Baking and Other Delights by Susan Mellsopp
I grew up enjoying the delights of a farm kitchen. The coal range was usually stoked up and produced copious amounts of biscuits, cakes and roasts. Toast was made every morning on a long fork in the fire. Soup bubbled away on top in the winter alongside the kettle with what seemed to be an endless supply of hot water for tea and coffee.
Baking was a weekly event. Arriving home from school to find the large kitchen table covered in biscuits and cakes of all sorts was the norm. If for some reason the baking was postponed to the weekend, standing on a stool to be handed the beater from the cake mixer was a huge treat. The taste of butter and sugar beaten until it was white and creamy was a delicious sweet treat.
My mother made a huge variety of biscuits including…
Afghans, Anzac Biscuits, cheese biscuits, Elsie’s fingers, melting moments, peanut brownies and shortbread. Slices were not as popular then, but tasting many different cakes from chocolate to lemon was the norm. Fruit loaves were also indulged in regularly. We were usually only allowed one treat at a time, and the tins were stored on an unreachable high shelf.
A ’plate’ always had to be provided for any country event. The china plates which were piled high with our offerings for church, school or district outings now reside in my cupboard. Afternoon tea or lunches provided by the mothers meant a huge array of food which was usually disposed of in a very short space of time. Sometimes a plate was gratefully received after a family tragedy or to help out a busy mother after the birth of a new baby. Not all the offerings were up to the expected standard. I once received a lasagna which the kind country cook had forgotten to add the cheese sauce to.
Keen to learn to cook and bake, I was unaware at that stage it was in my genes, and was soon baking like a professional. My mother had a large well-worn exercise book with a purple cover full of recipes, but like myself in later years she and most New Zealand cooks relied on the Edmonds Cook Book and those produced by farming organisations such as the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers. My well used Edmonds copy was lost when moving into my present home, now two copies reside on my shelves.
When I had my own kitchen one of my first presents was a large Kenwood Cake Mixer. As the family grew so did the baking requirements. Each foray into town to purchase groceries meant bringing home baking essentials; a 10kg bag of flour, a 10kg bag of sugar and a large box of butter from the dairy company shop. Other ingredients such as icing sugar, dried fruit and cocoa were also purchased in large or multiple amounts.
Also baking one day a week, sometimes more, most recipes for biscuits were quadrupled, and cakes doubled. Slices were not as popular as doubling the recipe still did not produce enough pieces when they were cut up. I made….. afghans covered in runny chocolate icing and with a walnut on top, peanut brownies, many of the same biscuits enjoyed in my childhood. Favourites were vanilla biscuits and hokey pokey biscuits. I must have made hundreds if not thousands of banana and chocolate cakes, as well as cream napoleons, chocolate eclairs, madeira cake and gingerbread. Ginger crunch was a favourite as well as marshmallow shortcake and date slice. When purchasing a food processor, essential for preparing ingredients, making the pastry for the eclairs in it as well as a microwave lemon cake were added to the list.
Birthdays always meant a special cake was ordered. The most difficult one attempted was the train from the well-known Australian Women’s Weekly birthday cake book. In later years an amazing sponge cake recipe which rose to great heights, about 8 inches if all went well, became the most requested celebratory cake. I even made it for my dog’s birthday.
The cake tins in my kitchen were huge, I lost count of how many I had, but they were filled to the brim each week. Tins of favourite biscuits were emptied quickly. Hiding them on the top shelf of the pantry was of little use as nimble children shimmied up the door and unlocked it. They then climbed up the shelves and passed the tins down to their co-conspirators in food crimes.
Desserts were always part of the evening meal. Fruit was frozen, and hundreds of preserving jars were filled with all types of fruit, often having to stay up until well after midnight to ensure the bottles sealed. From this emerged apple crumbles by the dozen, apple and apricot shortcakes made in a huge dish which lasted 2 nights if I was lucky. They were delicious with Mooloo ice-cream. Steamed puddings made from my English grandmother’s recipe were a weekly pleasure, and self-saucing chocolate pudding with ice cream was often a nightly dessert made by a child during calving. It did get a little tedious after several weeks. Making apple turnovers in the toastie machine was another new skill, and custard squares using cream crackers instead of pastry.
The large 16 cubic foot freezer was a saviour. Meals were pre-prepared and frozen to save time during calving, baking was frozen also but was usually found and devoured without my knowledge. The vegetables I grew which survived the invasion of a herd of cows were blanched and stored to be added to winter dinners. Purchasing large boxes of tomato seconds for just a few dollars meant I could get a bag out of the freezer and add it to any suitable meal.
One year we had two cows have an accident on the same day. The mobile butcher came to slaughter them and it was with some desperation a call was received to say they could only turn them into mince and sausages. After two years of inventing recipes for these meats, I imagine I could have written several cookbooks of recipes. A roast, slice of wiener schnitzel or a nice piece of steak were very tempting when the final sausage was devoured and we could kill another beast.
