History with flavour

Good food and generous hospitality were part of the rhythms of domestic life at Rouse Hill House. A collection of cookbooks and handwritten recipes accumulated over more than a hundred years remains in the house, and provides a taste of the family’s culinary repertoire through times of boom and bust.

Over 180 years, Rouse Hill House was home to six generations of one family – the Rouses and, by marriage, the Terrys. Among the vast collection of family possessions that remain in the house are cookery books – both British and Australian publications – dating from between 1849 and the 1950s, and handwritten recipes on slips of paper. Many pages are tattered and bear telltale food stains that signal active use, and some books are inscribed with their owner’s name. The fact that we can cook from these recipes today helps us understand the types of food enjoyed by past generations of Australians, and the techniques employed to produce them. Now, of course, we have the advantage of modern technology and food production systems, but these historical culinary references can help us appreciate the time, effort and skills that were required of cooks in the past, to put food on their tables.

Food for thought

As historical artefacts, the books and manuscript recipes held onto by the family can be understood in several ways. Their material or physical form (including weight, size and quality) can indicate their cost and status when first produced; and their condition, whether pristine or well worn, suggests levels of reverence and use.

As cultural products, the published works convey the established, prescribed tastes and cooking styles that authors felt to be appropriate for readers at the time of publication, while annotations and food stains indicate the users’ actual engagement with the book and the types of ingredients and techniques being used. Similarly, handwritten recipes indicate personal interest in a dish and making it themselves.

Some texts – and the handwritten recipes in particular – can also be considered in relation to the meaning they held for different owners and users. Some may have been consulted as instructive texts, while many handwritten recipes contain scant detail, suggesting assumed knowledge of the required method, cooking temperatures or ingredient quantities. Others may have more emotional bearing, perhaps kept as mementos of family members or friends, or of special occasions.

Advance Australian fare

The use of both English and locally authored cookery books reflects the hybrid nature of colonial NSW society in the 19th century, shaped and influenced by British tastes, customs and sensibilities but often adjusted for local conditions. Colonists adapted their knowledge and traditions – including cooking practices – to the local climate, available ingredients, and notions of class and social standing. As the century progressed towards the centenary of the NSW colony in 1888 and talks of national federation, colonial cookbooks indicate a growing sense of a distinct Australian identity.

The printed books kept at Rouse Hill House vary from hefty, pricey tomes to more modest publications, many of them sold as ‘one shilling’ cookbooks. Most of the English books in the collection were published prior to 1890, and the locally authored texts date from 1891, suggesting a shift away from British texts as sources of authority in favour of local voices. The latter include The Kingswood cookery book by Harriet Wicken (1891); Australian cookery: recipes for the people by Margaret Pearson (1894); Mrs Maclurcan’s cookery book by Hannah Maclurcan (c1903); Cookery book of good and tried receipts by the (Presbyterian) Women’s Missionary Association (c1910s–20s); and the Common-sense cookery book by the NSW Cookery Teachers’ Association Australia (c1915–20s). Although the dishes and cooking methods are in the English style, some of them reflect an appetite for recipes better suited to local ingredients and conditions.

In her self-titled book, Australian-born author Mrs Maclurcan provides recipes for native and endemic produce, including wallaby and kangaroo, wonga pigeon and scrub (or bush) turkey, rosellas (from the wild hibiscus plant, not the birds) and prickly pears. Local ingredients were also included in books written by immigrant authors such as Margaret Pearson, who arrived in Australia in 1887 with a ‘diplome’ in cookery from London. Produced just five years later, Australian cookery: recipes for the people has recipes for locally found foods such as eels and Australian river fish, and game birds such as parrots and wattlebirds. Some of these resources made their way into British cookbooks, no doubt for novelty value – for example, fricasseed or curried kangaroo tails, roasted wallaby, and parrot pie. You can see a selection of pages from these books here. Several recipes have been adapted with modern measurements so that cooks can try making them at home.

Reliable sources

One of the distinctive traits of Rouse Hill Estate and its time-layered collection is the evidence of use and reuse over time. For example, many of the 19th-century furnishings now in the collection were used by the family until the 1990s. Similarly, two cookbooks dating from the 1880s show evidence of use in the 1940s and 50s. Inserted in Warne’s model cookery & housekeeping (one-shilling edition, 1884) is a newspaper clipping of an Electricity Company promotion from around 1943 featuring a recipe for ‘cake without butter’, apparently part of a wartime ‘cook for victory’ campaign. A department store receipt dated 1950 is used as a page marker in Mrs Beeton’s book of household management (c1880s). These inserts indicate that the older texts continued to be valued as culinary references and also stand as testament to the maintenance of traditional cookery while modernisations such as refrigeration, industrial fuels – including coal and kerosene – and, later, electricity, gradually crept in.

