With the explosion of Master Chef type reality television making each of us stare into our mashed potatoes and bemoan that we forgot to mix through a little truffle oil, garnish lightly with finely chopped flat-leafed parsley and grated nutmeg, the good folk at Sydney Living Museums (SLM) are giving us a taste of how food used to be.
The cook and the curator blog, is a recent offering from Scott Hill, curator and Jacqui Newling, cook. Together they take us down memory lane researching and presenting recipes that once sustained and built the colony.
While many of the recipes have fallen out of fashion—in part because of the changing nature of ingredients and partly because technology has separated us from the hard work physical work of the kitchen of the past—Jacqui does much to revive them and adapt them for today’s cooking culture. Scott Hill describes their place in our history and joins the dots between the recipes and their role in each of the historic houses.
With the explosion of Master Chef type reality television making each of us stare into our mashed potatoes and bemoan that we forgot to mix through a little truffle oil, garnish lightly with finely chopped flat-leafed parsley and grated nutmeg, the good folk at Sydney Living Museums are giving us a taste of how food used to be.
And it’s a really great read. Here at M&GNSW we really like that it brings alive much more than the food. Coupled with a visit to one of their museums, what you read on the blog makes all the more sense once you step into the kitchens of these historic houses. Whether you choose the tiny terraces of Susannah Place in the heart of Sydney, or Rouse Hill House , once inside these beautifully maintained and conserved houses, the past comes leaping back.
You can smell the rasping of lemons in the sandstone kitchen of Elizabeth Farm, see the wafting smoke from the Macarthur’s smokehouses as they preserve and prepare oysters, fish and kangaroo meat in preparation for the summer months. And if you listen carefully, you can even hear the gentile chink of china being laid out for a banquet in the dining room of Elizabeth Bay House.
In true SLM style, the houses also offer a range of food related events – so get out of your kitchen and into theirs, now!
The Cook and the curator blog was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Award in the Media category and won two awards for design in the MAPDA this year!
