Dark Magic Pulled Beef Pikelets

"Oh great - meat in a pancake".

It is a truth universally acknowledged that leftover beef is as dry as Jane Austen's humour.

No matter how plump and tender it was the day before, a night in the fridge turns any cut into the sort of sad-looking specimen that Gordon Ramsey would shudder over on Kitchen Nightmares. Even pulled beef, cooked to melting perfection, looks like a dehydrated porcupine the day after.

It was with no small amount of excitement, then, that I bit into one of these pulled beef pikelets and discovered that some type of dark magic had rehydrated the beef to dizzyingly moist new heights. The effect was so beguiling that my wife, who had greeted dinner with a resigned "Oh great - meat in a pancake", began to tuck in with her usual gusto.

It makes me feel a bit strange to say this about a recipe from 1889, but let me swap my historian hat for my mum hat and say that these pikelets would be great in lunchboxes. They're healthy, quick to make, and could be frozen (just not reheated as the meat has already been cooked twice). They also passed the toddler taste test, unlike the Kale raab I served them with. My tiny food critic threw that to the dog.

Pikelets in my hand-me-down cast iron frying pan.

Here is the original recipe:

BEEF FRITTERS.

Beef fritters are best for breakfast; chop   pieces of steak or cold roast beef very fine. Make a batter of milk, flour and an egg, and mix the meat with it. Put a lump of butter into a saucepan, let it melt, then drop the batter into it from a large spoon. Fry until brown; season with pepper and salt and a   little parsley.

THE LADIES' PAGE. RECIPES. (1889, March 9). Western Mail (Perth, WA : 1885 - 1954), p. 16. Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32717255

Note: The original recipe does not include any instructions or quantities for making the batter, as it assumes that the cook would have her or his preferred recipe memorised. This really shows the difference in assumed knowledge for recipe readers in the Colonial era. When writing for the modern home cook, food writers are advised to assume little prior knowledge and explain terms including ‘blanche’ and ‘sauté’. The batter recipe included below is my go-to recipe, which I first learnt as a small child and as a result can be found in The Family Circle Cookery Collection: Kids’ Cookbook (1991).

The batter. I'll admit at this stage I had my doubts. Little did I know the deliciousness that awaited me.

Pulled Beef Pikelets

Serves four for a main meal with a vegetable side, or six as a snack. These would also make a healthy addition to lunchboxes.

130g (1 cup) plain flour
1 egg
340ml (1 ¼ cup) milk
150g pulled beef (I use this recipe); or cold roast beef, chopped very fine
1 T of chopped parsley
A pinch of salt and pepper
Butter, for frying

30 minutes.

Whisk the flour, egg and milk together to make thick batter. Keep whisking until there are no lumps, to avoid the startling sensation of discovering a pocket of uncooked flour in your pikelet.

Add the beef, parsley, salt and pepper. Stir well with a spoon to combine. (Abandon the whisk at this point. There are few kitchen experiences more unpleasant than trying to remove pieces of batter-covered meat from the interior of a balloon whisk.)

Heat a heavy based frying pan on medium high. While it is heating, set yourself up for pikelet production. As my grandmother would say "Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance". Put the bowl of batter next to the stove, with a soup spoon or 1/4 cup measure to ladle the batter into the pan. Put an oven-safe plate in your oven at 100C or "Keep Warm" (if your oven has that setting). You will transfer the pikelets to the plate once they're cooked to keep them warm before serving. Make sure you have an egg flipper on hand to flip the pikelets. Finally, have your butter and a knife nearby.

Cut off a piece of butter as big as a grape, and put it in the frying pan. Holding the frying-pan by the handle, swirl the butter around as it melts so that it coats the pan. Measure three spoonfuls of mixture into your pan (if it is medium-sized). You do not want to overcrowd the pan, or your will develop a pikelet traffic jam when you try to flip them. Use the spoon to spread the batter a bit so that the pikelets have an even thickness.

Cook for about a minute, until you can see a few bubbles on the surface, and a darker colour around the edge. Flip the pikelets over and cook for a further 30 seconds. If they're not golden brown when you flip them, turn your stove up a bit.Transfer the pikelets to the plate in the oven.

Put another grape-sized piece of butter in the frying pan, and repeat the above steps until you've run out of batter.

We enjoyed our pikelets with some good old-fashioned HP sauce.

Dinner, with the unwanted Kale raab just visible at the top of the image.

Cookery friends, what is your favourite way of reviving phelept beef? Would you give meat in a pancake a try?

The Importance of Preserving Food Traditions, and My Surprisingly Strong Feelings about Baking Powder

"AN UNEXPECTED RISE. Bob Sliprail, a Free Settler, having purchased some tins of Hunt's Baking Powder, is horrified at the result of his first experiment in making a pudding."
While this is supposedly an extract from Punch, it appears in the newspaper archives only alongside advertisements for Hunt's Baking Powder in regional papers.

EXTRACT FROM "SYDNEY PUNCH.". (1895, November 23). The Hay Standard and Advertiser for Balranald, Wentworth, Maude...(Hay, NSW : 1871 - 1873; 1880 - 1881; 1890 - 1900), p. 4. Retrieved September 27, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article144647766

As a historian, I realise that nothing lasts. I even know it on an emotional level. After the death of a childhood friend I forced myself to walk the length of the Paris Catacombs repeating the thought that everyone I had ever known would die. Since then I haven't been too troubled by our mortal nature. But it turns out that seeing my culture pass away turns out to be a different kettle of fish entirely.