Women’s business

The cookery books also reinforce gender and service roles in middle-class households during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Rouses employed the services of a cook for several generations; however, the responsibility for entertaining and menu planning was generally bestowed on the women of the family. By the mid-19th century, this responsibility fell to Hannah Rouse (nee Hipkins), wife of Edwin Rouse. The couple met soon after Hannah arrived from England in 1837, when she was visiting the Terry family, neighbours of the Rouses, at Box Hill. Edwin was impressed to find her ‘busy in the kitchen making damper’, suggesting she was a practical woman, a useful trait for one living on a rural property, even for people of means.¹ They married in 1840 and often entertained, and Rouse Hill became known for its sometimes lavish hospitality. One house guest was so impressed during her stay at Rouse Hill House in the late 1850s that she waxed lyrical in a poem about the food she enjoyed:

… oh the goodly
Cream & Pies the Ham – the Fowls – the Custard,
The Rolls & Eggs – that cooked themselves – & don’t forget the Mustard
The Oranges & Marmalade – the Medlars & the damper …

Extract from poem by Evelyn Robinson, c1858–60, in Caroline Rouse Thornton, Rouse Hill and the Rouses²

Bessie Rouse (nee Buchanan) became mistress of the house when she married Edwin and Hannah’s son Edwin Stephen in 1874. She was pleased with the household help at Rouse Hill House, reporting to her mother: ‘the cook seems a pleasant woman and I hope will suit … The dinner yesterday evening was so nicely cooked and got up and the table looked very well indeed. I had Mrs Jones and Mrs Brown to help with the washing up’.³ Not all staff worked out so well, with one cook unable to perform her duties after imbibing too much alcohol.

Even with household help, Bessie was willing to involve herself in food preparation. When preparing for a trip to the horse races with friends, she wrote that ‘we set to work and cut the sandwiches and started for the races a little after 11’.⁴ Eventually, Bessie’s mother’s cook, Kate Joyce, transferred her services to the Rouse family, staying at Rouse Hill House until 1923, having given more than 40 years’ service to Bessie and her parents.

A young apprentice

Bessie’s elder daughter, Nina, took an avid interest in cooking and spent hours in the kitchen watching Kate Joyce at work. Nina’s sister, Kathleen, did neither. Although they were born into a life of privilege, both girls were given books about homemaking from a young age. These include The child’s book of knowledge (1882), given to Nina, and Kathleen’s Good things made, said, & done, for every home & household (1885). Neither title is specifically a cookery book, but they include sections on food, cooking and dining etiquette, and suggest the future roles the girls would be expected to take in their homes. Kathleen lamented her lack of skill when travelling in her early thirties, confiding in a letter to her father, ‘I’m afraid its [sic] rather late in life to learn much, but I must try and cook a bit when I return [home]’.⁵

After Bessie died and Kate Joyce retired, Nina moved back into the house with her husband, George Terry, and their four sons. She took over the household cooking duties, not only for her family, but also for her father and sister and, at times, workers employed on the estate. Kathleen was critical of Nina, complaining to their father in 1927 that she was ‘continually on the run [and] always at work’, helping with her husband’s and sons’ businesses as well as domestic catering duties, ‘which can’t be good for her’. If an employed helper could take on the cooking, ‘Nina would get a rest from the eternal going & there would not be meals at all hours in the kitchen. We are all getting too old for this sort of muddle’.⁶

Nina’s granddaughters remember her as a talented cook. Caroline Rouse Thornton attributed the rich quality of Nina’s relatively plain cooking to good fresh homegrown produce – eggs, milk, meat and vegetables. Nina’s specialties included ‘the most flavoursome gravy [and] delicious beef tea ... ever tasted’, rich Yorkshire puddings and ‘eggy, light, delicious sponges’, all made using the iron fuel stove that remains in the kitchen at Rouse Hill House.⁷ Thornton’s cousin Miriam Hamilton fondly remembered the birthday cakes and pink blancmange that Nina prepared for parties.⁸

A more accessible version of the carrot pudding recipe from the image above can be found here.

