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On Drive with Rafael Epstein
These are particularly personal tales charting a turning point in someone's life with a song to match. There's no hard or fast topic for the stories featured on Changing Tracks, just "a song that was playing when your life changed tracks." Send in yours.
This week’s Changing Track is for Jen:
Well today has been interesting. All day the web has been down. We live on an isolated farm and even a cloudy day can see us without internet. Last night I had started a batch of tomato relish with an online recipe. Then I remembered a bunch of somewhat ancient recipe books my friend Norma gave me years ago when I was moonlighting as a nursing home cook.
The book from the Kaniva Hospital gave a guide to quantities for entertaining - a 2lb loaf will cut into 72 small sandwiches or a 1lb puff pastry will cut into 24 to 30 patty cases.
The 30th Birthday Nhill Branch CWA recipe book, from 1962, is a beauty. Full of practical, easy recipes together with handy hints for newlyweds and a useful table of weights and measures.
It has several recipes for chutney and relish, so on a wing and a prayer the online relish recipe was completed and made. Sweet and yummy it is almost gone. The shearers love it in their sandwiches. Back to the books. Best of all is the tip is to bait mouse traps with a pumpkin seed. No wonder the pumpkin seeds this year had all been eaten. Last tip from the book; did you know that if you add 1 crushed aspro to each cup of passionfruit and stir well, it will keep in the refrigerator for years!
Most noteworthy was the total lack of any capsicums, egg plants or zucchini in any recipe. This truly shows the wonderful influence of immigration. I knew there was a reason why I hadn't sent these gems to the OP Shop, but laziness prompts one to the quick and easy online recipes.
These great books, written by women who mostly had little in the way of kitchen gadgets, dishwashers or maybe even a washing machine. But, oh gosh, they are a wealth of information from a lost era of practicality and necessity.
These books take me back to my mother standing, kneading and rolling back and forth; her puff pastry was to die for. My Mother was a farmer, a soldier settlers wife. Like all settlement families we lived on the smell of an oily rag, eating mutton, lamb, home grown vegetables and milk from our goats. She was one of best and most innovative cooks I will ever know.
She made the best Cornish pasties and even today I follow her recipe. Chopping the onions, potatoes, swede turnips and parsnips with a little meat, pouring on the Worcestshire and tomato sauces, with salt and pepper to taste. For years I could never get them to look like mothers' pasties until I realised one has to cut the pastry into a round, place the meat in the centre, then mould the edges together to get that pastie shape.
As I was allergic to cows milk, and we had several goats and she made butter and ice-cream, from the cream skimmed off the top of the milk. That ice cream was so white and creamy, having been beaten by hand twice and frozen in the tiny freezer at the top of the Kero Fridge. The beater was a great contraption held with one hand, while the other hand turned the handle. The Kero fridge was always a bit iffy, with the slightest draft likely to blow out the flame. The soap she made was soft and pure, made from rendered sheep fat, ready for the weekly wash in the huge copper at the back of the house. Years later she still grated it to wash her woollen jumpers.
Like so many rural families we didn't have electricity until late 1950's and I learnt to cook on a wood fired stove, use a flat iron and a sew on a Singer sewing machine.
Right now I am buried in the 1975 Inverleigh Naturally cook book, that helped build a kindergarten and tell the story of a beautiful town. Every recipe and handy hint brings to mind the face of wonderful women, some now gone, who willingly shared their recipes for all to enjoy.
Jen's Changing Track is A Spoonful of Sugar from Mary Poppins.
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These are particularly personal tales charting a turning point in someone's life with a song to match. A new story airs every Friday at 5.30pm, on ABC Radio Melbourne's Drive with Raf Epstein. Hear older Changing Tracks.
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