it up with the jelly which is made from scratch with plum purée and red wine, and it looks much the same as the original. I bet most busy housewives today still do it the old-fashioned way. And why not?
The article noted, that many of the recipes in such publications used things that the average mum would have in their pantry - packets of soup, and biscuits, dried fruit, flour and butter, mayonnaise and tinned this and that. In my book there was a recipe for a pizza base made with self-raising flour for example. My lucky dip page in the Main Courses section, also relies on pre-packaged things. The first recipe for Oysterblade casserole from Judith Stamp, has very few ingredients - the oysterblade steaks, which are just put in the 'greased casserole' sprinkled with half a packet of brown onion soup mix, a tin of mushrooms and 1/4 cup of claret - we used to call red wines by their French names back then. I shudder a little at this one.
The next one is rather more adventurous - Pork and apricots from Eric Doriean. pork chunks are seasoned and rolled in flour, then sautéed and put in a casserole. Ditto for onions. Tomato purée is sautéed with ginger ale to scrape up the juices, dried apricots added to the casserole and sauce poured over before baking for 1 1/2 hours. Ginger ale? I've never seed that used in recipes. Maybe I should make that a future post possibility. Could this recipe be a possibility?
And finally just Roast topside - one of Helen Dingli's contributions, for which the topside is placed on a sheet of foil, claret, soy sauce, chopped onion and dry mustard are mixed and poured over. The foil is wrapped round it all and it's baked for 3 1/2-4 hours. Also maybe.
I don't think I ever made anything from this little book, although I obviously played my part by buying one. And probably nobody made my gratin dauphinois or french french beans either. I'm sure that all of those who contributed had thought carefully about what they would contribute and also that today the selection would be rather different. Different but presumably much loved in the household from which it came. Perhaps the, to my mind, overuse of prepackaged things like onion soup, just reflects a lack of time, and a lack of interest too. Those young mums would have had other things on their mind as well as less access to attractive sources of food inspiration. This was well before even personal computers, let alone smartphones.
And then there is this that the Stone Soup Syndicate pointed out:
"Community cookbooks recognise the value held in the specificity of family recipes. Even if a dessert is the best dessert in the whole world, if it doesn’t taste like a memory for you, it will always be inferior."
One book down - although in this particular instance it will be almost immediately replaced by the next lucky dip book. And I won't be throwing this one out, unless I can find a specific collection somewhere to which it can be contributed. It's a memory thing.
YEARS GONE BY
June 22
2024 - Pumpkin gnocchi
2023 - Nothing
2021 - Pesto today
2020 - Deleted
2017 - Nothing
Ah memories of time past and lives lived and children growing up! Hmmmmm. 🤫