Utensils for cooking

These recipes are in my mother's handwriting and are housed in a battered, blue plastic folder. They are transcribed here as part of the A-Z Challenge 2019. Each day in April a new letter of the alphabet and accompanying recipes are posted.

Utensils

U - there is no recipe starting with U in my mother's folder but this set me thinking about the utensils she had available to her through many years of cooking.

When she first married in 1937 she joined my father's household and would have inherited her mother in law's kitchen. It was three years before my parent's marriage that Elizabeth Agnes Smyth (Horgan) had died and in that intervening time my father Edward, his brother Joseph and their father Andrew had no female living in the house. A housekeeper/cook visited once a week and cooked a mutton roast. My father's recollections were that they then ate cold mutton and mustard for their meals for the rest of the week.

At age 25, in 1937, Hannah would have had to adapt quickly to supplying meals for the three men. What might have been in her kitchen? The kitchen would have contained a wood burning stove that needed to be kept going on low overnight ready to boil the heavy kettle on the stove top first thing in the morning. There would have been no other source for hot water, so the kettle on the hob was an essential tool.
A meat grinder was more than likely present to use all the scraps of meat. Butter pats, for shaping the butter after beating the cream by hand. A rolling pin and a wooden spoon still essential tools in a kitchen were probably there too. The meat safe was probably outside on the coolest part of the verandah.

In the old farmhouse where we lived until I was nine, there was a wood burning stove and a kerosene refrigerator. A toasting fork was used at breakfast time to hold the bread over the previous night's embers.  A 32 volt generator ran the lights at night.
Cakes and biscuits were mixed with a wooden spoon in a large earthenware bowl. In the newer farmhouse in the 1950s there was great joy when electricity came to the farm.

As time went by Mum became the proud owner of an early Mixmaster - an electric beater with matching bowls. An electric stove was added to the kitchen but often she preferred the wooden one that she was accustomed to. Later on a mouli was used to puree soups and tomato sauces.

Household work and cooking for a large family with limited utensils was a full time job. Her old Green and Gold recipe book was an invaluable guide and as I've transcribed her recipes I've found many of the basics come from that book. A history of its publication is available here on  the Australian Food History timeline. My copy shown here with its distinctive cover, is a 46th edition dated 1992. It has now been published in a 75th edition.

So to the women who first contributed the recipes, thank you and to my mother who learnt from them, recorded her successes and cooked with a minimum of utensils thank you once more.