You see, cookery friends, I consider baking powder a pantry staple. You know - like yeast, plain flour, treacle ... that's just me then? In any case, a recent trip to the supermarket to stock up on baking powder brought about a minor personal crisis. This is because, instead of having pride of place on the eye-level shelf, baking powder was tucked away on the bottom shelf. At first glance, I hadn't even seen it.

Wild Colonial Grandma, who was there riding herd on my toddler, said with equanimity that baking powder probably wasn't very popular any more; and did I know that the Norwegians use ground antler as a rising agent (I didn't - I thought ground antler had gone out in the 1600s). But could baking powder be going the way of ground deer antler, and soon be the sort of thing you ordered from a speciality online store? Surely not!

I'm not the first person to experience this kind of ingredient-related angst. When researching candied Angelica for a colonial recipe, I found an upwelling of British grief for lost Christmas traditions. Angelica, in case you didn't grow up in England in the 50s, is a herb that until relatively recently could be bought candied by the tin and used for decorating cakes.

Candied Angelica was a particular favourite on top of traditional English Christmas cakes, and it's sudden disappearance from British supermarkets a few years ago came as a very nasty surprise to those die-hards still using recipes in which it featured. Though you can substitute other candied fruits in terms of taste, there is really no visual substitute for the neon green logs. The first page on Google for "candied Angelica" is largely filled with people hoping to keep the tradition alive by making their own. 

All of this flashed through my mind in the supermarket. I had the sudden feeling that I was a bit of a culinary fuddy-duddy. Which, for a 29-year-old, is a hard pill to swallow. For me, baking powder is essential. For most other people? Apparently not so much.

Baking powder, to me, means hospitality. With baking powder on hand, no unexpected guest or tradesperson need go hungry at morning or afternoon tea time, because a tray of hot scones can be produced in 20 minutes. My great-grandfather, on seeing people coming down the road to his farm, would put on a kettle of tea and scones in the oven. Both would be ready by the time his guests sat down at his kitchen table. One of my strongest food memories from my childhood is my mother taking a tray of scones from the oven, including a knobbly customer she called the "chef's scone" which was made from the last few offcuts of dough. We, and our guests, would eat her scones with jam and cream if it was a special occasion. For everyday use they were split while steaming hot, and a knob of butter was sat on each half and allowed to melt down into the soft crumb. Scones, and the baking powder that made them possible, meant that no guest went away feeling as if they had gone unnoticed in our home.

Back at the supermarket, I tried briefly to console myself by thinking that this was the way of the world - new ingredients replacing old. Baking powder, as the go-to raising agent, had superseded bicarbonate of soda; which in turn had knocked off saleratus; which saw off ground up deer antler in the early 18th century. I'm sure each had its fans who grumbled when it was superseded. But one glance at the shelves of packet cake mix and pre-made icing on the supermarket baking shelf put paid to that idea. Glumly, I worried that the answer to the question "What comes after baking powder?" might be "Nothing".

Though I have accepted that I will die, as will my wife, my parents, and even my child, it turns out I cannot accept that the same fate awaits my culture. I will rage against the dying of the light, and continue to buy baking powder as long as there is still one specialist online retailer who will sell it to me. And when guests come over unexpectedly, I will feed them with a tray of freshly-baked scones.

Readers, please help me in my quest to preserve this part of our food culture! If you've never tried baking with baking powder before, give it a go. You can use 1 teaspoon to a cup of plain flour or 2 teaspoons to a cup of wholemeal flour, to instantly produce self-raising flour. Entry-level recipes that use baking powder include pikelets and cupcakes. If you live in Australia buy heritage Australian brands such as Anchor and Mackenzies (neither of whom sponsored this post in any way).

Australia's Love Affair with Beef; and a Topical Recipe

Beef Braised in Vinegar (recipe below)

I have an ambiguous relationship with beef. I know, I know - for an Australian, that's like saying I've never really been keen on oxygen. But it's the truth.

For some reason, my family were avid lamb consumers with a strong sideline in pork and chicken, while beef was often left languishing at the butchers. After an unfortunate stint as a vegetarian (no offence, vegetarian friends!), I found myself further plunged into an even more unpleasant stint as a genuinely poor person to whom meat was a luxury. The upshot of this is that I only learned to cook a steak this year. Grim indeed.

I feel the nation's love affair with beef can best be seen in the slightly forlorn advertising campaigns of its two competitors: pork and lamb.




Please eat our pigs. Our lean, lean pigs. Not that nasty, fatty beef. Please!

Image from http://www.pork.com.au./

We love our lamb. Really!

Image from http://www.youneverlambalone.com.au/

If you're the scientifically-minded type that prefers hard data, this table shows the amount of each meat the average Australian puts away each year. (On a related note, I think the average Australian might need to cut down.)

As you can probably tell from the darker 'chicken' line, this data is from the Auustralian Chicken Meat Federation. Beef consumption is still a lot more than that of its direct rivals, pork and lamb. I have no idea why. Has no one else in Australia tasted pork crackling?

This graph is interactive, by the way. You can play with the original over at http://www.chicken.org.au/page.php?id=4

The population of Australia was actually engineered to be fairly carnivorous. Early Australian activist and social engineer Caroline Chisolm used the promise of three meat meals a day to lure settlers over, making us a self-selecting sample of steak eaters.

The popularity of beef can also be seen in the fact that it is the second largest category of Colonial main meals I have collected (behind vegetarian, strangely enough). Admittedly, my spreadsheet of recipes is drawn from newspaper archives and selected on the basis of what I might conceivably get a family member to taste test for me. But I think it's safe to say that beef was darn popular in the Colonial era too.

That brings us to today's recipe. Despite a rather Italian ingredient list including garlic, onion and bay leaves, this end result is thoroughly English. Thankfully it still went well with polenta and sautéed green beans.

