The Busy Woman's Cookbook

My dear friend Emily knows I collect vintage and off-beat cookbooks and so on Friday when I saw her and our friends for dinner at The Press Club, she handed over a copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly The Busy Woman’s Cookbook, published in 1972 (the year of my birth).

There is so much to love about this piece of food history: the distinctively seventies use of brown and yellow, the Goodies font used throughout, the pink lipstick and blue eye shadow on the woman lighting red candles on the cover. Moreover looking through the recipes in the book, they reflect perfectly the ways in which Australians from English speaking backgrounds approached food and cooking at the time.

The chapters follow the course approach to structuring a cook book – soups hot and cold, the first course, salads, fish, chicken, meat and desserts cold and hot. There are only a few sauces for pastas – including curried steak. In any modern cookbook our continuing love of the Italian noodle would ensure a pasta sauce chapter was at least as long as the salad chapter.

In terms of cooking with alcohol, Sherry is a favourite (as is Marsala), whereas now we cook with good red and white wine and with alcohol from different cultures such as Chinese rice wine.

In terms of spices, curry (powder not paste) is used in very Anglo-type dishes – minced steak, mayonnaise chicken and so on. In terms of fresh herbs it’s mainly parsley.

There are lots of recipes for veal and hardly any for lamb. It’s all about canned and fresh white fish rather than fresh seafood and fresh salmon.

In terms of sweets, there is a fairly narrow range of fruits used – apple, banana, pineapple and lemon mainly - whereas it’s hard to imagine a cook book today without recipes using berries and stone fruits.

Asparagus is canned. There is hardly a mention of oils and when it is mentioned it isn’t of the extra virgin type.

There are some shockers in there.

Fish fingers in sauce verte (using fish fingers frozen from a packet)
Crab Creole with canned crab meat
Curried sausages
And the famous apricot chicken

That being said, there are definitely recipes that stand the test of time in this book, albeit more along the sweet end of the spectrum (such as the very pretty rose wine ice).

There is a straightforward and unpretentious approach in old style cook books like this which I love. It’s not about glossy pictures that make your dish look inadequate. It’s not about lifestyle or conspicuous consumption. It is all aimed at people who will actually use these recipes. I like that.

I feel a seventies dinner party coming on, minus the key swapping.