The Blue Ribbon Cookbook

This cute little book from curious and adventurous South Australian publisher Wakefield Press is also, for this reviewer, just a little irritating. Let me explain.

What author Liz Harfull has done is to garner recipes and stories from the prize-winning entrants to cooking competitions around country South Australia. Expect Rich Fruit Cake, Rock Buns, Chocolate Cupcakes and Sultana Cake. There are a few savoury dishes — Sue’s Sausage Rolls, Mary’s Farm Pasties — and a drizzle of chutneys and sauces, Eggplant and Chilli Chutney and Mustard Pickle being just two.

The stories accompanying the recipes tell of these seemingly gentle women turning into ferocious competitors at show time, and each recipe offers ‘Tips for the cooks’ and ‘Tips from the judges’ (“Make sure the jars are clean and polished with a soft cloth”).

What irritates me is not that is not done well — it is, and it is fascinatingly and profusely illustrated with archival photographs, ancient advertisements and portraits of the cooks — but that it doesn’t go far enough.

These shows and these cooks offer a rich source of domestic cooking that goes way beyond the cakes, tarts, jams and jellies they produce for competition. I wrote a story (for the Slow Food magazine) on the history of the cooking competitions at the Royal Sydney Show and spent hours in the archives, and then interviewed some of the same types of women Harfull has spoken to for her book.

What emerged for me was the secret history of good Australian domestic cooking. It soon became obvious that in addition to cooking their Rich Fruit Cakes and Cinnamon Coffee Cakes these (mostly country) women were seriously good all-round cooks. Which puts the lie to claims there was no good Australian cooking before the post-WWII arrival of migrants from the Mediterranean (a notion I have been guilty of propagating in the past).

One delightful woman I talked to, Glad Schute, began to outline some of her other cooking and ended with a statement about the important role food played in the Schute household: “With my kids, if I stood in the same place too long, they’d eat me.” Don’t know about eating Glad, but I bet she has a few family dishes worth recording.

So I hope this is only the first stage for Liz Harfull and that she is now working on a domestic food book. I know I tried to get publisher interest in just such a book — and failed. But I reckon the time is now right.

In the meantime, the Blue Ribbon Cookbook is a goldmine for anyone interested in fair-dinkum desserts and the history of Australian domestic cooking.