Wise - Family favourites: delicious classics from the family table

This book is dedicated to my family, who have travelled alongside
me and shared this journey with food the experimentation and
the endless hours of cooking competitiveness that has made our
kitchen such a fun place to be.And to all families who love to cook and eat together. Our household, like many others, has an old exercise book filled with lovingly handwritten family recipes. We call it The Red Book. This recipe book is actually an old diary, a cast-off from 1988 originally provided by my husband, Robert. In the early days I transcribed into it recipes from various relatives: their own family favourites, dishes that I had loved from my childhood. In this day and age of innumerable data storage devices, the practice of keeping such a treasure has slipped, I think, into the background. While the actual recipes may be saved in some soft-copy format, these are lacking the same sense of nostalgia: the spidery writing of young children, the splodges of various ingredients, sauces and batters that cling to the pages.

Ive always been an enthusiastic cook. Even before I was in actuality, I knew in my heart that I would be. Long before I was married I secreted away recipes I thought would serve me well one day when I had a home and family of my own. Cuttings were taken from magazines, especially the English Womans Weekly, and then carefully pasted with homemade glue into scrapbooks. I dreamed of the days to come when, once married, I could entertain visiting friends and relatives with gastronomical delights Id whipped up with ease in an old country kitchen. Of course the reality does not always live up to the dream, in fact mine became a veritable nightmare.

I had not been shy in boasting of my impending kitchen prowess, and so after I was married great things were expected of me. However, the recipes that Id collected did not serve me well. Often they failed dismally and at the worst possible moment, such as when visitors were due on the doorstep for dinner. For some strange reason, and despite the humiliation, the passion for cooking never left me. A turning point came one day when I read a short story in one of those magazines from which Id so dutifully gathered my recipes. The young woman, recently married, was an atrocious cook and her husband despaired of her.

She began listening to a radio cooking program where the compere coached listeners through simple recipes. So much did her confidence grow that her husband invited his boss home for dinner. She went to make a recipe for flummery (very chic in the 1970s), and found she did not have the necessary lemon juice. Beyond the point of no return, she hastily substituted sherry and the dish, of course, was a resounding success. In this, I thought, lay the solution to my dilemma. I started to mess with the recipes, forgetting the tiresome and painstaking methods and taking some liberties.

I threw things together with something akin to wild abandon and while they may not have looked like the picture in the book, they certainly started to taste mighty nice. And so began a lifelong process of beating recipes into submission. I still dont consider myself to be a particularly good cook, but I do like to invent recipes, and I know that if one works for me, it will most likely work at least that well for others, if not better, and probably look a whole lot more professional when presented on the plate. As the years went by I became convinced that food is the very fabric that weaves a family together. Its not only in the eating, but also its preparation, the endless discussions (sometimes heated) about ingredients and how they might come together, the experimentation, the jiggery-pokery and trickery in getting children to eat nutritious food. Its that age-old battle of making sure your family enjoys optimum health from the food they eat.

So ever since those early days of humiliation and experimentation, I have loved playing with food. For instance, with my children I never bothered too much with playdough nasty smelly stuff back in the day, in no time at all ending up as fragrant as a pair of old gym sneakers, despite the fact it was laden with salt, which was supposed to keep it fresh. And children tried to eat it. So we instead worked with biscuit and bread doughs the former making for interesting cookies and cakes to share with extended family and friends, the latter performing all sorts of culinary calisthenics in the rising and baking. Fruits and vegetables of the season could be added at will. It is from these foundations, time spent experimenting in the kitchen, that so many of these Family Favourites recipes have come together.

We did a great deal of preserving over the years, and used the innumerable jars of jams, chutneys and bottled fruit as a huge toolbox of ingredients for tasty family dishes. Once word got out that we loved preserving, people would land on our doorstep with buckets and bags of excess produce for us to use. As for family mealtimes, well, these could be a debacle. Each of our six children had their own likes and dislikes and invented devious means for disposing of the latter. For instance, Alistair had a strong aversion to peas. Back in those days it was considered almost a cardinal sin not to get greens into your children.

Peas were high on the list of beneficial foods, and so the battle went on, raged in good humour for the most part. Alistair developed a knack for disposing of them from his plate. The very few peas he was ever served he would take like tablets with a glass of water at best, or drop them on the floor, hoping that the cat might take a fancy to them. Best of all he managed to bury them under a minuscule pile of mashed potato that could be left on the plate. Our Stephanie was a poor eater but loved toast; not just any toast it had to be fresh from the toaster, crunchy, or would not be eaten at all. I can still picture her in her high chair at no more than 18 months wailing Its not cwunchy! Ice cream too my Nan would bring all sorts of ice creams as a treat when she came to visit each Friday.

However, Stephanie had to have hers heated she didnt like it too cold. Whoever heard of microwaving ice cream? Yet we did, just so poor old Nan wasnt disappointed when she brought them such a special treat. And so the list goes on with these family memories Andrew who refused to eat fish (his catch-cry being fish is for cats) and yet when he became a chef, he became inordinately fond of it. Philippa loved all things creamy so we played with many twists on macaroni cheese, and custard in its many guises. Elliott loved to experiment with flavours of meats and Courtney developed excellent pasta-making skills. All the girls loved to make confectionery as they do to this day, so much so that a candy hook has come to be a quintessential part of the cooking school here.

I must admit it is an amazing thing to watch a lump of toffee being thrown over the hook and then twisted and turned into ropes in all the colours of the rainbow. The flavours are incredible, the aroma in the kitchen astounding, and in seemingly no time at all taffies and toffees are piled high on the benches, where the grandchildren then portion them into tiny bags to sell at local markets or on the stall at our gate. And so the years passed with days filled with experimentation, and finding any excuse to be in the kitchen, cooking. Then one day, back in the 1990s, I found a flyer in our letterbox. Could you cook a meal for 10 people for under $10? it asked. Could I? I was doing this every night between the children and the two live-in grandparents.