Will this recipe convert vegetarians? Possibly not. But it will make a perfectly acceptable weeknight meal, even for the beef sceptics among us.

Here is the original recipe from 1866, which appears to quote a cooking class lost to the mists of time (perhaps this one in New York?):

BEEF WITH VINEGAR. - For this, a piece of almost any kind of beef that is tender, and has little or no bone, may be used. The piece used for this lesson weighed two and a half pounds, and was nicely tied, put in a pan with four tablespoonfuls of fat, the same of broth fro the "Alphabet Kettle", and fried upon all sides until slightly brown, but not cooked. The broth and fat were then poured off, and a gill and a half of vinegar added, also two cloves, two bay leaves, one stalk of thyme, one onion, and one clove of garlic. After being fried in these seasonings for a few moments, a little over a quart of broth from the "Alphabet Kettle" was added, and the whole left to gently simmer for an hour; at the expiration of which time the meat was placed on a plate in which it was to be served, and the sauce after being thickened with flour and water was strained over it.

Recipes. (1866, June 16). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 6. Retrieved April 16, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138047302

Beef Braised in Vinegar

Ingredients
600g stewing steak, or other bone-free cut of beef
2 tablespoons oil
550ml stock, divided
100ml vinegar
2 cloves
2 bay leaves
1 stalk thyme
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon flour (optional)

Cooking Time
1 1/2 hours

Yield
Serves 4 for dinner, with a vegetable and carb side

Method
Heat 600ml of stock in a small saucepan.
On a moderate stove, heat a large saucepan or a casserole dish with a heavy base.
Add the oil, and sear the beef on all sides.
Remove the beef, and sit it on a plate.
Tip off the oil.
Add a dash of stock from the smaller saucepan to deglaze the large one.
Add the vinegar, cloves, bay leaves, thyme, onion and garlic. Stir well, and cook for a minute until aromatic.
Put the beef back into the large saucepan, and add the rest of the stock.
Simmer for an hour, with the lid on. Add a dash of boiling water if necessary.
When cooked, the beef should be tender and in an aromatic sauce.
Remove the meat, and set it aside while you finish the sauce. (Don't worry - it will only take a minute or two so your meat won't get cold).
Strain the onion and other seasonings out of the sauce. They have done their dash.
Thicken the sauce either by sprinkling in a tablespoon of flour, and stirring vigorously until there are no lumps; or by reducing the sauce at a roaring boil until it is the desired consistency.
Season the sauce with salt and pepper before pouring it over your beef to serve.

Cookery friends, which is your favourite meat? Is it the same as your nation's?

Cultural Cringe and the Unbearable Brownness of Colonial Cooking

My recent foray into Pinterest has revealed a startling trend, cookery friends. Almost every dish I make from the Colonial era is brown. Brown stews, brown pastries, brown puddings and preserves. Yesterday, I even managed to produce a brown drink.

Quite frankly, it's all a bit grim.

Looking at that page of browness, I had a mild existential crisis. All of a sudden, my Pinterest page seemed a terrible metaphor for everything Australian: not just our food, but our culture, our history, and even the vast tracts of suburbia in which I live. What if we, as a nation, could be summed up in that one unremarkable yet slightly grotty colour?

This feeling of rising revulsion at one's own country is what social studies types like to call "cultural cringe". It's a nagging suspicion that one's country isn't much chop, especially when compared to other contenders. The term was invented by my fellow-Melburnian A. A. Phillips in 1950, but the sentiment goes back to the Colonial era, and quite possibly to the settlers of the First Fleet who hopped off the boat and suddenly thought that London wasn't that bad after all.

(You can read about Phillips' essay here, if you too live in a post-colonial nation and want to thoroughly depress yourself.)

After stewing on my concerns all day, I was cringing hard. Lying in bed at night, I suddenly burst out that I was afraid that no one would ever read this blog because of the subject matter - that Australian culture was in fact an absence of culture, and that this condition stretched back to colonisation making Australian history empty of value as well.

My wife, who had been trying to sleep, commented that I was having some type of hormonal shift which she was sure would pass soon.

As I pondered the brownness of my Australian existence, a phrase from an 1865 recipe kept rattling around in my head. That phrase, to describe America in comparison to New South Wales, was "the elder colony". New South Wales was only 77 years old at the time . Compared to America's 258 years, New South Wales (site of the first European settlement in Australia) still had that 'new colony' smell.

Of course, Australian history doesn't start with British colonisation. But Australian culture is unfortunately another story. There are a few hundred Indigenous nations whose continuous history goes back around 50,000 years; and who have members that survived European colonisation. But in effect, the brutality of that colonisation ensured very little cultural continuity between those nations and the one that now inhabits their lands. Colonial Australians did their best to obliterate the Indigenous cultures they interacted with, and as a result our nation missed out on the chance to be rooted in an older culture. I believe that it is as consequence of this that we are very young, an awkward tween to America's swaggering 21-year-old.

Lying in bed with that phrase rattling around in my head, I started to think that perhaps Australia's browness isn't a cultural vacuum, but is instead the awkward national equivalent of a twelve year old trying to decide if they're a goth or a preppy. We're just beginning to realise that we can shape our own identity. It is only natural that as part of that process we are agonising over each similarity and difference between us and our parents.

I came to a conclusion. Instead of being a hopeless case, writing about Australian history and culture (brown though it may be) was an exciting opportunity. Perhaps, in my small way, I could help Australian food culture inch towards an appreciation of its history, even as it discovered its adult identity.

I felt elated, and full of the importance of historical recipe reproduction.

Well, either that or I'd had another hormonal shift.

