Wood soot and raisin salad: Retro recipes from Kiwi newspapers
The sight of me even just standing in the kitchen has always frightened my family, but when I’m actually cooking something their fear reaches a whole new level. On Thursday morning, my adult son is leaning on the other side of the bench eyeing me, various ominous ingredients and the whole unlikely scene suspiciously.
‘‘This is for a story, isn’t it?’’ he asks before, without waiting for an answer, scarpering as quick as anything.
‘‘I’m not eating any of it,’’ he says over his shoulder. ‘‘I’ve suffered enough.’’
This whole mess is for a story, of course. For no reasons other than it’s summer and I felt like it, I’m recreating some of the recipes our newspapers served up to readers decades ago.
If there had to be an angle for this exercise it’d be something about how our palettes have changed or the influence of global trade – but really it’s just a bit of fun. Well, that’s what it was meant to be.
In the innocent, pre-internet days of yore, newspaper readers would send in recipes, clip out the ones they liked, and share tips and tricks.
These were the days when cooking was almost always done at home so newspapers provided a popular way for their audience to swap favourite dishes and try out something new.
I’m not sure which of those boxes a 1932 edition of The Evening Post was ticking with whatever it is I’m currently making but, regardless, its name is Raisin Salad.
The recipe starts off innocently enough with a cup of raisins, another of sliced apples and half a cup of chopped celery. Things are looking entirely reasonable before suddenly, they take a disturbing turn.
A sliced banana and a shredded orange are up next on the list of ingredients. This is bad news but not nearly as bad as the following instruction that sees everything mixed with a ‘‘generous amount’’ of whipped cream flavoured with a teaspoon of mayonnaise.
‘‘Serve on lettuce leaves and sprinkle with chopped nuts,’’ the recipe finishes. I’ve finished too, and I’m staring numbly at my creation when Mum drops by for a coffee.
‘‘You’re just wasting food,’’ she says of the experiment. ‘‘Don’t give people any reason to hate journalists more than they already do.’’
She’s right, as usual.
While I can’t tell her I’ll likely make use of the remaining whipped cream, Aotearoa is deep in the midst of a cost-ofliving crisis, leaving me rightly ashamed of my recklessness.
I’m also a bit scared because Mum’s looking for all the world like she might make me eat the raisin salad. I don’t want to eat it; I don’t think it’s meant to be eaten.
Anyhoo, the next dish on the list is something my family will surely stomach, so I pad along to the supermarket for fixings. In January 1932, an edition of the Northern Advocate featured a recipe for strawberry boats: a dessert both super easy and quick to make.
Readers were told to take six bananas, then cut the skins in halves length-ways. Next they should scoop out the fruit and pass it through a sieve with one pound (0.45kg) of strawberries.
A dessertspoon of lemon juice, 3 oz (85g) of castor sugar, and a half pint of whipped cream is mixed in with the fruit before the mixture is spooned into the banana skins and sprinkled with chopped nuts.
Easy, certainly, though the problem here is the aforementioned cost-of-living crisis. At the supermarket this pointless bit of fluff will cost about $17, and that’s without buying more whipped cream.
This story doesn’t feel fun any more. It feels obnoxious.
Changing tack, I abandon the strawberry boats to scroll through even older newspaper recipes in the hunt for something a bit more in line with the national mood.
Bingo! In 1850, The Nelson Examiner covered a tea party held by the region’s Total Abstinence Society, commemorating the group’s 1846 formation.
Nearly 200 persons sat down to tea, the story says, reporting both that a few more persons signed the pledge and that a barley pudding was made for the occasion.
‘‘...a comparison was drawn between this and a gallon of ale – a gallon of ale at a cost of 2s leaving the appetite of a family unsatisfied, while a barley pudding, agreeable and nutritious, at a cost of only 1s would dine a family of five persons.’’
To make the barley pudding, cooks should soak a teacup full of scotch or pearl barley in water all night, put it in a baking dish with sugar and a little cinnamon, then pour about three pints of milk upon it.
The pudding requires three or four hours of baking in a slow oven, the recipe finished, barley being a harder grain than rice.
Unfortunately, there’s no way my family are going to find this meal either agreeable or nutritious, and as the ingredients cost about as much as a bottle of merlot, nor do I. Cheers.
The plan for recreating recipes isn’t working, though the Examiner’s 1846 August edition offered some helpful medical advice for injuries sustained in the kitchen:
‘‘A mixture of lard and wood soot, in equal qualities, is the most sovereign thing in the world for burns and scalds.’’
And, should one need to stop the bleeding of a leech or cut in just a few moments, the paper had just the trick. Take the thin skin of an egg and lay it on the wound, it reported, adding the egg must be fresh or won’t adhere to the skin.
‘‘What on earth are you doing?’’ Mum asks, ostensibly popping in to return the trousers she’s repaired, though really just checking up on me again.
‘‘I’m trying to peel an egg,’’ I say, stating the obvious.
‘‘You’re meant to boil it first,’’ she replies. ‘‘And didn’t you just write something about the egg shortage?’’
The story is a bust, though perhaps if it did have an angle it’d be something about modern food prices; the many issues with eggs or how the hell a bottle of booze can be cheaper than a bit of grain, some milk and sugar.
That long-ago barley pudding might not have been agreeable or even very nutritious, but at least it was a bit of filler when things were lean.
Just like this story is now.
‘‘A mixture of lard and wood soot, in equal qualities, is the most sovereign thing in the world for burns and scalds.’’
The Nelson Examiner, August 1946