Ingredients:
1 white Australian male [3rd gen]
1 white Australian Catholic female [2nd gen]
Several Northern Victorian country towns
2 Aussie Battler families

Method:
My parents were born into families with ‘crosses to bear’. My Dad’s family was poor and my Mum’s was a single parent family.
Dad was born to a travelling salesman/musician/entertainer/shop assistant/picture show man and a 19 year old woman who had never worked. There was no white wedding dress for her. Dad was born just before WWII began. He recalls bread and jam for tea, listening to the radio serials whilst doing the dishes, going to bed late, being woken up by his mates on their way to the Wedderburn State school because he slept on the verandah.
He was working by 13 years of age for a mechanic at Koondrook, whilst also assisting his Dad to run the ‘Picture shows’ in the local Hall. They lived next to the Hall and ran a little shop selling the ‘Hamburgers’ to the patrons. Pa would also travel around to other local towns showing the ‘film’ for that week or so.
Mum lived with her Mother and older siblings in a small cement sheet house in Pyramid Hill. Her father had died after a long illness when she was 6. Raised a strict Catholic in a predominantly Catholic town she was fairly sheltered until she met the handsome man at the Pyramid Hill dance.
She began her Hairdressing career when her mother rang and told her she had been apprenticed to the local hairdresser. Mum did what she was told!

So take this 20 year old man and add the 16 year old Catholic girl mix well for 4 years and create one daughter.
Place into a caravan for first few months of daughter’s life in the backyard of paternal grandparents.
Father, a farm labourer and shearer but dreaming of better things, his own business.
Mother was still a hairdresser but was on home duties whilst caring for me and Dad!
Both my parents are ