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    The Awful Cook
    The Awful Cook
    The Awful Cook
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    The Awful Cook

    By Lara Brooks

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    hilarious cooking misadventures and calamitous dinner parties using wood-fired, gas, electric stoves and microwave ovens; set in biographical snippets from world war II until the present. for anyone suffering pangs of guilt from being a failed ‘master chef’, take heart, you are not alone!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLara Brooks
    Release dateMay 17, 2014
    ISBN9781310111006
    The Awful Cook

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      Book preview

      The Awful Cook - Lara Brooks

      The Awful Cook

      Lara Brooks

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2014 Lara Brooks

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

      Cover design by www.simongoodway.com

      Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

      Preface

      While I eagerly await the scientific discovery of the ‘Cooking Gene’ to excuse my cooking disasters—and I will surely have a faulty one, I wish to pay tribute to the many friends and acquaintances whose hospitality I have enjoy over many decades; thank you most sincerely. As time passes, I appreciate more and more the quality of the meals, the selection of wines and liquers, and above all, the first-rate company. This is the most important, indeed vital ingredient of any truly memorable meal. Looking back on my own efforts to reciprocate such wonderful generosity, I am reminded of my own strenuous yet failed cooking attempts by offering my abject apologies by quoting from Robert Burns poem, ‘To a Mouse’, "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, an' leave us nought but grief an' pain, for promised joy!

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Boiled Christmas Pudding

      Jessie’s Hogmanay

      A Secret Spice

      Rabbit Stew And A Dog Called ‘custard’

      Alas, Poor Soufflé

      Cooking Under The Influence

      Fondue Party

      Dutch Pea Soup

      How To Make Old Fashioned Ginger Beer

      Winemaking

      Living Off The Land

      Boiled Christmas Pudding

      For months before Christmas, my mother and aunts would hold sessions where the kettle was boiled, tea leaves carefully measured out, every sugar crystal jealously guarded. They would have mysterious conversations, lots of laughter, strange odd parcels were handed around, and because they sent us out to play regardless of the weather, we knew that they were planning for Christmas. It took weeks and months, and sometimes bus trips to strange little villages where grown-ups haggled, produced purses of money, swapped coupons, had a cup of tea and returned home with some truly precious cargo.

      Like any child, Christmas was a time of anticipation. It didn’t matter that the whole world was engaged in a terrible war. As a child I didn’t know about the savagery, or how people survived. War was for grown-ups! I knew that some men went away and never came back; others came back but there was less of them—missing arms and legs, and eyes. Or eyes that didn’t seem to see anything, and we were warned to avoid them as they were unpredictable. My only truly awful experience happened one day before I had even started school and when I was playing outside waiting for the neighbouring children to come home. Jimmy lived next door with his family and he was home on leave from the army. He saw me, strode over and pulling himself up very straight, spat on me, calling me ‘an Itie bastard’. My first, but certainly not my last racial vilification, which continues to this day despite changing countries and continents several times. When I told my uncle, who had been torpedoed twice, the tears came to his eyes for he knew that we were all fighting for our country in spite of our parentage. But as a child, meals magically appeared on the table everyday and how my mother produced these wonderful meals was not my concern. My classmates, some whom were extremely poor, would stand outside our house just to sniff the aromas and imagine the wonders cooking in the oven. Another memory of that time was when we all went to see our classmate Mary laid out in her coffin—she had died of a ‘strange disease’, malnutrition. Mary was one of a family of eleven children and while they had coupons they didn’t have enough money to be properly fed.

      My aunt Jessie was a genius at dressmaking, toy making and cooking, and my mother was a wonderful cook who had ‘connections’. Christmas meant pre-planning, and the collecting of ingredients—who had spare sugar, who could search out spices, who could acquire dried fruit, who could get a hold of......and the list grew. If you didn’t have enough coupons, who did you know who knew someone who could get something on the Black Market. That was costly and who could pay for it? A lot of negotiations went on. I didn’t know about all this until many, many years later.

      My mother’s ethnic background left her lacking in the art of cooking Christmas puddings. Her best efforts were always coverd with a skin of something akin to old shoe leather. On the other hand, my aunt Jessie produced wonderful Christmas Puddings.

      I have memories of great housewives—Scottish (aunt Jessie was one), Irish, South African, American, New Zealand, and Australian that I had encountered, who began preparing for Christmas weeks, indeed months beforehand. Sometimes I even helped, while we children licked wooden spoons and bowls, stole handfuls of sultanas, made off with the occasional glace cherry, and sometimes slurped a stolen spoonful of the mixture. In all the chaos, in different countries and indeed, different continents, all these women produced delicious puddings, be it in the cramped kitchen of a Scottish croft, an imposing farmhouse, an Irish terrace where the heat was welcome as the snows piled up outside. In the Southern Hemisphere, they cooked over wood stoves, on gas ranges, on electric ranges, all in overwhelming heat. They were strong women, cooking with cast iron pots and pans, some jam pans which when filled with fruit and sugar could have been used in Olympic weight training! While on my first visit New Zealand I was so impressed with these relics that I bought an entire set from a second hand shop. The only size I couldn’t buy was a cauldron used on the whaling stations to render the blubber into oil. The steamships Whangaratta and Wanganella (or was it the Wanganui?) still sailed from Sydney to Auckland twice a week, so there was no problem with excess luggage.

      Were these just childhood memories? Was Christmas only in my imagination when it was a much anticipated celebration that came once a year, not the tawdry tinsel plastic piped-carol season lasting for months we endure today?

      It was almost Christmas, and as a new bride I was determined to cook a delicious Christmas lunch for my husband and a few guests who lived on the other side of the Australia, too far from their families to make it home. I settled on standard Christmas fare. Then from somewhere in my subconscious up popped the memory of aunt Jessie’s Boiled Christmas Pudding. Yes, that would be it, my ‘piece de resistance’. It couldn’t be too difficult, could it?

      Mother had saved the Cookery Book and Home Baking Guide’ prepared for Lofty Peak Flour, the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society Ltd., Flour Department. To quote, Six years of war, with its hardships and shortages, taught thousands of our womenfolk to rediscover the art of Home Baking, and it is acknowledged that the dainty cakes and appetising scones made to Lofty Peak recipes, which graced countless tea table throughout the land, enabled us to forget disaster and difficulties and helped us win through." I had Van Loon’s Lives which I consulted occasionally! These were no help.

      I prevailed on friends, neighbours and colleagues to divulge their best recipe. This took

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