Communal Ovens

While the title of this blog is Before Our Time I would not like you to believe for one minute that I wish to live in the past. Oh no, I am quite attached to having water on demand rather than trudging to the nearest stream to pound my laundry with a rock. I am also quite relieved that I do not have to walk bare feet onto the moors to collect peat for the fire. And the very thought that I may have lived in a time when I was denied even the rudimentary elements of an education gives me shivers.

However, at our annual neighbourhood get together this Christmas our thoughts turned to a very useful thing of before our time - the communal oven.

While the average kitchen could cater for normal family meals the Christmas turkey and ham are often too large to be cooked in our ovens. We then resort to either renovating our kitchens to commercial standards, buying a monstrosity of a BBQ or foregoing large cuts of meat. How useful it would be to have a large communal oven down the road.

Communal village ovens have been part of Mediterranean and middle eastern life for thousands of years. They still exist in some places, although many were destroyed during WWII. Villagers would bake their weekly supply of bread or cook a celebratory meal in these ovens, often alongside other villagers, making it a social experience. Where a purpose-built oven was not available the local baker's oven may have been used.

Communal ovens not only provide a practical service but help build a sense of community too. Traditionally, being wood-fired and located outdoors, the communal oven would take time to reach operating temperature and thus was suited to cooking en masse. A communal bread oven which opened in Cringila Community Park, Wollongong in 2005 has become a focal point for the local indigenous and ethnic groups in the area.

Perhaps a reader can correct me here, but while we have a tradition of communal BBQs I don't believe we have a tradition of communal ovens in modern Australia. There is evidence, however, that indigenous tribes used communal cooking facilities. The Wathaurong people, whose tribal lands take in areas south of Geelong in Victoria, cooked in communal ovens called minne.

I'd like to propose that in honour of glazing a full-size ham at Christmas or a turkey to feed fourteen relatives we introduce the communal oven to our suburbs and towns. On Christmas morn we can all meet over a beer or glass of champers as our turkeys bake or our hams glaze and the neighbourhood children play nearby.

I'd love to hear from readers with experiences of communal ovens both here and overseas.

* image from here. Read about the story of a communal oven built in a park in Toronto.

What's for lunch?

Could you wish for better proof? Here is the ideal lunch for your youngster. So easy to prepare. No cooking. Packed in a few minutes – but what a carefully planned and balanced meal!

The Oslo Lunch gives a full daily quota of “protective” food elements…it’s minerals and vitamins you and your family need for health and vitality. Put it in young Jimmy’s satchel, Dad’s bag, Joan’s suitcase…the OSLO LUNCH.

Kraft Cheese advertisement in The Argus newspaper, 14 July 1945.

See an image of it at: http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/968370

School’s back for another year for many Australian children this week, and the remainder will follow in the next week or so. There is nothing that creates a fear and loathing of schoolday mornings (at least in this household) than the thought of preparing school lunches. It's an ongoing challenge to prepare something tasty and healthy with some degree of variety.

And then there’s the age-old dilemma of keeping the food cool until it is consumed at lunchtime, especially on days like today when it is forecast to reach into the 40s (degrees Celsius). My daughters take insulated lunchboxes with a frozen icepack included with the food.

Before our time, in the 1940s, the concerns about school lunches were more to do with the nutritional value of what the children were eating. During the Second World War many children were considered to be malnourished. This, of course, had implications for their ability to learn.

A chain of Opportunity Clubs had been established in the industrial suburbs of Melbourne to encourage the well-being of children in those areas. In the early 1940s, these clubs adopted the concept of an “Oslo Meal” and offered schoolchildren an Oslo Lunch.[1]

The Oslo lunch consisted of a wholemeal bread sandwich filled with cheese and salad, a glass of milk and an apple or other seasonal fruit. This interest in children's diet was part of an international movement which had begun prior to the War. In Norway, the head of the school health system at that time, Professor Carl Schiotz, devised a meal to be served to Norwegian school children called "the Oslo breakfast" which included milk, bread and fruit. Its reputation as an aid to nourishing children and enhancing their ability to learn soon spread to other parts of the world.

According to the Kraft advertisement, the experiment of introducing the Oslo Lunch through the Opportunity Clubs in Melbourne was a success. It was claimed that, after three months children on the Oslo lunch gained an average of over 7 lbs. in weight,which was more than twice as much as children on ordinary lunches.

The Oslo Lunch was then introduced in various states of Australia over the next ten years or so.