Orgeat: The Scourge of the Cocktail World

Home-made milk Orgeat, with a dash of cinnamon.

Orgeat, an almond-based liqueur, is a source of much consternation in the cocktail world.

It is apparently essential (as the basis of the Mai Thai), but at the same time jolly hard to get a hold of. It lurks at the back of cocktail cabinets. Even bartenders mispronounce it (it's pronounced Or-ZHAT, apparently).

Wild Colonial Grandma, currently enduring a cold with all the grace of the usually healthy, declared it too rich. My wife reacted to a sip with an involuntary shudder and the dark verdict that it was for "the rice pudding set". My toddler literally ran screaming.

It seems that everywhere Orgeat goes it causes trouble, my home being no exception. But despite all this, I'm going to tell you to make it. And what's more, I'm going to tell you to make this particular recipe despite the fact that its inclusion of milk makes it a fringe oddity in the Orgeat family, and renders it not terribly good for keeping.

The recipe at hand is from an 1866 edition of The Australasian, but has much older pedigree. It is closely modelled (cough *plagiarised* cough) on Maria Eliza Rundell's 1808 recipe from her recipe book A New System of Domestic Cookery. This throws us back beyond the Victorian modernism that characterised most of the Colonial era, into the murky depths of the Georgian era and its lingering Medieval influence.

The early origins of this drink saturate the experience of consuming it. With the smooth texture of a creamy winter soup, but the jangling tastes of sweet almonds and spirits, this vintage Orgeat is a delightful oddity.



My Virgin Japanese Cocktail, made with milk Orgeat.

You can drink this home-made version neat, unlike its modern commercial counterpart. Though interesting on the palate it is also mild, and well suited  to being enjoyed in a cocktail glass with a stark dash of freshly ground cinnamon.

Orgeat is also the basis of the Japanese Cocktail, an 1862 invention credited as being one of the earliest modern cocktails. You can read more about its potentially scandalous origins, along with a recipe here. Scroll down for my recipe for a Virgin Japanese Cocktail.

Finally, here are a few serving suggestions straight from Australian Colonial era newspapers:

The Warragul Guardian and Buln Buln and Narracan Shire Advocate suggests in 1886 that Orgeat need only be diluted with ice water.

In 1924, with the world in the grip of the cocktail craze, the Adelaide Advertiser suggests the recipe of 1 measure Orgeat to 3 measures iced seltzer, and decorated with a slice of peach, pineapple or apricot. Exotic!



Orgeat a la Warragul Guardian and Buln Buln and Narracan Shire Advocate.

Here is the original recipe:

ORGEAT.-Boil a stick of cinnamon in a quart of new milk, sweeten to taste with loaf sugar; let it stand till cold; then take 3oz. of Jordan almonds ,and twenty bitter almonds, blanch them, and beat them to a paste with a little water; pour the milk to   these by degrees, well stirring as you proceed; then boil all together, continuing to stir the whole, till it is cold, adding half a glass of brandy.

Recipes. (1866, September 22). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 5. Retrieved July 27, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138049214

Orgeat in the pan.

Pre-Modern Orgeat

Ingredients
1 stick cinnamon
600ml milk
¼ cup castor sugar
60g almond meal
¼ teaspoon almond essence
¼ teaspoon brandy essence

Cooking Time
1 hour, largely spent waiting for it to cool (twice)

Yield
Enough for 10 cocktails

Method

Combine the cinnamon, milk and sugar in a saucepan.
Bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
In a large bowl, with plenty of stirring room, beat the almonds with 1 tablespoon of water until they form a paste.
Add the almond essence to the almond paste.
Gradually add the cooled milk, stirring continuously to avoid lumps. If lumps simply will not be avoided, keep stirring vigorously until you have banished them.
Pour the mixture back into the saucepan, and bring once again to the boil.
When cool, mix in the brandy essence.
You're now ready to make any of the cocktails described above or...

My Virgin Japanese Cocktail

Mix 1 part home-made Orgeat with 3 parts Lemon, Lime and Bitters. Stir to combine, and then pour into a large tumbler. Top with tropical fruit and a jaunty umbrella. If you don't have a shot measure, I've found the cap of a baby bottle works well and is about the same volume. You're welcome.

Orgeat mocktails as far as the eye can see.

Cookery friends, what do you think of this divisive drink? What was your favourite cocktail?

Culinary Traditions and the Curse of the Stegosaurus Cake

You may have noticed, cookery friends, that for the last week I haven't been around plumbing the depths of Colonial era cooking for your amusement. Don't worry - it's not because I've reached my limit on the number of pudding recipes I can tolerate reading, or developed a sudden and profound hatred of White Sauce.

It is, instead, because my every waking moment has been dedicated to the creation of this beast:



Behold, the Stegosaurus cake!

I love my wife a lot despite, or perhaps because of, her occasional childishness. You can probably tell how much I love her, in fact, when I reveal that it was for her that I laboured over this Frankenstein's dino.

In Australia, every child for the last few generations has held a reasonable expectation that on their birthday they would be presented with a cake in the shape of something their mum thought they liked. And, at some point in the week before they coughed up said cake, the mums turned to The Australian Women's Weekly birthday cake book. You can read a charming and detailed post about this key work in Australian food culture (complete with retro family photos) at Cate's Cates.

But aside from the fact that childhood Women's Weekly cakes are probably in large part responsible for my wife's request, those books feature only briefly in today's tale of triumph over adversity. That is because I own both the slim 1980s original, and the encyclopaedic 2000 reissue, and neither of the damn things have a Stegosaurus cake in them.

