Recipe

The Ultimate Insult

‘The Woman Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris’ is a little movie about manners in Sydney, if manners are what you wish to call them. Frustrated by his yuppie wife’s pretensions, more particularly her constant reports of a friend who has met the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, the husband plans a confrontation in the café where this friend is a waitress. Browbeaten and drunk he retreats home later, muttering at the kitchen table the ultimate insult: “You and your Simone de Beauvoir in Paris! You and your Elizabeth David cookbooks!”

Work Place Relations

When a new male joins the staff certain rites of passage are enacted at morning tea. These normally conclude with statements like, “So in fact you have a Peugeot and a Pajero and the moke is for the beach,” or “Why would you barrack for a bunch of dropkicks like the Hawks?” When a new female joins the staff, not long after a tin of homemade orange biscuits appears for morning tea. After steady consumption of these biscuits, and general signs of approval, someone (invariably another female) leans forward and says: “These biscuits are delicious. Have you got the recipe?”

Jimmy Webb

Mississippi and a few other words sort of rhyme with Recipe, which is why it doesn’t spring to mind when singing a song. Even the famous “cake left out in the rain” rhymes rather gloomily with “again”; in fact, in that song the recipe has been lost, in much the same way as the author’s good taste. Most good recipe songs are for children, like ‘The Candyman Can’.

A Walking Dictionary

Recipe is the second singular impersonal of the Latin word recipere, to receive. Before the 18^th century any English speaker using the word meant chemist’s prescription. That is, take two before bed-time. Doctors headed their prescription with R, still the symbol seen in pharmacies everywhere. So when the Jesuit Robert Parsons writes in 1584, “Hee died in the way of an extreame Flux, caused by an Italian recipe,” he means the medicine helped him on his way. The word used for cooking preparations was receipt, which found its way into Middle English from the same source. When Chaucer asks for the bill by saying “What shal this receyt coste? telleth now”, we have some idea of where modern receipt comes from. By the time it comes to mean a list of food ingredients, not herbal ingredients, the word is being used for any combination that might effect a good end. It is really only in Victorian times that the word is used most commonly in the way we use it. First, catch your hare.

The Antidote

A chaplain of Trinity College within the University of Melbourne once gave a sermon about depression. When he was really depressed he would go out and buy the biggest glossiest cookbook available. The colour illustrations of stockpots and meringues would be enough to snap him out of his melancholy, if only for a while. He could dream of all those savours and flavours. But the real message was, there is no way you can escape the questions that trouble you by reading a recipe, there is no way in this world that you can really run home to mother.

Blank Page

Boys never learnt to cook in Australia. This was the preserve of the women and it was only the girls who were taught how to bake scones or roast potatoes. Boys came in and ate when they were called. Only in girls’ schools was there any such thing as Domestic Science, the ultimate meaning of which was to train girls in how to run households while the husband counted the beans, made the bread, and brought home the bacon. But only older men nowadays can get away with joking how they know how to boil a three-minute egg. Knowing thirty basic recipes ought to be a non-option at Year Twelve; it would help cut down the youth suicide rate too.

Bringing It All Back Home

The kitchen was the home and there knowledge was imparted that was practical and spiritual. The increase in production of the cookbook can be seen in inverse ratio to domestic life in the kitchen. Who needs a book when you have someone showing you how to prepare any meal you want? Conversely, if you have no skill as a chef and no one to show you how to cook, what else will you do but turn to a book for your guide?

Revered Tome

A house may have a hundred perfect recipe books with beautiful sketches of Piedmont, crisp explanations with exact measurements, indexes that lead you back up the garden path for that obscure mauve herb. Every house though has the battered scrapbook, especially battered at the cake pages. 1959 newspaper cuttings for the perfect minestrone stuck next to your grandmother’s illegible directions for the Gingerbeer Plant stuck next to a handout card for Hungarian Goulash courtesy of your friendly butcher stuck next to the ingredients hurriedly scribbled down at the drunken party for the famous Bombe Alaska. The spine of this book bends out and has to be tied down with a ribbon. Countless other cuttings fall out every time you open it. No matter how many incredible Italian recipe books you own you know that this shambles of a book would be the one most likely to survive the Big Cull. 

Clifton Hill, Thursday the tenth of September, 1998