Hometown Reflections

Asked about my hometown, Toowoomba, my glib reply is that it's the Australian capital of evangelical Christian churches and incest. The Deep South of Australia's north.
There are no shortage of places to go in Toowoomba on a Sunday if you like to wave your arms in the air and submit to healing hands: I recall attending one such service as a cadet reporter on the local newspaper assigned to interview a visiting preacher. I was about as horrified by the spectacle as I was by some of the car crashes I was sent to cover. In the late '80s, the right-wing Logos Foundation moved its headquarters to town (the church's charismatic pastor was eventually felled by a delicious adultery scandal) and more recently and perhaps more famously, the magnificently named Magnificat Meal Movement made the hamlet of Helidon, just outside Toowoomba, home. (The founder of MMM also had her problems: a Catholic bishop who labelled the movement a 'cult' and a loquacious ex-husband who described her as a 'fake' and whose mutterings about a 'doomsday burning' resulted in the MMM headquarters being surrounded by police and journalists on the 9th of September, 1999. Nothing happened.)
In my days in the offices of The Toowoomba Chronicle (where computers had just started to take over and 'compositors' — formerly printers — waxed the backs of bromide paper bearing the typeset articles before sticking them to art board), endless press releases whirred and clacked their way out of the wire machine announcing everything from the movements of local members of parliament, to charity fundraisers, local sports fixture results and government statistics showing Toowoomba's alarmingly high incest rates. I don't know whether the figures still rate among the nation's highest, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I have been thinking about my hometown because it has again made national headlines. This time, two baby brothers, four and 18 months, are dead. The crime scene, a house in an area on the wrong side of the tracks. Not the first time Toowoomba has been in the headlines for such a terrible thing.

Tacos and Chinese Takeout
Segueing to another, lighter topic: one thing Toowoomba has never made headline news for is its food (except perhaps for Weis's restaurant, famous for its all-you-can-eat seafood smorgasbord, the place for special celebrations and, oddly, where I first tried frogs' legs). Mum always talked about opening a restaurant in the town, a curry restaurant (early in her married life she found a couple of very authentic Indian cookbooks which still inform her cooking — and her musty cluttered pantry); I wonder if her musings about such a business venture were not a reaction to our occasional meals at the Mexican Cantina in Margaret Street. Or takeout from the Westlake Chinese Restaurant.
My collection of vintage cookbooks (which I can largely thank Mum's op-shop-foraging habit for) includes two Toowoomba "cookbooks", one featuring "Chronicle Prize Winning Recipes in conjunction with the Royal Agricultural Society and Toowoomba Master Butchers", the other a booklet "compiled by the Parent-Teacher Association, St Stephen's Presbyterian Church Toowoomba." Neither is going to enhance the town's food reputation, but still, they offer a fascinating snapshot into a time and a place.
Bit hard to work out the booklets' exact ages — nothing so sensible as a date appears on either — but from the Chronicle cover's minty-green kitchen with its bakelite canisters, Sunbeam Mixmaster and perfectly coiffed housewife (above), you'd have to think it was the late '50s or early '60s. Can you imagine how very chic that woman and her kitchen must have seemed in a provincial Australian town of that era? And how chic the food must have looked — the first recipe in the book is Spiced Pork Chops with Prune Filled Apple Rings (from Mrs G. Smiles, Dalby). But while the prize-winning housewives whose recipes appear in the book might have been dabbling with some new and exotic flavours (I wonder what the Vue de Monde chefs would make of Lamb Cutlets with Bananas, or Tornado a la Roseni), there are some markers here of a dying era. The booklet's preface lists four "classes" in the cooking competition, the last being "Meat Recipe for a Breakfast for 4".  It wasn't unusual for my brother and I to get lamb chops for breakfast (Mum insisted we have a full cooked breakfast every day) and in Australian rural areas mixed-grill breakfasts were the norm, but how many Australians these days sit down to a meaty breakfast routinely?

Personal Reference Points
The other booklet from the St Stephen's Parent-Teacher Association (price 2/6) strikes me as being a fair bit older. On the inside cover is an ad for a local motor dealer, Gordon Motors, singing the virtues of Humber Hawks, Snipes and Pullmans and "the new Hillman Minx" — "inspect and drive 'the world's most successful light car' claimed to be the greatest achievement in design and construction". I'm wondering if the booklet isn't from the early '30s, which is when the Minx seems to have been first released; the fact that telephone numbers in the ads are only two, three or four digits, and the language, too, suggest that vintage. (In an ad for W.A. Noble & Gegg Pharmaceutical and Veterinary Chemists: "the pharmacist has a 'key to a cabinet' in which he guards stocks of narcotic drugs — opium, morphine, codein (sic), and others — prescribed by Doctor to provide relief from torments of insufferable pain.")
There are more personal reference points for me in this seemingly commonplace cooking booklet: in an ad for The Bootery ("Footwear for the Family"), which I'm sure is where my mother bought our sensible school shoes decades on; in another for T.S. Burstow ("Furniture and Furnishings" and "Funeral Directors"), the funeral home that buried my grandmothers; F.W. Howard Newsagent, Stationer and Bookseller — I'm sure that's where I picked up copies of Rolling Stone magazine and, later as my interests shifted, Vogue Entertaining and Travel.
There's one for Pigott & Co. ("The City Emporiums"), where my Dad's cousin worked and where my brother only last weekend claimed he had a tantrum over a lost toy car; John McKinney (Toowoomba's Quality Store), where Mum bought me my first string of pearls (which I later lost at a rock concert: I guess I wasn't much of a rock chick); and the booklet was printed by Downs Printing Company, which I think is where my father had most of his election material — leaflets, how-to-vote cards — printed.

Chokos and a Cookie Recipe
And the recipes in the St Stephen's Parent-Teacher Association booklet? Perhaps most evocative for me are those using what Australians call chokos. (Apparently, the Spanish name for this vegetable is chayote.) A choko vine suffocated the leaning wooden fence separating my Nana's driveway where she parked her little green VW Beetle, from the next-door neighbour's place. I remember grumbling when Mum served chokos up at dinner, although I wasn't so unhappy when they were younger and had delicate, sweet seeds in their centre which were great drenched in butter and pepper. I haven't seen a choko in a market or grocer for such a long time; if I could find some, I might be tempted to try out the booklet's Choko and Pineapple Jam or one of two plain Choko jam recipes it offers.
Extraordinary how such a little thing can bring back such a flood of memories and how it can say so much about the continuum of small-town life. Sadly though, it hasn't inspired me to rush into the kitchen. The recipes are largely of their time (Savoury Mutton, Mock Chicken, Potted Rump Steak, Raspberry Tapioca) and I had to comb them a few times before I found one that appealed. Under "Special Lard Recipes" I came upon a recipe for some spiced Oatmeal Cookies. Substituting butter for the lard, I found an antidote to the less savoury side of my hometown.

Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup cake flour (I assumed plain flour)
1tsp baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp allspice
½ cup sugar
1/3 cup lard (I used butter)
3tbsp milk
1 egg
½ cup chopped nuts (I used a mixture of walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds)
½ cup raisins
1 cup dry rolled oats

Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder, salt and spices, and sift together three times.
Cream sugar and butter. Add 1tbsp of the milk and the egg and beat well. Add nuts, raisins, rolled oats and the remaining milk and stir. Add the flour and stir well. Drop by teaspoonfuls on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 10-12 minutes.
Allow to cool completely before storing in an airtight container.