With Jane Vale
Cooking and eating for the early settlers
No electricity, gas, microwaves, air fryers, fridges or freezers. A hot summer’s day – no air conditioner or electric fans, and you have to bake some loaves of bread in the small wood stove to feed the family tomorrow. How would you cope?
That’s the scene which faced all the brave women who came into our area of South Gippsland in the early days. They faced living in 2,000 square miles of Gippsland - among huge trees and almost impenetrable scrub. It was a daunting task for the men to clear enough land to build a humble little house and to have enough open garden to grow fruit trees and basic vegetables, and to have a few hens and a house cow for eggs and milk and butter. A woman from Hedley recorded in her diary for one day: “work, work, work”.
Both men and women worked very hard to feed their families, but unfortunately they did not learn to appreciate the bush food which had successfully sustained the Indigenous people here for tens of thousands of years. Virtually the only local food which the colonists shared with them was the fish and shell fish from the sea.
However, the settlers soon grew enough food to cater for their growing families. Bread and butter and jam were staples. The Pilkington cousins, fresh from from Ireland with their cousin Charlie Griffin, were early settlers at Sandy Point. In one of their diaries they record the welcome gift from another family of a five gallon kerosene tin of jam, which kept the young bachelors happy for quite a while. A few years ago the Mount Best Hall had a social pioneer night, and we brewed up a genuine kerosene tin of hot water for the cups of tea. It tasted terrible and we quickly resorted to the tea urn in the kitchen! They were tougher in the olden days!
Their diet was limited by lack of refrigeration but was pretty healthy. Dairy products, fruit, eggs, chicken and beef, especially corned beef, were plentiful. After rabbits hit the area in about 1910 they became a staple too. At social occasions, usually at the local halls, trestle tables would be groaning under huge amounts of wonderful food. On offer would be pies, scones and mouth watering sponge cakes, all made with lashings of cream.
However, very little of the food was wasted, and some of the old recipes sound somewhat off-putting to us now. I’m not at all sure of the sound of tripe in batter, brains in batter for breakfast, boiled sheep’s tongues, lamb’s head soup and sheep’s head bake. Every recipe for vegetables then suggested boiling them for 20 to 40 minutes – even asparagus, cabbage and green beans. There were few recipes for salads, and some of them sound a bit bizarre too, such as herring salad.
Because the roads down from the hills to the little towns were so appalling, the women were not able to shop with the ease which we can today. My Grandmother, who lived at Sandy Point, told me that a trip into Fish Creek to shop would take a whole long and tiring day, driving the horse and buggy through the muddy roads. Many families living in the hills relied on men with pack horses to bring them their monthly order of basic food from the shops.
Bill Crawford told me a story once which I often think about when I open a packet of flour to make bread (in my electric breadmaker!).
The delivery man, who was riding one horse and leading the laden packhorse, was battling along a narrow and difficult track through the scrub up to a family near Mount Fatigue. The main item on the load was a huge, vital bag of flour. It became tangled in the scrub and it was torn open. The precious flour was pouring out into the mud. Disaster. However, he had a sudden brilliant idea. He took his trousers off, and then his long john one piece underwear. He managed to pour most of the flour into this, tied it shut at the waist, then secured it onto the packhorse like a pair of legs. He triumphantly delivered it to the housewife when he finished the trip. It was the only flour she could get for a month, and she had to use it for all her bread and cakes. I am sure that for that whole month every time she scooped out the flour the question haunted her – did he turn the underpants inside out before he put the flour into them?