I was bewildered, betrayed, and generally cheesed off. Why had I devoted limited shelf-space to a cake book that couldn't even produce a Stegosaurus in my hour of need? What made it worse is that I know that there's an AWW one out there somewhere, because here it is:

According to the original caption, it can be found in the Bumper Book of Kids Cakes. That's nice.
Image from Women's Weekly online [http://www.aww.com.au/how-to/expert-qa/the-death-of-spearmint-leaves-21183]

Undeterred, I decided to strike out on my own, modelling it on this drawing my wife had found on the internet. With grim determination, I set out to bring it to cakey life:

My wife's dream Stegosaurus.
Image from Kids Dig Dinos [http://kidsdigdinos.com/Dinosaurs/stegosaurus.htm] 

In a whirlwind before carting my toddler to her twice-weekly stint at crèche, I grudgingly used the Quick Chocolate Cake recipe from the back of the AWW cake book to fill both of my cake tins in the vague hope that between them there would be the makings of a dino. [My hint for getting cake in two very differently shaped moulds to be roughly the same height (for evenness of Stegosaurus), is to use a skewer to measure the depth of the batter in each mould until it's roughly the same depth.]

My feeling of smug accomplishment was soon wiped out by the fact that my one month old dishwasher promptly kicked the bucket and refused to work. Perhaps it had seen the cake explosion in the kitchen and had simply given up on life. In any case, after some swearing I lugged my toddler to the car with a final vengeful look at the dishwasher.

As I explained to the lady who took my crèche payment, this Stegosaurus cake was cursed.

I arrived home in a somewhat calmer mood. Two hours of uninterrupted writing and a large latte will have that effect on a person.

My mood soon soured when faced with the reality of the situation. I had a circle and square of cake; three hours before my wife came home from work; and a toddler whose hunger for the aforementioned cake was only rivalled by her hunger for my undivided attention.

Even as a woman of 29, I am not ashamed to say I called my mother.

Wild Colonial Grandma arrived. She, who had made many a novelty cake for me as a child. She who, despite starting life in a dirt-floored shack on a share farm, had studied sculpture at University. She, who looked at the picture, and my two geometric slabs of cake, and rolled up her sleeves with relish.

What followed was one of the most pleasurable times I have ever spent cooking with my mother. My panic dissipated with each of her assured instructions: freeze the cake, it will cut easier; make the icing thinner than you expect it should be; sit the knife in a cup of hot water when you're not using it.

Though she and I had cooked together when I was a little girl, those times had often ended in frustration for both of us. Her direct tone and my extreme sensitivity were not a good combination, often resulting in furious tears on my part and utter confusion on hers. But this week, something slid into place and we worked side-by-side with perfect focus and companionship.

While the AWW cake books had let me down, my mother had not. Together, we defeated the curse of the Stegosaurus Cake, to the praise of our family and friends (and one lady walking her dog past our picnic table at my wife's party). It was a true victory, and even if the cake had turned out ugly and unrecognisable, it still would have been because of those three hours where my mother initated me into the venerable Australian tradition of shaped cakes.  

Stay tuned, cookery friends. A new vista of shaped cakes has opened up for Wild Colonial Grandma, who has now requested a Whippet cake for her birthday.

Hopefully, she will be happier with the results than this actual Whippet.
Image from Corbis [http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/42-17039412/whippet-with-birthday-cake]

A Spill of a Different Kind

In light of the politics of the day (or of the 'late last night' as the case may be), I trawled through the newspaper archives for a relevant article.

I came up short, so instead enjoy this humorous 'spill' anecdote from the turn-of-the-previous-century Sydney newspaper The Arrow. I'm sure there's an appropriate metaphor for our sudden change of Prime Minister in here somewhere:


UNLUCKY TO SPILL SALT.

 

A philosopher was dining at a George-street restaurant.

 

In stretching out his hand to get the po-tatoes he happened to upset the salt.

 

"You will observe," he remarked to the waiter who stood just behind him, "that it is unlucky to upset the salt. To avert the ill luck you should take a pinch of the salt you have upset and throw it over your left shoulder."

 

The philosopher then suited the action to the word, and the salt went into the waiter's eyes.

 

The waiter is now of the opinion that it is sometimes unlucky to upset the salt.

 

UNLUCKY TO SPILL SALT. (1898, July 30). The Arrow (Sydney, NSW : 1896 - 1912), p. 3. Retrieved September 15, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article114451005

 

 

Orange Sponge (of the Jelly Persuasion)

Oh, Colonial jelly!

Cookery friends, we are not talking sponge cake here. We are talking Colonial era jelly, in all of its bizarre, wobbly glory.  

Those of you who have read my post on flummery will be well aware of my fascination with historical jellies. Their simultaneous firmness and jiggliness; their utter absence from the modern cookery cannon; the sheer variety of things you can find in your kitchen and then, it transpires, turn to jelly with the addition of gelatine powder.

The taste of Orange Sponge is absolutely identical to that of orange-flavoured Aeroplane Jelly – so much so, that my wife commented, “So this is what they based it on, then.” While I doubt that Bert Appleroth, the splendidly-named creator of Aeroplane Jelly, was poring over 1866 recipe pages in the 1910s when he brewed the first batch in his bathtub,  the similarity in flavour really is uncanny.

For those of you not from Australia who are wondering about Aeroplane Jelly, it is a much-beloved Australian brand that has for years enjoyed a monopoly in its field. We love a good corporate monopoly in Australia, particularly if it has a catchy theme song.

 

What, then, is the point of making this recipe when you can get the same flavour in a little white bag from Woolworths for 99c?

Well, cookery friends, this one is all about the texture. This dessert is whipped just before it fully sets, which creates the impression of a dish frozen in the middle of violent action. Like a geyser with a pause button, the Orange Sponge looks like it will froth over the edges of its mould at any moment.