Sweet, but not always simple

It is difficult to know whether recipes in a published text were of interest to their owners unless there is evidence of use, such as worn pages, annotations and food stains. The most well-thumbed pages are generally for sweet and dessert cookery. This is typical in many recipe collections, including those from other house museums under the care of Museums of History NSW, such as Rose Seidler House and Meroogal. As culinary historian Colin Bannerman explains, savoury cooking is more forgiving on timing and ingredient ratios, but sweet dishes require closer attention to a recipe – for example, the amount of gelatine required to set a pudding, the oven temperature or the quantity of eggs for the lightness of a cake. Even if she employed household help, the lady of the house might prepare special desserts or tea treats, leaving the ordinary or more hearty fare to her cook.⁹ Cakes and biscuits were more likely to be served at social events such as morning and afternoon teas, either at home or at community gatherings. They were a way for women to demonstrate their tastes and cooking skills and share them with others. It is these kinds of recipes that are most often written out, kept and exchanged, transcribed from published sources or shared by cooks with others who expressed an interest in making the product themselves.

You can view a version of the gingernuts recipe pictured in the image below here.

Proof in the pudding

Handwritten recipes offer more direct proof of interest in a recipe or resulting dish, as they show that someone cared enough to write out the recipe for themselves or to pass on to someone else. These are often attributed to their source, usually the person who recommended or made the dish for others to share. Many became heirloom recipes, kept by families for the next generations. Some recipes are recorded and cooked from as a way of remembering a person or occasion, while handwriting provides a tangible connection to their authors.

A pair of handwritten recipes, for meat soufflé and quenelles, may have been kept as a memento of extended family in regional NSW. Found inside a late-19th-century Warne’s model cookery book inscribed ‘Nina B. Terry/Rouse’, they were recorded on a piece of paper headed ‘Baroona Whittingham’. Baroona, in the Hunter Valley, was the home of Nina’s aunt, Phoebe Dangar (nee Rouse), after she married Abby Dangar in 1866. The soufflé is akin to meatloaf and the quenelles to meatballs. The recipes are similar in that both rely on meat being finely minced into a paste. Without the benefit of electrical appliances, this was time-consuming work, chopping meat very finely or feeding chunks through a hand-operated mincer if one was at hand, and then rubbing the mince through a sieve to achieve the required consistency for a lightly textured result. Could it be that these dishes were enjoyed with the Dangars on a visit to Baroona, and kindly written out after a discussion about how they were made?

These recipes also invite us to consider changes in tastes and the ways we cook over time. Today we would probably bake or fry these kinds of meat preparations, and quite likely finish them with a tomato-based sauce, but for these recipes the meat is steamed or boiled and served with white sauce. The recommended side of ‘macedoine’ (chopped mixed vegetables) for these pale, boiled morsels would certainly add some welcome colour!

Beyond the page

As a collection accumulated by one family over many generations, the books and recipes become more than the sum of their parts, encompassing the social and cultural changes the family experienced during their residency at Rouse Hill House. They act as markers of social organisation, generational changes and economic circumstances within the household, all of which influenced domestic hierarchies and relationships, the use of servants and culinary technologies. As a representative chronology of cookery, the books and recipes illustrate changes in tastes, ingredients and methods. They also help make sense of the evolving use of rooms once dedicated to food preparation and storage at Rouse Hill House. The woodfired bread oven, butter churns and a ‘bottling outfit’ for preserving fruit in season remind us of the family’s dependence on house-made food staples, as do the outbuildings – such as the fowl run, milking shed and slaughterhouse – that played a part in keeping the family stocked with homegrown produce.

Although the need for these homemade products diminished as retail markets and regional commercial centres became more prevalent in the district, many of these books and the dishes they inspired were used and enjoyed for 70 years or more. We still delight in sharing many of them today. You can look up the books on the Museums of History NSW collections catalogue, and a series of recipes tried and tested using modern measurements and appliances can be found on our website.

More recipes

Find the following recipes from the Rouse Hill Estate Collection on the Cook and Curator blog:

Tomato chutney, Pineapple and melon jam, Rasped lemon sherbet, Salt-preserved lemons, Devilled bones, Honey toffee, Gingernuts, Meat souffle and quenelles, Cheese darlings, Curried bananas, Stewed tomatoes, Australian soup and Christmas plum pudding.