Rhubarb sago

Before Margaret Fulton or Stephanie Alexander, who did Australian home cooks look to? I had assumed it was English experts and cookbooks – until I started looking through both my grandmothers’ cookbooks. I discovered that, as home cooks starting out in the 30s and 40s, they relied on local experts. And really quite local – […]

I do love a salad. I’m pretty broad minded when it comes to what constitutes an acceptable salad. I’m here for anything from a lightly dressed few green leaves straight out of the garden, through to a complex mix of Middle Eastern grains and pomegranate syrup. Even the salads of my 1970s childhood,  mostly involving […]

There were plenty of young invalids in the classic novels of my childhood. Poor, long-suffering Beth in Little Women! Plucky Judy in Seven Little Australians! At least the Secret Garden’s Colin enjoyed a better fate. My favourite, Katy Carr of What Katy Did, was confined to bed permanently after a fall – if only she’d listened when […]

It’s Sunday evening, and still over 30 degrees after dinnertime. Looking at the weather forecast, it’s probably the last day we’ll get like this before autumn gets real. That solid warmth hangs low  and thick with the late sun, gentler than Summer days in spite of what the thermometer says. It’s perfect weather for sustaining a late-season burst of produce: […]

There’s been a bit of a hiatus at Rhubarb Sago, while we moved house. We’re now in a Geelong suburb settled in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Out walking, I came across this sign on the wall of an old shop front. It’s hard to be sure, but I reckon it could date back to […]

We loved baking on the weekend, and Mum was happy for us to do it, but there was always this caveat: ‘you’ll have to get the oven hot first’. I learned to cook on our 30-year old farm wood combustion stove. That’s it pictured above, just before it was replaced in the 1990s. It taught me some […]

The Italians make a biscuit called “brutti ma buoni”  – ugly but good. This describes the golden syrup dumpling perfectly. In spite this blog’s name I’m not much of a sweet tooth. But a recent wintry weekend and a visit home from the uni student demanded a warm and substantial dessert. So golden syrup dumplings it was. They’re affectionately […]

One of my favourite childhood memories is of waking up at my grandparents’ house when we stayed in school holidays. Tucked under our flannelette sheets up the cold end of the house, we could hear the door to the kitchen open (it had a distinctive creak). From that door came the signals of early morning: the radio on the […]

It seems Australians have been getting steamed up about butter substitutes for more than 100 years. Margarine (sometimes called oleomargarine or oleo) was invented in France around 1870. I always assumed it didn’t take hold in Australia until the 1940s, when butter became scarce under wartime rationing. In fact Melbourne was home to a ‘butterine’ factory in Yarraville in 1885, pretty much under where […]