To turn this dessert from a zany weeknight novelty into the sophisticated belle of your dinner party ball, all you need to do it turn it out onto a plate, whack a lone piece of orange peel artfully on top, and avoid jiggling it suggestively as you place it in front of your guests.

Formal jelly. So fancy!

Here is the original recipe:

ORANGE SPONGE.- To 1oz. of isinglass, dissolved in a point of boiling water and strained, add the juice of six oranges and two lemons, 1/2lb. of sugar, and 1oz. of flour, sifted fine. Mix all well together, and when nearly cold whip it till it becomes a sponge; then put it into a mould. If whipped too warm it will turn to a jelly. It is better to make it a day before you use it.  

Recipes. (1866, September 8). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 5. Retrieved March 7, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138048952
 

Holy bubbly jelly, Batman!

"It's About to Escape" Orange Sponge

Ingredients

Aprox. 6 teaspoons of gelatin powder (this might seem like overkill, but you are waging a mighty fight against all the acidity in the citrus juice)
450ml boiling water
6 oranges, juiced OR 350ml orange juice
2 lemons, juiced OR 150ml lemon juice
225g sugar
30g flour

Cooking Time

1 hour, including cooling time (more if you need to readjust the amount of gelatin to get the darn thing to set - if I'm going to be honest, I was mucking about with mine on and off for about three hours).

Yield

6 huge portions (see photo below), or 12 sensible portions

Method

Mix all ingredients together. Stir until the sugar has dissolved and the gelatin is no longer clumping.
If you enjoy jellies that are clear and smooth, strain the mixture at this point to remove pith, the odd seed, and the possible small rouge lump of gelatin.
Allow the mixture to cool until it looks like the blob – in one piece but very, very goopy.
If it hasn't even begun to set after half an hour, add another 2 teaspoons of gelatin, dissolved in 1/4 cup of water.  
Beat until it has doubled in size.
Gently decant into whatever mould or moulds in which you intend to set it.
Keeps for a couple of days in the fridge, if you live in the sort of household where products containing sugar have a chance to sit around unmolested.

To the left, you can see the pointing finger of my indignant toddler, who has just noticed that I've used her little bowls as recipe-testing ramekins.

So, cookery friends, what is your favourite jelly-based desert? What strange things have you used as jelly moulds or ramekins?

The Colonial Cook is Now on Pinterest

Of course, no announcement in Australia will ever be as exciting as Mr Craig's 1861 pronouncement that he would soon be exhibiting his "GIGANTIC CROCODILES".

Classified Advertising. (1861, August 5). The South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1858 - 1889), p. 1. Retrieved September 10, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article876076

I've been reading so many old newspapers that my first thought when I got a Pinterest account was that I should take out an advertisement in the classifieds advising the residents of the Colony that Miss Avery's Pinterest board was now displaying images that may be of interest to them.

I guess this blog post will just have to do instead. It's hard being a modern woman with access to sanitation, science-based medicine, and the vote.

In any case, check out my Pinterest board, full of historically-themed food photography here.

Victorian Era Tattoo Designs - Which Will You Choose?

When my great-great-great-grandfather John Lawson came to Australia from Sweden, he proudly sported an anchor tattoo as a memento of his life as a sailor.

John Augustus Lawson, in his later years as a lighthouse keeper. Yeah, he had a pretty good life.

You might be surprised to learn that it wasn't only sailors who were getting inked in the Victorian Era. This article from The Guardian about the increasing respectability of the modern tattoo also includes a potted history of tattooing in England. (Apparently Winston's Churchill's mum had a tatt of a snake on her wrist. Cool.)

While I was researching "Oriental" things that Colonial era people liked (for this article), I came across a great article from 1892 that included four illustrations of tattoos by Hori Chio, a famous Japanese tattoo artist.

Here they are, for your enjoyment.

Oriental Tattooing. (1892, October 1). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 1 Supplement: EVENING NEWS SUPPLEMENT. Retrieved September 9, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article113316312

And here's a bonus quote from the text of the article:

"A young American woman conceived a strange idea and had a monster crab etched upon her shapely calf. The secret got out at a bathing resort."  

If you use one of these designs, drop me a line in the comments. I'd love to see a Colonial tatt on a modern arm.

Candied Ginger: A Tale of Orientalism, Isolation and Recipe!Fail

Let me begin by saying that Colonial Australia was as racist as Donald Trump singing "Kung Fu Fighting" while wearing blackface.

As a society, we were steeped in the fascinated revulsion with other societies that Edward Said would later describe as "Orientalism": a loathing of the 'other' coupled with an adoration of the fashionably exotic. (If you want to read more about this concept, you can do so here, here or here - where people have more time to write eloquently about theory and are presumably not being pestered by a toddler to peel in succession every piece of fruit in the fruit bowl).

In any case, the Colonial Australian attitude to China can be fairly summed up in the following two images.

Chinese people are scary, slimy monsters. With claws.




The caption of the original cartoon reads, "Hi Yah! Me teachee you. Plenty muchee." I could not make this up.

[No heading]. (1896, July 16). Quiz and the Lantern (Adelaide, SA : 1890 - 1900), p. 9. Retrieved September 9, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page19469619

Chinese culture (when used by other white people in ways we're comfortable with) is sooo pretty! And exotic! Oooh, a vase!

From the original article: "Its shape is that of an Oriental water bottle or Carafe".

THE DORE VASE. (1893, December 30). The Bacchus Marsh Express (Vic. : 1866 - 1918), p. 1. Retrieved September 9, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article88191994

So what does any of this have to do with cooking?

