Being stuck inside the house makes me want to cook and bake. It makes it even more interesting as you cant just nip out for an ingredient you don’t have. So I’ve been kind of playing ready steady cook by myself, or the Master Chef ingredient challenge. Yesterday I was figuring out what to do with pork mince and or beef mince.
What better place to look than “The Every Boys And Girls Rally Cook Book”. If you are not from New Zealand or you are too young you may not know what this is. Every Boys and Girls Rally was a kind of a brownies type thing but it had a bit of a religious twist. You could go each week as a child, and learn how to tie a knot or look after old people and learn prayers.
We never went to the weekly meetings because we wern’t religious. But every school holidays they had a camp which we went to as it was cheap babysitting while our parents worked. Our parents turned a blind eye to the bible lessons they made us do each night as it suited their child care needs.
Anyway, they produced a cook book. One of those ones that Mrs Brenda Jones from Te Kuiti would post in her favourite five bean salad recipe and Mrs Susan Martin from Feilding would give top tips on how to grease a cake tin or get chewing gum out of carpet.
The cook book was very popular in New Zealand, most houses seemed to have one as the kids from these clubs would go door to door selling them. At the front of my book it says it was first published in 1979 and my copy is from 2008 which was the nineteenth print and over 123,000 copies in print.
I have always loved cooking and as a child I would get up early and flick through the book deciding what to cook before the parents got up to tell me to stop wasting ingredients.
As I left home in my twenties to travel I forgot about this book. Then about ten years ago I remembered it and got my Mum to send me one (they had done a re -print).The book went mini viral amongst friends in London for a while.
So, back to yesterday, I’m originally looking at what to do with mince but read it from cover to cover. I still remember most of the recipes and the sections such as “Appetizers, Buttered Items, Miscellaneous, Luncheon, Supper Savouries and Beverages. I thought these headings were funny back then as of course we didn’t talk like that.
I still remembered under the miscellaneous section “How to Preserve a Husband” which I found hilarious as a child, but now it’s a bit naff.
As I’m reading, I am realising what are weird bunch us Kiwis are.
There is a recipe called “Chicken Surprise” this includes a tin of chicken soup and crushed up crisps on top. Actually, there is one whole page where every chicken recipe includes a tin of soup or a tin of pineapple.
Then, I get to the health food section. This is not exactly Deliciously Ella but a few recipes for muesli, bran muffins, wholemeal pastry , sultana cake and brown rice salad.
There is a whole Jewish section which seems strange as I had never met a Jewish person in New Zealand until I was about 20, then I realise every recipe is from a Margaret Christensen in Belmont.
There is a leftovers section. What to do with all those egg yolks after making pavs, how to use up stale cake and what to do with left over corned beef.
There is no international section as such, however there are a few exotic recipes dotted throughout, including, Swiss onion pie, Egg- Foo Yung, Tacos and then in brackets (American recipe), Chinese Chew, Belgian Salad, Hawaiian Chicken, Uncooked Spanish cream, Egyptian Pudding, something called “Curry Rice Fish Dish" which includes a packet of Maggi chicken noodle soup.
Then there is the ubiquitous use of breakfast cereals. Not only in sweet dishes but also savoury. There is the passionfruit cornflake crunch, Spanish cod which calls for breadcrumbs or cornflakes, Weetbix square.
Under the supper savouries section there is the signature dish from my good friend Karen from Perth. Cheese Rolls, famous in the South Island, it is basically a piece of bread spread with cream cheese and then toasted in the oven. It does note they may be frozen and heated as required.
The other thing that seemed to be a popular ingredient was tinned or packet soup. Nearly every recipe in the soup section included an actual tin of soup as well. Tinned fruit and sultana’s featured heavily in savoury dishes. I mean, what were we thinking?
Some of the recipe names are hilarious. I mean to say: Nothing pudding, Arsenic cake, Never fail sponge, Shane cake, Yum Yum cake, Heavenly rice, Fish supreme, Humpty Dumpty Pie, Sunday Snack, Porcupine mince, Mock goose, Economical mock cream, Mock maple syrup, Canary pudding, Monday pudding, Economical fish soup (including a whole snapper head.
What lead me to write this blog was when I was looking in the mince section trying to decide what to cook and there was a meatball recipe with mashed banana and another one for ginger meat balls which included 6 Ginger nut biscuits and a quarter of a cup of raisins. I kid you not.
When it was our birthdays we were allowed to choose what we were to have for dinner and my two favourite dishes that I would always choose are in this book. Savoury Spaghetti Bake and Pineapple Cheesecake for dessert.
Reading this has been a trip down memory lane. Some of the recipes we never cooked in our house but my friends Mum and our neighbour Chris Hawken used to make some of the more modern things and I thought they were so treaty and exotic. She used to make the smoked fish on toast, Dad thought it was crap fish so we never had smoked fish in a tin. I also remember her making preserved spaghetti in jars. People must have had a lot of time on their hands. I’m pretty sure the tomato soup recipe is Margie Gullivers recipe and not 100% the same but the meatloaf recipe is similar to Rachel Coupers mothers famous meatloaf.
My Grandmas recipe for Sally Lunn Bun made with cold mashed potato is here too. Also my Mums famous brown rice salad that would make its appearance every Christmas. Dads beetroot recipe which he still bottles every year is here. There is even the recipe that I tried to make to impress a boyfriend: “Apricot chicken”- Pieces of schnitzel spread with cream cheese and a tinned apricot all rolled up and secured with a toothpick, how fancy was I?
My signature dish from this book was the wonder cake recipe. The original book which I think is still at home has a big circle on the page where I have put the cake tin on top of the book. I was usually allowed to make this as it only had 2 eggs so if I stuffed it up it wasn’t a waste.
I will leave you with the ultimate recipe the height of sophistication : Saveloys Deluxe
What recipes can you remember from your childhood?
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