Topic: Family Recipe

I have in my possession a wonderful old cookery book, hand-written with hundreds of recipes and household hints and also knitting patterns. It has marbled end papers and would at one time have been a handsome book but is now falling to pieces. It belonged to my maternal grandmother.

Edith Lillian “Lily” Hunt was born in 1876 in Reading, Berkshire to schoolteachers Edwin and Margaret (Morgan) Hunt.

She was the youngest of their ten children. When she was aged 2 the whole family emigrated to Australia on an early steamship the “Aconcagua”which would have certainly shaved off the days a sailing ship would have taken, but nevertheless took 49 days. They travelled in the equivalent of first class and must have had a mountain of luggage including linen and silver – some still in my possession. Eventually they settled in a large house in Sydney.

When Lily was aged 32, about a year after visiting an elder sister who lived in a small remote town in northern Queensland, she married Dick d’Archy, Manager of an even more remote cattle station in the Australian outback. It must have been quite a change in lifestyle for a gently-bred English girl – she would have had to deal with loneliness, heat, drought, ants, snakes, limited water and basic food supplies … very different from her sheltered early life in Sydney.

When World War I broke out, Dick enlisted in the Light Horse. Lily, by then with two little girls, moved to southern Queensland to live with her mother and two sisters in a large family home, always full of visiting relatives. The photo was taken about 1915; the little girl being held is my mother. Lily is on her left.

Later the family moved to a large house in Sydney which they again shared with various relatives at different times. It can be surmised that Lily and her aged mother probably shared or at least supervised all the cooking. When Dick returned from the War he was very restless, and being a countryman through and through spent most of his time in the outback and rarely visited his city-based family.

When did Lily start her recipe book? It contains not only recipes and knitting patterns but many household hints, probably dating to the years of the Second World War. Possibly back to when Lily first got married, but more likely after some years when butter and eggs were again readily available, as many recipes include them. Perhaps it was a ‘new’ recipe book made from an old one. The first numbered page contains recipes for Sponge Gingerbread, Sand Cake, Soap Recipe, Lemon Syrup, Blue Transfer Ink and Coffee (!) Over the years more and more recipes have been added, some in my Aunt (Lily’s eldest daughter)’s handwriting, some in unknown hands. Many have the name of the person who contributed the recipe, hint or pattern – a custom I have continued.I am reasonably certain my Aunt continued to use the book for many years.

The book is so fragile I have not attempted to scan any more pages.