It would seem that the Oslo Lunch principles have definitely stood the test of time. In packing my daughters' lunches each morning, I try to include a selection of foods containing some complex carbohydrate, a serve of calcium, some vegetables, some fruit and a serve of protein. I just didn't realise I was being Scandinavian when I did so!

It's not always a sandwich, milk and fruit in their lunchboxes. In fact, it is rarely a sandwich, milk and fruit. My daughters' lunches are more likely to include something like a wholemeal ham and cheese wrap, a small serve of yoghurt, a fruit salad, and some carrot or celery sticks. There's often also a small treat such as a mini-muffin.

Do you remember the Oslo lunch? Inspire me - what's your favourite 'Oslo combination' in a lunchbox?

[1] “The Oslo Meal” in British Journal of Nursing, June 1945Accessed via: http://rcnarchive.rcn.org.uk/

Book Blasts from the Past

While visiting Mum in Western Australia last week I came across this amongst her cookery books. A cookbook put together by the local Anglican Ladies' Guild. The book is undated but likely to date from about 1964.

I was looking for a quick and easy banana cake recipe. Mrs P. Webb, a relative by marriage, submitted this one.

I needed this book, distributed in 1966, to work out the measures.

And I loved the little advertising gems.

Imagine, five pounds to install your hot water system. Lucky you indeed. Mathematicians out there - how much is this in today's dollars?

Clearing out the lumber

“… it seems fitting here to devote a few words to another kindred matter, namely, the hoarding up throughout the house of what may literally be designated as lumber. It is astonishing what a number of utterly valueless things are allowed to remain in nearly every household, and it is well remarked that no one ever knows what a collection of rubbish he possesses till he has occasion to remove. There may not be much to be ashamed of in the first load or two of furniture, but at the latter end there is a strong feeling that a dark night would be more adapted for moving—the darker the better. At least every twelve months there should be a regular clearance of worn-out articles, and that miscellaneous collection of odds and ends which can be of no earthly value to anybody, unless he be an antiquary.”

Philip E. Muskett The Art of Living in Australia, 1893
CHAPTER IV: BEDROOM VENTILATION
(Accessed via: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/)

With a house move imminent, I feel it is time to heed the advice of Philip E. Muskett and clear out some of the ‘lumber’ in our home.

It is only two years since we last moved house, and although I felt that we did a reasonable job of clearing out the cupboards at that time, there are always those drawers or shelves you just can’t bear to sort through. So they get packed up and moved.

And moved again.

Eventually, you can’t even remember where some of the stuff came from. And it certainly doesn’t get looked at between house moves.

There’s the items that you once started collecting, but then gave up on…and now they don’t really suit the home’s decor, but you can’t bear to part with them. Like the Wedgewood.

Then there’s the old sporting equipment, that you keep ‘just in case’ someone wants to use it. Of course, by the time someone does want to use it, the item is so old-fashioned it looks like you’re playing with an antique.

And then there's the vinyl LPs and singles from the 70s and the 80s. (Do we even have a record player in the house nowadays?)

What about the boxes and boxes of my daughters' drawings, paintings, schoolbooks? I know I should sort through them and keep just the very best, perhaps photographing some of the rest. But do I ever do that?


This time around, I’m determined we’re going to clear out a little more of the lumber, but it's a fine line between de-lumbering and recklessly stripping away your personal history.

What lumber is lurking in your house?

Before Our Time: When parents didn't need retreats

Walk in the door of a four bedroom, two bathroom, home with walk-in-robe, ensuite, home theatre and study and you are likely to find only 2.5 people enjoying the space.

In the 18 years between 1985 and 2003 the floor area of new homes in Australia has grown by nearly 40%. In 2005 28% of homes had four bedrooms or more compared with 17% in 1976. During the same period the number of people in each household has dropped from 3.1 to 2.5.

Fewer people live in bigger houses, with more stuff.

In contrast, Australian homes of the 1920s and 1930s became smaller than their earlier counterparts. Building materials were expensive and families were becoming smaller and a period of house-size rationalisation began. Hallways disappeared, bedrooms were functionally sized and sleep-outs became popular. Wirelesses replaced the piano and in smaller homes dining rooms disappeared into an all-purpose living room. A focus on outdoor activity placed the family car in sharp focus with garages and driveways widening suburban blocks.

a 1920s home offered by Knight & Harwood builders, Melbourne*

House design naturally alters over time to accommodate changes to the way we live. The demise of service staff in the home means that the working areas such as the kitchen and laundry are now at the heart of the house; living areas now accommodate televisions rather than radios or pianos and many homes have a computer room, home office or study. However homes are also larger taking up more of our suburban blocks than ever before. Rather than a focus on the outside, there is a focus on the inside (with the exception of the outdoor room, which is the inside taken outside).