Cooking for Christmas was a very difficult mission. Several batches of Christmas mince pies had to be sellotaped into tins with threats of bodily harm if they were opened without my permission. Shortbread was not as popular so I made copious amounts to eat myself, though the children soon learnt to enjoy it. Making a large fruit cake was not just a Christmas ritual, although hours were spent baking them and then icing with royal icing and decorating with English related cake décor. Twelve inch fruit cakes were made all year round and demolished post haste, usually within just a few days for morning and afternoon tea and often as a snack after dinner. The children usually took a slice in their lunch box along with a sandwich and fruit. I seldom managed to have any as they were gone before I could stop long enough to savour a piece.
Baking was not just for family. Men picking up hay or doing other farm jobs also had to be fed. Contractors cutting hay or silage meant a long trek up the farm with large amounts of baking for morning tea, then back again with filled rolls, baking of all sorts including cakes, pies, home-made sausage rolls, and huge flasks of cold drinks. This all had to be achieved with several small children tailing along, and perhaps a new baby in a pram bouncing over the ruts in the farm tracks. When it was time to pick up the hay a dinner had to be provided at home when all the cows winter feed was safely stored in the barn. It could be at any time during the evening and a roast dinner with all the trimmings including Yorkshire pudding was expected, along with a dessert such as steamed pudding and custard or ice-cream. Climbing into bed after cleaning up and washing mountains of dishes often meant a sleepless night due to pure exhaustion. Like many farmer’s wives I was extremely grateful when the contractors started bringing their own food.
Feeding unexpected visitors at the drop of a hat was sometimes the norm. People such as the vet were invited in for a meal, and if food was a little short it had to go around. Eggs became a meal of necessity if the available meat and vegetables were reassigned. If the visitors arrived for lunch, a triple or quadrupled batch of scones had to be made quickly. Scones were a regular family lunch; plain, cheese, date or raisin. Covered in home made jam or lashings of butter they certainly filled hungry children. The purchase of a bread machine meant making two loaves before lunch to fill hungry tummies.
Eventually my first oven decided to retire from exhaustion and I purchased a fan oven with a ceramic hob. The joy of being able to cook several trays of biscuits at once and reduce the time spent each week baking from a full day down to half a day was wonderful.
My cake mixer sat on the bench and it was unusual for it not to be in daily use. Batches of rissoles were a weekly chore; mince, sausage meat, eggs, herbs and onion. Covered in left over gravy, they were devoured at 2-3 a time and eaten so fast none were ever left to have cold the following day. I made huge batches of home-made chocolate in the mixer as a sweet treat, particularly for birthdays, Easter and Christmas. I purchased a special pottery dish to set it in, one I still have today. And yes, I still make the occasional batch of home-made chocolate full of dried fruit and nuts.
Providing enough variety for lunchboxes was another very time-consuming task. Trips to town for groceries and fruit was not a simple exercise. Cold sausages were a regular lunchbox filler, alongside egg sandwiches, a banana if we had some, and of course a slice of cake and a couple of biscuits. By the time the last child had reached secondary school age lunches had become her domain. Muesli bars, which I had always made but were now of the bought variety were in the box along with purchased crackers or fruit rolls.
As the years passed I have amassed a large collection of cookbooks and recipes cut from papers and magazines. I have hundreds of copies of the Healthy Food Guide. Cookbooks produced by church groups, women’s farming groups and other organisations attempting to fundraise are the backbone of my collection. They have useful recipes which could be made from what one had in the kitchen cupboards and did not require a trip to the supermarket to purchase a long list of expensive ingredients. I still buy cookbooks, the more elegant variety, with lovely pictures and recipes which require a home economics degree to decipher. They are nice to drool over, but only the occasional recipe is useful.
After many years of farm culinary provision, I moved into a new home in the city. Decades of providing meals to new arrivals in a country district meant I was very surprised no one brought me a dinner on moving day. I was forced to trek down to the nearest supermarket and purchase a pizza which I then heated in my new oven with its covered bottom element. This oven, bought at great expense, has been all but useless. Trying to cook scones in it results in dry hard creations, casseroles and fish pies overflow, and biscuits are either under or overcooked. A long conversation with the manufacturer was of little help. They were not used to women who cooked in the farm style. In writing this I have realized that modern ovens like mine are probably not made for bulk amounts of baking and the settings are useless for this pursuit. While I no longer bake, pikelets in the electric frying pan are now my specialty. The inability of the modern oven to produce good hearty food is quite sad.
Cake mixers churning out large batches of Anzac biscuits or Afghans seem to be mostly a thing of the past. Cooking skills are very simple and some young people have no idea how to construct a meal or bake a cake. Told once it took too long, I timed a chocolate cake and it took only 15 minutes to mix. Takeaways are often the food of choice. I wonder if one can even buy a 10kg bag of flour or sugar now. Dried fruit comes in tiny packages and as for butter, one needs to take out a loan to buy just a pound. Please get out your recipe books, choose something simple to begin, and revive the art of home cooking. You might be surprised how much better it tastes.
