Economy and practicality were the watch words of domestic cookery manuals in the late nineteenth century. It was Mrs Beeton who wrote that ‘Frugality and economy are home virtues, without which no household can prosper’ in the 1860s, but the idea that thrift was essential to good household management was by no means a new idea. A host of cookbooks had already addressed ‘the economical cook and frugal housewife’. As the nineteenth century wore on these notions became freighted with greater moral and social value.
Thrift and good, plain cooking underscored all cookery teaching in Britain and were the implicit guiding principles behind cookbooks published in Australia throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Plain cooking meant simple dishes utilising the resources available – think fresh, seasonal, produce prepared with a minimum of messing about. Roasting, boiling, baking, frying and grilling, the processes which created good honest, traditional English fare, were the foundations of plain cooking. But “plain” cookery required just as much care and skill as high-class cookery, the difference between the two related not to the method but to the kind, and quantity of the ingredients.[1] Advocates of plain cookery believed that a well-cooked dinner, no matter how humble, was guaranteed to promote digestion and would lead to contentment and happiness.[2]
As to thrift, economy in the use of both time and materials was recommended as the basis of all good cookery[3]. Economy was not to be confused with stinginess – to quote Mrs Wicken, a graduate of the National Training School in London, author of the Kingswood Cookery Book and one time instructor at Sydney Technical College:
Economy in the kitchen does not mean buying the cheapest eggs, butter and other provisions, but buying carefully of the best, and knowing just how much material is needed to make a wholesome and tasty dish.[4]
Wicken was very much of the opinion that it was ‘the duty and pleasure of every woman … to consider how to get the greatest amount of comfort for her family with an outlay proportionate to her means.’[5]
Apart from advocating plain cooking, the most popular Australian books of the early years of the twentieth century were themselves plain. Largely free of any sort of illustrations they offered minimal and sometimes downright vague instruction. There was an emphasis on the use of leftovers, recipes utilising offal and on simple preservation techniques such as jam and pickle making. These books provided sufficient inspiration for cooks to produce easily prepared, uncomplicated, nourishing and tasty dishes and to make best use of a garden restricted by seasonal availability, financial considerations and the dominance of British culture. Thrift and plain cooking continued to dominate Australian cookbooks until the 1950s. Consequently, many regard the first half of the twentieth century as the dark ages of Australian cookery, the era of food that was dull, bland and boring.
By the 1950s, years of Depression and war time rationing had given economising a bad name. Thrift was now associated with deprivation, with limited choices, and having to make do. Moreover, with increased prosperity a diet of meat and three veg and a weekly menu based around a roast on Sunday, refashioned leftovers for most of the week, fish on Friday and sausages on Saturday was now considered prosaic and monotonous.[6] Rather than being simply filling and nutritious meals now needed to be more varied and adventurous. Eating was no longer simply about staving off hunger, Australian eaters had grown up and now regarded themselves as sophisticated, with a taste for cosmopolitan food.[7] For many, plain food was conjured as a symbol of colonialism, cultural insularity and immature tastes, others embraced the development of a more diverse food landscape but retained a nostalgic appreciation of a simpler life. [8] Overall plain food was regarded as at best conservative.
As part of this food cultural awakening, writing about food moved out of women’s magazines and the women’s columns of the newspapers. Magazines devoted to food and wine – Epicurean and the Australian Gourmet - made their first appearance in 1966. It was no longer good enough that food was merely tasty, it needed to be delicious, and perhaps most significantly it needed to look interesting and stylish. In 1968 Paul Hamlyn published The Margaret Fulton Cookbook.
This was by no means the first Australian cookbook to promote more sophisticated dining,[9] but, with its stylish design and full colour photographs, Fulton’s most clearly illustrates Australian culinary culture at the crossroads, poised to abandon any lingering parsimonious overtones, and launch headlong into the endless desire for new tastes, the latest ingredient, or the smartest restaurant.
Fulton made no mention of leftovers or home preserving, although she retained recipes for old fashioned plain food such as rabbit, lamb’s fry, brains, Scotch broth and the like which, while they may have lacked imagination, were the ‘comfort food’ of the colonial past. These old standbys rubbed shoulders with more sophisticated ‘home style’ dishes from around the world, Chinese stir fries, Indian curries, and great dishes from Europe, such as Swiss fondue, Beef Bourguignonne and Osso Bucco included, according to Fulton, because they were ‘colourful, fascinating and varied’.
Thrift was barely mentioned although Fulton espoused familiar attitudes to quality and good cooking – claiming to prefer ‘a superb chop to a filet mignon carelessly prepared’. Plain food, or at least using plain as an adjective to describe food, was pretty much on the way to the dustbin. Although on the whole Fulton’s recipes remained simple and uncomplicated the photographs made even hamburger patties appear elegant and luxurious.
The Margaret Fulton Cookbook (Sydney: Paul Hamlyn, 1968), p. 93.
