Tasty Treasures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 14, 2014

I lifted the metal lid of our circa-1958 shamrock-green letterbox. Small daughter handed me with a wodge of envelopes, clamped with a fat elastic band. “Bills!” I groaned.

Four-year-old was now scrabbling behind the rickety mailbox post. “Something fell out!” she shouted and flapped her discovery above her head.

It was a postcard. A striking botanical drawing stood out against an inky background. It pictured the life cycle of a sunflower, drawn in exquisite detail in every incarnation, from bud to bloom to seed.

I turned over the postcard and immediately recognised the handwriting – straight-limbed but slanting slightly backwards. The text was a recipe from a friend in her 70’s, a magnificent cook. She appreciates my weakness for chocolate and our shared love of baking. So she’d sent me a copy of her latest triumph – a delectable chocolate cake using sour cherries, ground almonds and rum.

I was touched. Some of my most treasured recipes were originally hers. Over the years, she has transcribed them onto handsome stationary, adding tips and tricks she thinks will help me, her less-seasoned protégé.

To make her famous cumquat chutney, I begin roaming the neighbourhood in May for trees festooned with fruit. I beg stripping rights from owners, then lug my golden cargo home. I’ll spend an hour chopping the bitter fruit, extracting pesky seeds. By kilo’s end, my fingertips are pruned and the juice is biting into the quicks of my nails.

My friend’s recipes are reminders of raucous dinners at her place in the 90s. Her table was always laden: slabs of salmon and rollmops washed down with schnapps, curries made from scratch, ripe cheeses and her renowned chilli jam. Her family’s prized dishes have become firm favourites amongst mine.

I’ve been collecting my trove of recipes since I was a teenager. The recipe for Mum’s signature dish, Pineapple Chicken, sits atop a bulging file in the top drawer of my desk. Still rich with evidence of its original owner, Mum’s handwritten page is dog-eared and spotted with greasy thumb-marks. But it’s not the recipe I covet, rather the remarks that live in the margins. “MUCH POSHER THAN APRICOT CHICKEN,” Mum has written in capitals, then underlined it, in case anyone should doubt her.

From her notes, I can track her attempts to combine fruit with fowl. They date back to the 80s, when her kitchen had glazed orange tiles and a clinkerbrick pantry. She has scribbled on the recipe in red biro: “1st time – used fresh pineapple – try tinned.”

“2nd time: Golden Circle Pineapple Rings work best. Check for rust.”

“3rd Time: Delicious served with rice and frozen peas.”

As a child, I anointed Mum’s Pineapple Chicken (and defrosted peas) the birthday dinner of choice.

My grandmother’s surviving recipes are frustratingly terse. Her buttermilk scones require ‘enough flour to make a soft dough’ and should be baked ‘until done.’ She needed only the bare basics to jog her memory. Her cooking was instinctive, a repertoire of corned beef and baked custards learned at her mother’s elbow in the 1920s, recipes she mentally fine-tuned each time she made them.

I have no such confidence in my productions. I like my baking instructions precise and foolproof. On a whim, I might vary the ingredients, but that’s when the dish flunks. I blame my catastrophes on the recipe. “Hopeless!” I’ll scrawl across the page, having wasted six eggs and a pat of Danish butter on a rubbery sunken sponge.

I still remember the first cookbook I fell in love with. I was 28. The Sydney restaurant critic Terry Durack had written a rhapsody to food. (On the cover was a woman wearing nothing but a skirt strung with garfish.)

I took Terry to bed every night for a week. “It was the slippery, silky, mother’s nightie feel of it that got me at first, a reassuring and arousing smoothness of impossibly luxurious proportions.” That’s how he described the taste of his first smoked oyster. I went to the fish shop, hoping I, too, would be overcome with mother’s nightie raptures. Sadly, my first smoked oyster tasted like an old slipper, plus grit.

Recipes are rich histories for swapping between friends and passing between generations. The internet has made recipe-sharing a furtive pleasure. I can waste an hour browsing through litanies of slow-cooked beef cheeks and self-saucing puddings when I’m uninspired by a kilo of mince and a limp head of broccoli.

But my laptop’s cold, plastic interface is no match for Mum’s butter-stained school recipe cards, relics from compulsory domestic science. Sometimes I’ll flick through the cards and marvel at how unappetising 1950s food now seems. (Rock cakes feature heavily). Other times, I just want to see Mum’s girlish handwriting, alive on every page. Satisfied, I’ll put the cards back in the drawer, reach for the can opener and make a start on tonight’s Pineapple Chicken.