Oz history in food: Australian Family Recipes 1868 to 1950

I love a bit of food history.  Food history is not only quaint and historic recipes.  Possum Pie, Beetroot Beer and Lamingtons: Australian Family Recipes from 1868 to 1950 by Victoria Heywood is a social history of lives gone by.  As of the first of this month, a wonderful contribution to Australian food history has hit the bookstands.  

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Victoria came across many weird, supposedly edible, things in 17 years travelling the world as a journalist, but none so strange as some of the dishes she encountered back home in Australia when researching Possum Pie, Beetroot Beer and Lamingtons. In a writing career spanning 20-odd years, Victoria has written extensively about food, sex, health and travel for magazines and newspapers both here and abroad, and is the author of numerous other books.  One that would be of interest to Oz Tucker lovers is:

More about this book here

Bring the family down for a FREE sausage sizzle and 

some other tasty treats from original Australian cookbooks 

and hear Victoria Heywood chat about her new book:

• Where - Westgarth Books, 77 High Street, Northcote
• When - 12-1 pm, Saturday, October 15, 2011
• Phone - 9482 7117

GARAGE SALE : RINGWOOD, VIC: FRI-SAT 7/8 OCTOBER 2011

Favourite Focaccia ... alla Pugliese

This is a detour of Oz Tucker into a favourite recipe of mine - 

from the Italian genre.

@tammois is looking for a good excuse to start the fire to-day.  I suggested Focaccia alla Pugliese was an excellent excuse and offered to send the recipe.  She has taken me up on the offer, so I scanned the pages and thought I would post them here as well.  Please pop over to her site Tammi Tasting Terroir. I think you'll love her.

Click to enlarge the scanned pages below

 

The Story of Meetup

Those of you who have your own blogs may know about meetup. It is a wonderful net tool for organising people to get together for meetings, a drink, whatever.  And while bloggers may love to communicate on their blogs, many of them like to meet up with similarly interested bloggers in their neighbourhood...so there's a tendency to use meetup.  In my mail box to-day dropped the wonderful and somewhat emotional story of how it all started............

Fellow Meetuppers,

I don't write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it's the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many people don't know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby.

Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought local community doesn't matter much if we've got the internetand tv. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I hoped they wouldn't bother me.

When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they'd normallyignore. People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being neighborly.

A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet -- and grow local communities?

We didn't know if it would work. Most people thought it was a crazy idea -- especially because terrorism is designed to make people distrust one another.

A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months after 9/11.

Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it's working. Every day, thousands of Meetups happen. Moms Meetups, Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups... a wild variety of 100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common -- except one thing.

Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me. They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and motivate each other, they babysit each other's kids and find other ways to work together. They have fun and find solace together. They make friends and form powerful community. It's powerful stuff.

It's a wonderful revolution in local community, and it's thanks to everyone who shows up.

Meetups aren't about 9/11, but they may not be happening if it weren't for 9/11.

9/11 didn't make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers. 9/11 didn't rip us apart. No, we're building new community together!!!!

The towers fell, but we rise up. And we're just getting started with these Meetups.

Scott Heiferman (on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ)
Co-Founder & CEO, Meetup
New York City
September 2011

--
Add info@meetup.com to your address book to receive all Meetup
emails

To manage your email settings, go to:
http://www.meetup.com/account/comm/

Meetup, PO Box 4668 #37895
New York, New York 10163-4668

 Last Sunday afternoon, a gracious friend of mine took me
to a High Tea at

 St Stephen's Bayswater.

 The afternoon was organised by an NGO called

Australia Aids South Africa.

As the name implies, the organisation works to assist

AIDS victims in South Africa.

 The hall at Stephen's was packed.

There was wonderful music from talented local people.

As well as my friend and her lovely family,

I also enjoyed the presence at our table of

St Stephen's vicar, Father David.

Each table had its own host.

The host (or hostess if you prefer) provided
all the beautiful napery and tableware.

I thought this was a great idea -

since it split so much of the organisation, responsibility and work.

Beverages, it should be noted, were not limited to coffee and tea!

I did enjoy the champers in beautiful fluted glasses -

and the flowers and chocolates, too.

I think the afternoon was a marvellous social success.

I am sure the hard work was rewarded, as well, with financial success.

Thank you, Australia Aids South Africa.

There's more to cooking than 4 Ingredients. #food #cooking #4ingredients

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Almost four years ago, I did a post in regard to the 4 Ingredients phenomenon. The phenomenon goes on - but I don't see the point.  If your great necessity is to make things quickly, then I don't think good food is your goal or your thing at all. Not that the good cook doesn't have to be able to prepare good food quickly from time to time. Reliance on speed and short cuts is not conducive to good food or good cooks.

Anyway, I have at last come across another person who calls into question the phenomenon. Melissa over at Frills in the Hills has written about it too.  If you want to get a handle on some good cookbooks by some cooks with long and great reputations, go over to the sidebar; scroll down to the tags/categories and click on "Books".  After a browse through that lot, you might get an idea of the difference between the great cooks and the goals of the authors of 4 Ingredients.

BTW, make sure you have a good browse around Melissa's blog while you are there. Well worth your time!

Abundance and scarcity : Food distribution, logistics, prices, quality #scarcity #food #prices #quality

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Picture from here

I am grateful to Liz McLellan of Hyperlocavore for drawing my attention to this post.

I have long complained about the emphasis of Economics on scarcity. I have never turned my head in the same way as Roberto Verzola to thoughts about abundance, its meaning, its impact, its consequences. From hereon, however, I will set about doing so.

