WRITTEN HISTORY

A FOURTH-GENERATION IS LEARNING TO COOK, THANKS TO THE SEEDS PLANTED BY A KIND AND LOVING GRANDMOTHER.

Pamela Oberman remembers her grandmother’s best recipes, including one for a special cake.

EVERY DAY, UNTIL SHE WAS in her eighties, Clare Miller — or ‘Mill’, as she was called — and her best friend Ivy ‘Kirky’ Kirkwood would walk over two big hills to go for a swim at Coolangatta or Kirra Beach on Queensland’s Gold Coast. People would stop and offer the pair a lift, but they always refused. According to Clare’s granddaughter, Pamela Oberman, everyone knew Mill and Kirky. She believes the friends met in 1919, when Clare moved to Coolangatta from Clifton, a small town on the Darling Downs, where she was born in 1898. “Her father was a boundary rider,” says Pamela, who describes her grandmother’s early life as very tough. “She was born in a tent and sent out to work at the age of 12.” In Coolangatta, Clare got a job in the kitchen at the Kirrabelle Hotel — now The Sands — where she learnt to make wonderful pastries. She soon met her husband, Jim Miller (pictured together above), an Irishman who worked in the bar at the Grand Hotel, and the couple had two sons, Robert and Allan. “My father, Robert, worked for the Postmaster-general’s Department so we moved around,” says Pamela, who attended boarding school in Brisbane from the age of 12 and spent most school holidays with her grandmother at Coolangatta. “Staying with Gran made me feel safe and loved.” Along with her older brother and sister, Pamela spent days at the beach then came home to help her gran with dinner. The children shelled peas and peeled spuds — “very thinly so as not to waste any actual potato” — and set the table. The meals Clare cooked were old fashioned and delicious, and her specialties included crumbed lamb’s fry and bacon, a beautiful oxtail ragout and crumbed deep-sea mullet, caught that morning by a fisherman neighbour. After the washing up was done, Pamela would go to bed on the enclosed verandah and fall asleep listening to the surf roll in. When the children visited, Clare treated them to homemade marshmallows, coconut ice and this Loch Katherine cake, a slice of unknown origin that’s also called Loch Katrine cake. “She could whip it up in the blink of an eye,” says Pamela, who wrote down this recipe and many other favourites that she still cooks today. And now the 68-year-old is teaching her eldest grandson, Ollie, to cook in the kitchen of her Gold Coast home. “I try to involve him in cooking as much as I can,” she says. Although it’s early days, like his gran, seven-year-old Ollie has started a handwritten cookbook, which includes recipes for crumbed chicken tenderloins and rice custard. So what’s the next recipe Ollie intends to master? “Well, he’s rather keen on chocolate brownies,” says Pamela, with a laugh.