Paradoxically, through the 60s and 70s as it became more usual for women to work outside the home and devote less time to food preparation, they were also expected to be more imaginative and creative in the kitchen. Little wonder then that thrift had less to do with saving money and more to do with saving time – think labour saving devices, the use of convenience products, from tinned tomatoes and frozen peas to ready-made meals, eating out and takeaway food - rather than with time-consuming shopping and hours spent on careful preparation.[10]
At the same time the range of raw materials cooks could choose from and the potential sources of inspiration, widened dramatically. Pantries became crammed with unfamiliar ingredients and home cooks became more reliant on recipes, rather than their experience and intuition, as they strove to master cuisines form all over the world. Good eating was promoted as less about nourishment and more about knowing the difference between a taco and an enchilada, or how to pronounce bruschetta. Where once dining at restaurants and hotels had been the purview of the wealthy, eating out became a middle-class hobby and it has been restaurant style food and chefs and their creativity which has become the benchmark by which the food in the middle-class kitchen is judged.
So, what has happened to thrift and plain cooking? As an example, consider the latest publication from chef Neil Perry, Everything I Love to Cook (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2021). While Perry enthuses about fresh, seasonal produce and valuing quality over quantity, the idea of thrift is now also linked to the broader implications of our food choices - to the health of the planet, to eating less meat and re-discovering seasonality. Thrift now translates as sustainability and ethical production. Paradoxically, for many these thrifty items - an ethically bred chicken, sustainably sourced fish and organically grown vegetables - are luxuries well outside their economic means. For anyone on a limited budget eating less meat is a simple result of financial necessity rather than a calculated ethical choice. For anyone without easy access to a farmer’s market the time and effort involved with obtaining the best fruit in season or properly free-range eggs, is no match for the vast range of the pre-packaged, mass produced and manufactured products at the supermarket.
No one today would suggest that Perry’s food was plain, although it requires no specialist skills or fancy equipment, and still relies on the basic techniques of roasting, frying, grilling, etc down to even extolling the results of cooking over an open fire. His recipes include for example a whole chapter on the humble sandwich, ‘pimped up’ versions of old favourites like rice pudding, detailed advice on making the best hamburger, and home cooked versions of the meals he serves in his restaurants and dishes up to international travellers on Qantas flights. This sort of simple food now draws from a global garden of ingredients, which include 4 types of salt, 5 olive oils and 7 vinegars, to produce dishes Perry describes variously as ‘gorgeous’, ‘epic’, ‘sublime’ and ‘awesome’. Where Fulton’s book made simple food look glamorous, the photographs in Perry’s book make sophisticated food, look both delicious and plain.
Neil Perry's AKA Chinese Bolognese from Everything I Love to Cook.
Cookbooks, culinary literature, and food media in general, as part of our consumer culture, work, indeed some would say they exist, to encourage our dissatisfaction with the staid and familiar, and reshape our expectations of food and cooking by redefining our understanding of what is good, simple, and thrifty. But even in modern parlance ‘kitchen thrift’ is defined as ‘a home-based set of goal orientated practises that conserves or increases food resources while supporting well-being’, a sentiment with which Harriet Wicken would completely agree. [11] The understanding of what constitutes plain food may change but legions of home cooks, striving to get the greatest amount of happiness for themselves, and for their family, given the range of resources they can afford, and the limited time they have available, are still regularly making tasty and nourishing meals from leftovers.
[1] Mary Hooper, Good Plain Cookery (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1882), p. xiii.
[2] Harriet Wicken, Kingswood Cookery Book (Melbourne: George Robertson & Co., 1888), preface.
[3] Hooper, Good Plain Cookery, p. xiii.
[4] Harriet Wicken, The Cook’s Compass (Sydney: J.G. Hanks & Co., 1890), p. 11.
[5] Wicken, The Kingswood Cookery Book, 6th edition (Sydney: Whitcombe and Toombs Limited. 1905/6), p. 31.
[6] Mary Douglas, ‘Coded messages’, in Consuming Passions. Food in the age of anxiety, eds. Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace (Manchester: Mandolin, 1998), pp. 103–109.
[7] Margaret Standish, ‘Australia is developing food-consciousness,’ Argus (Melb.), 27 December 1950, p. 2.
[8] ‘The food they loved as children,’ Australian Women’s Weekly, 21 October 1954, p. 38.
[9] For example, Donovan Clarke Cookery for Occasions (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1949); Ted Maloney Oh for a French wife (Sydney: The Shepherd Press, 1952); Maria Kozslik Donovan Continental Cookery in Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann Ltd, 1955) and an Australian edition of The Far Eastern Epicure (Melbourne: William Heinemann Ltd, 1961).
[10] For example, ‘Be creative with cake mixes,’ Australian Women’s Weekly, 22 January 1964, p. 41; ‘How to glamorise quick frozen vegetables,’ Australian Women’s Weekly, 13 August 1975, p. 121; ‘Hours or minutes,’ Australian Women’s Weekly, 23 April 1980, p. 80.
[11] Jennifer E. Courtney, ‘Understanding the significance of "kitchen thrift" in prescriptive texts about food’ in ed. Melissa A. Goldthwaite, Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017) , pp. 48–59.