Long, long ago, many lifetimes ago it seems, there was a girl growing up in the Mallee in the north-west of Victoria. She lived with her father and two older brothers and spent her days going to school, spending time with friends, making things, going for walks through the bushland that surrounded her home and dreaming of one day making a home of her own, with a good man and five children to care for and love. The girl imagined sewing and knitting clothes for her children, just as her own mother had done and baking all sorts of good smelling delights for their afternoon teas. In these ways, she would show them how much they were loved.
So, she bought an exercise book, decorated the outside of it and began collecting recipes, just as her own mother had done many years before. Soon after, the first book was given the company of two more books. The first was for cakes and biscuits, the second for savoury dishes and the third for desserts. Each recipe added was another layer to the dream life the girl imagined for her future self. Images of aprons, dustings of flour, bountiful casseroles laid out on a checkered tablecloth and around the table, happy, healthy, well-fed children who glowed in their mother's love.
It has to be said though, that there was a degree of duality to the girl's recipe collecting. Along with the wholesome casseroles and nut-loaves that would nourish her children's growing bodies, there were recipes that spoke to the girl of a different lifestyle; a lifestyle of sophistication and glamour, of dinner parties with interesting guests and of menus with a hint of continental influence. All a far cry from the meat and three veg that she was used to cooking for her father and brothers each night, or the scones, anzac biscuits and tea-cakes she baked on weekends. So into the girl's recipe books they all went, the wholesome one-pot cook ups and the fruit cakes feeling a little dowdy and colloquial next to the French Quiche Lorraine, the grand Sacher-Torte and the Italian Cappucino.
Years passed. The girl left the Mallee and eventually found herself living in one of Melbourne's cool inner suburbs. The books had long been filled and were added to with more notebooks and folders, and the ultimate, real shop-bought cookbooks by the likes of Stephanie Alexander, Jamie Oliver, Stephano di Pieri, Nigella Lawson and Charmaine Solomon; books on baking, preserving, and the ultimate chocolate cookbook, Marcel Desaulinaire's 'Death By Chocolate'. Friends gave her a subscription to Gourmet Traveller and she read about all manner of exotic ingredients, cooking methods she had never imagined and kitchen gadgetry that would ensure she looked like a serious home cook. She read about restaurants and dinner party menus that made her girlhood imaginings of sophistication look as dowdy and colloquial as the casseroles and fruit cakes had previously. She scorned the supermarkets in favour of South Melbourne's fresh vegetable markets, the Asian markets lining Richmond's busy Bridge Road, bustling Prahran market, bought only fresh, handmade pasta and eventually made the rather expensive shift to organic produce. She was on her way to becoming a food snob.
More years passed and the girl (for she still felt quite young on the inside, despite the lines at the edges of her eyes and the beginnings of grey in her hair) left the big smoke to raise her soon-to-be-born babe closer to her sisters in the regional city of Geelong. In the blink of an eye (or so the intervening nine years seemed) she was mother to four and wife to none. As her babies grew up, she found that they didn't like a lot of the foods she had become accustomed to eating. Singapore Hawker Stall Noodles were refused, Chicken Butter Masala caused noses to be turned upwards, Pad Thai was sent packing. It seemed these children of hers wanted (horror of horrors), meat and three veg; the very thing the girl had been running away from since she had left home. So she reaquainted herself with the dishes of her childhood, the dishes her mother had cooked for her when she was little, the dishes she had cooked for her father and brothers. But, as she so often did in life, she did them her own way. Familiar recipes were tweaked (although there were some she wouldn't dream of changing), menus were adapted to suit the tastes of her growing family, she learned to make her own pasta with fresh eggs laid by her brood of hens, and her children grew. Strong, healthy and happy just as she had dreamed of all those years ago.
The funny thing is, that the very first recipe book she started, way back then, had hardly ever been used except for a few absolute favourites. The Hungarian Chocolate Pancake Cake, the Petite Roulades and even the good old Sacher Torte sat quietly unnoticed as the girl whipped up batches of Anzac Biscuits, Butter Biscuits and Dutch Orange Cakes from her high school cookery book, banana cakes, rock buns and cinnamon teacakes for her hungry children.
One day the girl wondered to herself, and then to her sister, "What if I cooked every recipe in that first book? One recipe a week. Just to see if they're any good." After all it seemed a shame to have all those lovely sounding recipes sitting there untried. They both agreed that it was a fine idea indeed although, at that rate it would take about three years to get through just that one book and a lifetime to get through the whole collection, even if she stopped collecting recipes that very day, which I can assure you, she will not.
Inspired by the film 'Julie and Julia' but with no such expectations of fame, the girl decided to record her baking triumphs and failures in her blog. So she made herself a cup of tea, opened the book to recipe no. 1, dated May 1984, a Viennese Chocolate Cake, written out in her best teenage handwriting and made a shopping list, written out in her scrawling grown-up handwriting. Then, when time permitted, she put on her apron, and began creaming the butter and sugar, losing herself in the familiarity of the motion.
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