The first thing one learns when studying Economics is that it is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources.  I prefer to ask what would have happened to Economics as a science and (as it is said) a dismal one if it had been based on the premise that there is sufficient on the planet for our need but not for our greed.  My view is that this would have/could have opened up a wholly different sets of questions and discussions from those that have given us our modern knowledge together with the current Global Financial Crisis (GFC).  I said a lot in a comment on Liz's Amplify post which you can find here.

I am not denying that scarcity does exist - but it usually does not exist across the whole planet at the same point in time.  This means that in times of scarcity - and in times of abundance, too - distribution comes to the forefront.

My view is that there has been too little attention given to distribution as an integral economic factor and a vital factor when it comes to human life and well-being.

I want to keep this simple so I will start close to home.  In Australia, there are two major food distributors in Australia: Coles and Woolworths.  I said I was trying to keep this simple so I have omitted IAG, Aldi, and the up and coming Costco.  Most Australians would think of Coles and Woolworths as retailers, predominantly of food but also of other necessities of daily life.

Coles and Woolworths have a greater role than merely making their shelves available to us for selection of goods and trolley-ing them through the check-out.  They are logistics operators.

They are a vital link in Australia's trade - from grower, manufacturer, wholesaler - whether these are nationally or internationally based - through their logistics operations into Coles and Woolworths stores to the families in your street. If you live in Queensland at the moment where the floodwaters are  the size of New South Wales, you might have an understanding of the vital logistical role that the major duopoly of Australian retailing has.

This huge logistical enterprise is central to food security and food quality in this country.  I once lived in Mount Isa in north-west Queensland at a time when the roads in and out were closed by floods for six weeks.  Milk and bread could be air-freighted in and out.  Everything that modern people and families need could not be - and, even if it could be, the price to the consumer would be prohibitive. It was interesting to watch the cabbages - which have a rather long shelf life when need be - growing smaller each day. Why? As the external leaves of  these long lasting cabbages turned brown and unattractive, staff would remove them. Thus the ever-smaller cabbage.

I was at at this conference in Gippsland last year. At a workshop, a speaker got up to spruik his recently formed company specialising in logistics.  He was telling of all the clever things his company could do.  I told him the story of Mount Isa, the floods, being cut-off, and the cabbages and asked what his company could have done in such circumstances.  The answer was that his company could not have done anything either. In short, they would not have got through.

That is food security in Australia at its most basic.  It was not that there was insufficient food in Australia for us.  It just could not reach us in any practical way.  In other parts of the world, food security is challenged by famine. There is no food to be had.  Right across the world, even in the rich developed world, food security can be challenged by personal poverty.  Food is available but it is out of reach because of high prices or low or nil incomes.

Food quality is a matter of logistics too.  Why is there not more organic food in Coles and Woolworths? Why is organic food not priced more reasonably so that if I have a household with six children, I can still include organic food in my shopping list?  There can be a few reasons for this.

First: Availability and dependability of supply and quality. Food farming is a huge enterprise. Broadscale food farming sustains the major distributors of food.  Organic food production is still, more or less, in its infancy.  A lot of organic food growers can not guarantee availability of sufficiently large quantities even if they can guarantee quality.

Second: A lot of organic farmers can not guarantee quantity with any sort of dependability.  Large logistical operations demand reasonable continuity of supply.  The advent of Farmers Markets is good for smaller farmers and consumers demanding quality products at affordable prices.  This avenue is where smaller producers can begin their journey.  However, as a national food distribution mechanism, Farmers Markets just don't cut it.

Third: Quality.  These days we are asking ourselves in respect of our food - What is Quality?  In an age of terminator seeds; genetic modification; pesticides; growth hormones and so on and so on, what is quality? And what about the visual? A blemish on a banana or a spot of fungus on the fuji and the consumer is likely to turn up his or her nose.  Why are capsicums so huge these days? Why is it a red-letter day for me to discover my favourite Ellendale mandarines in store?  Woolworths and Coles are not fools.  They have come to know what consumer preferences are and they trade accordingly.

Fourth: Price.  I reckon that Woolworths and Coles know precisely what the consumer is prepared to pay for what at any given time.  So if our duopoly knows we will only purchase organic food if it is competitive with mainstream chemically produced food, this is going to make it difficult to get organic food on the shelf in any sort of reliability, availability, etc.

If you go here, you will find some of my posts connected to the matters under discussion here. You will also find that I have written from time to time about Roger Corbett, the person I consider to be most influential in Australian public life; more even than the Prime Minister, the Governor-General  or the Governor of the Reserve Bank. If you read the posts, you will understand my reasoning.

So while the bankers are getting boosted by governments and making glittering prizes profits, let's turn away from their sort of economics to considering the subject of distribution: how it is done, what are its outcomes, how can it be done better, how can it be done to benefit the whole population of the planet, how can we distribute the sufficiency efficiently to all instead of allowing a few aggressive and self-centred people to indulge and support a system which can leave significant proportions of the planet's people to die or survive in inequitable, personality-stunting, health-denying circumstances.

Except for a few landmark examples, Economics has not acquitted itself well in the service of humanity and the service of the environmental circumstances of the planet. In fact, one is able to see frequently that it is not merely the dismal science. It is, in its mainstream form, the science of death and destruction.

So why don't we turn our heads around. Let's think deeply and broadly about our human and environmental circumstances and the needs that abound them.  If we can do this in the knowledge that the planet has sufficient to supply the needy but not the greedy, who knows what ideas might not become abundant.

The 1999 GE Food Debates: The Turning Point.(genetically engineered food): An article from: Synthesis/Regeneration - Roberto Verzola

Related articles

• Trade secrets of 'fresh' food (heraldsun.com.au)
• Govt seeks farms audit (news.theage.com.au)