The birthday cakes of your childhood will feature in a Rare Book Week display

They were cheap, readily disposable successful supermarkets and newsagents and they revolutionised our tastes successful food. They were the much-beloved Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks.

Whether they were inserts successful the magazines oregon published books, they were cooking bibles for Australian housewives from the 1930s onwards. The astir fashionable and perennial was the children’s day barroom book, archetypal published successful 1980, which was handed down the generations and is inactive disposable arsenic a collector’s edition. The littlies would thrill to cakes themed connected Humpty Dumpty, a choo-choo bid oregon a jelly swimming pool.

The classical swimming excavation barroom from the Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book.

Food historiographer Lauren Samuelsson has been studying the books and talking to their users for her PhD, and volition uncover her findings astatine the 2024 Melbourne Rare Book Week. Her speech is 1 of a bumper programme of 45 escaped events, positive lectures and exhibitions, being held successful Melbourne from July 18 and culminating successful the yearly Melbourne Rare Book Fair.

This twelvemonth marks the 10th day of Rare Book Week, described arsenic a planetary beacon for publication lovers and collectors. The attractions see a speech connected however Jane Austen tin assistance lawyers, 500 years of Ukrainian absorption successful print, and a peek into the world’s archetypal English printed book, made by William Caxton 550 years ago. (Disclosure: I americium taking portion successful 2 events: with writer and historiographer Lucy Sussex astir mysteries and mayhem successful 19th period Melbourne, and an interrogation with legendary bookseller Mark Rubbo astir his vocation astatine Readings.)

Also, there’s a accidental for vertebrate lovers to spot immoderate precise uncommon ornithology books astatine Melbourne Museum. State Library Victoria volition diagnostic archetypal editions by Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, and different landmark women’s books acquired done the Library’s Women Writers Fund, positive a speech astir the postulation by historiographer Anna Welch. James Joyce student Frances Devlin-Glass volition sermon however censorship influenced Joyce’s revision of his caller Ulysses – and changed it for the better.

The Melbourne Rare Book Week volition diagnostic archetypal editions by Virginia Woolf.Credit: AP

And there’s different lawsuit for cookbook fans: an evening with Elizabeth David and friends, presented by culinary bookseller Tim White, with a accidental to illustration respective of her specialities.

You mightiness not see The Australian Women’s Weekly look collections uncommon books, but Samuelsson says immoderate of the aboriginal titles are hard to travel by, and she ever keeps an oculus unfastened for them successful op shops. It’s mostly acknowledgment to those look collections that we discovered variations connected the accepted British nutrient and 2 veg.

As aboriginal arsenic 1948, the recipes were coaxing mums to navigator Chinese. Today, we’re surrounded by ingredients to navigator immoderate cuisine, Samuelsson says, “but this was revolutionary. The books offered antithetic flavours and tastes and they took distant the fearfulness factor.” Instead of that exotic constituent soy sauce, the books suggested utilizing Worcestershire sauce.

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You tin spot however overmuch our tastes person changed by looking astatine immoderate of the aboriginal AWW recipes. One for a household of six suggests utilizing fractional a clove of garlic, but warns this volition make “a precise beardown ail taste”. “Chicken a l’orange” is boiled chickenhearted bosom with orangish slices. Before the advent of mill farms, chickenhearted was uncommon and expensive, truthful housewives were urged to make “mock chickenhearted pie” by cooking shredded rabbit nutrient successful pastry.

Perhaps the strangest offerings were the diets, pushed from the 1960s onwards. “The spaghetti diet” promised you could suffer 2 kilos successful a period by eating pasta. Samuelsson has posted videos of herself cooking immoderate recipes, with mixed results. One was a 1950s look for jellied chickenhearted and olive loaf. What was it like? “Unpleasant. It tasted each right, but the texture was not doing it for me.”

Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com

Rare Book Week is astatine the Victorian Archives Centre successful North Melbourne, July 18-27.

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