Well, despite the fact that Colonial Australia was home to many migrants from all over Asia, including many Chinese cooks, Chinese recipes were not a common part of cooking columns in newspapers.

This made it all the more surprising when I came across a letter from a woman calling herself Hebe (the Greek goddess associated with youth), asking to be initiated "into that Oriental mystery" of making preserved ginger.

Sir, - I have for along time to get a recipe for making preserved ginger. I never thought of writing to you; neither, after   being advised by a friend, did I care to trouble you about such an insignificant thing, but hav- ing utterly failed in my endeavours to find it out myself, I now appeal to you. My great difficulty has been to make the ginger swell,   and if you would be so kind as to initiate me and all your lady friends into that Ori- entail mystery, you will greatly oblige

Aug. 10 HEBE

PRESERVED GINGER. (1868, August 22). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 25. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138057871

What struck me most about this letter - aside from a hint towards the deep current of Orientalism in Australian society - was how frustrating and lonely life must have been in the pre-internet age for people whose intellectual curiosity could not be satisfied by their immediate social circle.

I am just old enough to remember the tail-end of this era myself, and how thrilled I was when I realised that I could answer almost any question within seconds using the internet. This excitement arose even though I had been lucky, and my mother (the town librarian) had also put together a large and meticulously organised library in our home.

Despite the fact that Australian society, even in the Colonial era, was largely urban, I think that it still would have been possible to feel isolated in the middle of early Melbourne or Sydney, if you had a question about ginger that nobody could answer for you.

Well, cookery friends, we live in an era where questions can be answered, and I am here to answer the question that is no doubt on your lips by this point: "Did the recipe work?"

Things were initially looking good. My wife, who doesn't like candied ginger, cruised past the jar and said darkly that they looked exactly like the ones from the shop. For a few days, I left the jar on the bench, and snacked on these little bites of gingery goodness as I went about my day.

But after about a week, I noticed something ominous. The ginger was changing colour, and a pool of sugar syrup was gathering in the bottom of the jar. As the old saying goes, with this recipe I managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success. My candied ginger looked and tasted great, but unfortunately didn't keep very well. Which, for a preserve, presents a fairly fundamental problem.

I'm going to give you the recipe as I made it anyway, because if I'd known they weren't going to keep I would have cheerfully eaten the whole tray of these hot, sweet little bundles of sugar on the day. Modern recipes that may prove more fruitful can be found here, here and here.

It all looked so promising at this stage.

Here is the original recipe from the editorial team of The Australasian:

[Green ginger is far the best, and ought to be used for this purpose, but if not to be had simmer the required quantity of dry ginger until tender; then put it to soak for a while in cold water. When quite soft take it out and drain thoroughly. When dry, take sugar of good quality, or better still sugar candy, of equal weight; melt slowly over the fire, and add the ginger before the sugar is too hot.

Then simmer slowly until the sugar has quite penetrated the ginger. With green ginger the process is simple, but great care must be used to make a good preserve with dry ginger.] ED.

 

PRESERVED GINGER. (1868, August 22). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 25. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138057871

There may have been some wastage in my approach to cutting ginger into 1cm chunks.

 

 

"Oriental Mystery" Preserved Ginger

 

Ingredients
Fresh ginger, cut into 1cm chunks
An equal weight in white sugar
1/4 the weight in water (for water, millilitres and grams are the same)

Cooking Time
1 1/2 hours

Yield
This depends on how much ginger you use.

Method
Slice the ginger, and pat it dry.
Dissolve the sugar in water over a low heat, until the sugar crystals are completely dissolved but the mixture is not yet very hot.
Add the ginger, and bring the mixture to a gentle simmer.
Cook until the sugar syrup has thoroughly soaked into the ginger. This takes about an hour. The syrup will have almost completely dissolved (it will coat the ginger as it cools). If you’re unsure, take out a thicker piece of ginger and cut it in half – it should be dark and glossy all the way through. If there is a lighter bit in the middle it’s not done yet. It should also taste slightly sweet all the way through when done.
Allow the ginger to cool a little in the pot, until the syrup is starting to clump around the pieces.
Tip it all out onto a lined baking tray or chopping board, and separate the pieces quickly using two forks (or your fingers, if you have asbestos fingers)
The ginger is significantly stronger and hotter than modern crystallised ginger.  

A complete waste of a good jar.

So in summary, Australia has always had a problem with racism; life was rough for the intellectually curious before the advent of the internet; and the "oriental mystery" of preserving ginger still eludes me.

What is your experience of Orientalism, cookery friends? Have you had any success with preserved ginger?

Veggie Pie, Flaky Pastry, and Colonial Era Vegetarianism

Vegetarian pie - it's what was for dinner in Colonial Australia.

One of the most interesting patterns that has emerged as I collate colonial era recipes is just how many of them don't involve meat.

While there was clearly a prevailing view that meat was pretty good stuff (see the headline "Vegetables Better than Nothing" from an article on working-class vegetarianism I looked at here), I have more entries in the 'vegetables' section of my 'main meals' spreadsheet than I do any other heading, including beef. And by God early Australian colonists loved their beef.

There are no doubt many reasons why people ate vegetable meals in the Colonial era, and not all of them involved personal choice. For a start many people simply couldn't afford meat, or even offal (as you can see in a news report from London here). The situation was better in Australia; but bread, dairy and vegetables were still cheaper than any type of meat - just as they are these days.

Vegetable meals also landed on the Colonial table because of the eating habits of the era. There was a fashion among the Victorian era middle class to eat multiple dishes at each meal, some of which were vegetarian and others meaty. A sample meal plan from Cre Fydd's Family Fare (which provides a year's worth of meal plans for a middle class family and their servants) can  been seen here:



The 'family fare' for January 1st, including the servant's rations ("Kitchen"). Note the number of dishes served at dinner.
 