I live with my husband and two children in an early Arts and Crafts style home built in 1919. It was probably built for an upper middle class family of the time and there is evidence of the dividing walls between the private and ‘service’ areas of the home – there was likely a live-in maid. Our house has had minimal changes to its layout over the years.

Recently we decided to update the kitchens and bathrooms of the house. We are in the early stages of this process and have found the first hurdle – trying to find an architect that respects our wishes not to increase the size of the house. The first desire of architects we have seen is to make our house bigger, add more bedrooms (we already have four) and create an enormous master suite.

According to Archicentre the top trends for renovations are the rumpus room, parents’ retreat, ensuites, walk-in-robes, decks and outdoor kitchens. In addition storage is a big issue because our big houses need lots of stuff to fill them and lots of stuff needs storage.

I feel all out of date requesting none of this (I do want a back verandah – is that a deck? I guess so). These trends would be alien to an era before our time when children shared bedrooms, when the main living area was the back lawn and kids playing outside meant that parents didn’t need retreats.

I feel our house is big enough, I just want it to work better. I like the rational approach of building a house to meet your needs, not exceed them. A refocus on getting outdoors rather than cocooning indoors.

Wish me luck, because I can feel a fight with the trends coming along. Will I cave in or will I stick to my guns?

What would you do?

References:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics
*Chuffley, P Australian Houses of the Twenties and Thirties, The Five Mile Press, 1983
Archicentre - Trends Renovations 2008

Boiled eggs and spam

Spam (n): unsolicited marketing e-mail communication distributed to a large number of e-mail addresses.

There was once a time when the word 'Spam' had little to do with e-mail and the Internet. Spam was instead just the brand name of a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation.

Spam belongs to a range of canned meats (including Hamper's Camp Pie and Bully Beef) that have the reputation of sustaining generations from the Great Depression right through the Second World War and the post-war rationing and are still consumed the world over today.

In fact, Spam is often credited with 'winning the war' as it was part of the ration-packs for American GIs and Allied forces during World War II.

Spam is made of a few simple ingredients: ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, a little potato starch, and some sodium nitrite (which helps to keep the pink colour - without it Spam would be grey).

Spam was first created in 1937, and since then over 6 billion cans of it have been sold world-wide. The Spam we get on the supermarket shelves here in Australia is canned in factories in the USA. There are also factories in Denmark, the Philippines and South Korea.

I've always shied away from even the idea of Spam. I treat any food that claims to be able to last forever with a little suspicion.

Information on the Hormel Foods Spam website suggests that, "As long as no air gets into the can, the vacuum sealed goodness inside will be as delicious and safe as the day it was made. It’s like meat with a pause button."

But, I know that before our time, many, many people grew up eating and enjoying Spam, so I set myself the task of trying it out.

When I mentioned my plans to other people, their reactions fell into two camps:

a) EEeeeeewww. Why would you want to eat that? (anyone younger than about 50)

b) Oh! Spam! That takes me right back. We used to have it... [insert description of how it was served in their homes]

My Dad had particularly enthusiastic memories of how Spam was eaten in his family home in Scotland in the 1950s, and talked me through recreating the experience.

The Spam was sliced finely.

And was served with a fresh garden salad consisting of lettuce, sliced tomato and boiled eggs with mayonnaise on the side. In his family's case, the lettuce and the eggs were home-grown.

A friend popped in while I was in the process of serving up the Spam.

"No, no." he declared. "You need to fry the Spam. That's the way we always had it."

So I ventured both ways.

The end result was certainly palatable, not nearly as bad as I had feared - although I think I preferred the fried option to the fresh.

Dad recalled that Spam and salad was served as a quick summer meal in his home, and I can see that with some cans of Spam in the cupboard and a small vegetable garden, you could easily whip up a reasonably nutritious meal in minutes.

During the Second World War, and into the post-war period in Britain when fresh meat was difficult to come by, canned meats definitely had their place. By canning meats in countries that had greater supplies, a valuable source of protein and nutrition could be transported huge distances with no need for refrigeration. There was also no need for the meat to be refrigerated in the shops, or the home.

I, like many others of my generation however, have been fortunate enough to grow up with ready access to fresh supplies of most foods...and I take refrigeration for granted. We therefore see items such as canned meats to be more of a 'camping' source of food - the type of supply you would take if you went outback with no power sources.

I can't say that canned meats will be appearing regularly on my dinner table, but they could. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

What is your experience of Spam?