Belinda Hannaford - Sourcing the Sauce

Wakefield Press

Belinda Hannaford has excelled in living and loving with a sense of humour. Her strength is always finding a way through relentless obstacles. Belinda has touched on a thousand things including singing her own compositions and entertaining, cooking, running restaurants and starting community programs. Sourcing the Sauce is Belindas first book. She hopes that by sharing her life and how she lived it, others will be inspired to make sense of their world.

Wakefield Press

16 Rose Street

Mile End

South Australia 5031

www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2020

This edition published 2020

Copyright Belinda Hannaford, 2020. All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, Wakefield Press

Edited by Margot Lloyd, Wakefield Press

ISBN 978 1 74305 740 7

Sourcing the sauce is a crazy adventure, the cookbook of life.

The creative topping = the sauce

The substance of being = the source

From opulence, decadence, fame and fortune to creativity.

From creativity to mental illness.

From mental illness to mental health.

From revelation to resolution.

With a sense of humour being the icing on the cake.

I was seven, sitting in the tall, dry grass on the hilltop above Snelling Beach on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. One day Im going to live up here and own a restaurant called Belindas. Thirty years later, I do live here and I have owned a restaurant called Belindas. Hospitality has been at the heart of my life.

I grew up in the kitchen for years and years it seems,

Slurping up the sauces, licking up the creams,

Experimenting, implementing recipes untried,

With sisters all to intervene and Mama by my side.

The kitchen was my comforter with adolescent fears,

Enormous slabs of chocolate cake to wipe away my tears,

Lucky I was five foot ten and nervous as a cat,

With all that pent-up energy I couldnt turn to fat.

Frozen dinners, microwave, glad wrap, instant cake,

Wheres the need to grow your own?

Whens the need to bake?

Rest assured its easier but where is all the fun?

Its just not like the good old days when cooking with my mum.

To old traditions that I knew, that now are kind of queer.

The children cook the way I did and Im the one to sneer.

I still live in the kitchen. Ill die here I expect.

To pate, sauces and terrines, Ill pay my last respect.

The pleasures sought have been rewarded in this cutthroat game,

But for it, I would not have the slightest claim to fame!

Age: twenty-three

Our family home was grand. It was two storeys and a Victorian colonial hybrid, set on an acre block. The front overlooked huge parklands in an inner suburb of Adelaide. In need of a renovation, it was bought before the war by my parents for very little. When my father became managing director of General Motors Holden a deal was struck whereby the company took over the holding and provided the finance to renovate it back to its grand statesomething my parents could not have afforded at that time.

The front room of the house was a huge ballroom, with a grand piano. This was our formal dining room. Opposite the front door was the top room, a space we occupied one by one when we came of age.

Then there was the bar room (my fathers domain). This room was always under his control and featured a revolving bar of his own design. It was here he spent most of his time, from the moment he arrived home at five until seven when we had dinner, returning again after dinner and staying late into the night on weekends.

There was a breakfast room for casual meals, and a nursery where we were supervised by the nannies. Nearby was the kitchen, and a tiny maids quarters.

Up a grand staircase were five bedrooms and one bathroom. This one bathroom created a morning ritual that caused me great anxiety. I woke up every day to the sound of my fathers voice bellowing down the passage to get to the bathroomit was my turn!

My mother was born in the Western District of Victoria in 1913 into an aristocratic farming family. She was the third oldest of four girls. My school holidays were occasionally spent at Keayang, my mothers family home. Sisters and cousins joined in for family holidays. It was during those times that I really started to understand the pecking order and the rules and regulations that dominated her family, and later mine.

Children were definitely to be seen (a little) and not heard at all, so the kitchen was my mothers escape. It was a warm, cosy welcoming womb where she was nurtured by food, accepted and allowed to watch the staff, who became her friends.

Years later, my mother often expressed to me how unhappy, shy, and anxious she felt around her parents and siblings. Yet when it came to parenting us she used the same approach shed resented so much in her own childhood.

She was a true red-haired beauty, proved by her first employment in Melbourne at age seventeen, when she was house model for Myer, and then later when she was discovered after a walk-on role in one of the first Australian movies, In Her Majestys Secret Service, not to be confused with the later Bond film. She so stunned the producers they then chose her for leading lady in their next film, Diggers in Blighty, which I did not see until I had it shown, reel-to-reel, at her seventieth birthday. The viewing was much to Mums horror, and our fascination.

I admired my mothers presence and creativity, but I resented her inability to stand up to my father or to protect us from him. She was attentive to staff and social responsibilities, but I have no recollection of her part in my life until after I left the nursery. Even after that, my connection with her was impersonal. Except for each night at bedtime, she gave me very little physical affection.

My mother, Prudence Elsie, 1930

My mother was definitely a very glamorous Prudence Elsie in her early years. Then she became a bonafide Lady Prudence. By the time I finished with her and re-programmed her after my father died, though, she grew wings with her nicknames Bundy and Turbo.

My parents did a lot of overseas travelling by ship just before the Second World War, and continued with interstate and shorter trips throughout my childhood, so they had little involvement in our everyday lives. The exception was Kangaroo Island, where we spent all of our school holidays, and where they were faced with us en masse.