Lastly, there were some people who chose to eat a purely vegetarian diet on the grounds of health or animal welfare, just as there are today. A summary of the views of the early vegetarian movement in England can be seen in this 1854 letter to the editor of the Freeman's Journal, entitled "Reasons for not eating flesh" (and quite frankly, having my dinner referred to as 'flesh' is a pretty good reason for me).

All of this is to say that I found it unremarkable to see today's first recipe - for a vegetable pie - presented without fanfare in a column of other recipes in an 1897 newspaper.

Vegetarianism, Colonial-style

Of historical interest is the inclusion of mushroom powder in the ingredients list. Mushroom powder is simply ground dehydrated mushrooms, and it was wildly popular as a food additive to give colour and a savoury flavour before the invention of stock powder. You can make mushroom powder from scratch (it is still popular among preppers), or you can put a little bag of dried porcinis through your coffee grinder or blender (which is what I did). Any leftover mushroom powder will sit quite happily in a sealed jar for about as long as the mushrooms would have in their unground state.

Now, on to the pastry. The pie recipe specifies only that you should "cover with pastry", and leaves the rest up to the reader. I took this as an opportunity to double down with my recipe testing and have a go at a recipe entitled "Flaky Pastry", which produces what we would call these days a rough puff. The recipes makes significantly more pastry than is required to make a lid for a single pie, so you can divide it as you see fit, or use the leftover pastry to make some croissants and scrolls. You probably only need one guess as to what I chose to do.

So what was the result when I combined these two recipes? Well, the filling was great, with a thick, mysteriously savoury gravy (thanks to the powdered mushrooms). And the pastry? Well, the pastry was a writhing mass of bubbling butter and flaky crust. If I'd been driving a team of oxen all day and was huddled around a small campfire in the cold bush night, I'm sure it would have hit the spot. But in my humble opinion, there are very, very few people in modern Australia who need that much butter at dinner. Next time I make this pie filling (and there will be a next time), I'll just whip up my usual shortcrust.

Here is the original recipe for the pie filling (the pastry recipe is below):

Vegetable Pie.-Stew together until tender 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, a stick of celery, a small cupful of green   peas, a teaspoonful of sago or tapioca, loz. butter, and seasoning of pepper and salt, with just enough water to prevent burning. All the vegetables should be cut into small pieces; put all into a pie dish, cover with pastry, and bake till the crust is nicely cooked. A little mushroom powder is a great improve- ment.

VEGETARIAN RECIPES. (1897, October 30). Launceston Examiner (Tas. : 1842 - 1899), p. 3. Retrieved January 19, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article39702652


Good Old Fashioned Australian Vegetarian Pie

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 turnip, diced
1 stick of celery, diced
½ a cup of green peas
2 teaspoons ground dried porcini mushrooms
1 teaspoon arrowroot (tapioca flour)
Pepper and salt, to season
Puff Pastry (see note)
1 egg, beaten

Cooking Time

1 hour, but the filling can be made in advance at any time of the day

Yield

4 serves

Method

Melt the butter in a saucepan, and add the onions, carrot, turnip and celery.
Sautee over medium heat for a few minutes, without allowing the vegetables to brown, until the onion is translucent.
Add the peas and dried mushrooms, cover with water, and cook until the vegetables are tender.
Add the arrowroot (dissolved in a few spoons of water) to thicken the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Put the filling into a pie dish, and cover with pastry. Here is some ideas about fancy things you can do with your pie crust. At a bare minimum, pierce it with a fork a few times, and brush it with an egg wash.
Bake at 200C until the pastry is golden brown (about 20 minutes).

Note: Feel free to use a sheet of pre-made puff pastry. The incredible prevalence of advertisements for convenience foods in Colonial era newspapers has convinced me that most Victorian era housewives would have jumped at the chance to buy puff pastry ready made. If you're feeling particularly historically-authentic (or masochistic) try the recipe below which is a 'rough puff' (a puff pastry made in one go).


Here is the original recipe for 'Flaky Pastry':

FLAKY PASTRY.-Take 1lb. of flour, 1/4lb. of butter, and a sufficient quantity of cold spring water. Make a moderately soft flexible dough then roll in 1/2lb. of dry fresh butter. The flour should be perfectly dry, and the butter free from water or buttermilk. The dough should be made with a light hand, and in a cool apartment; and the paste should be baked in a moderately smart but not too hot an oven.

RECIPES. (1870, October 29). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 7. Retrieved August 22, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138067741

Flaky Pastry for Hardy Cooks

Ingredients

450g flour
110g butter
Enough water to bring the dough together
225g butter

Cooking Time

30 minutes (can be made ahead of time)

Yield

Lots. You will have more than enough for the pie crust above, and a tray of pastries:

Scrolls and croissants. Yum!

If the idea of a great volume of puff pastry doesn't float your boat (which I find highly unlikely seeing as you're reading this blog), you can divide the above recipe by 4 and make just enough for your pie crust.

Method

Combine the flour and 110g butter and work until it has the consistency of breadcrumbs.
Add a few tablespoonfuls of water until the dough comes together. It should be soft and flexible. Stop stop kneading as soon as it reaches this point.
Roll the dough out as large as you can on your bench. Slice the remaining 225g butter thinly. Put a few pieces of the butter on half of your pastry, fold it over, and roll it back out. Continue thus until you’ve used up all the butter.
You can now use the pastry immediately, or keep it in the fridge for a day or the freezer for a month.
But really, you're going to use it straight away, aren't you?

What did you use your leftover pastry for, cookery friends?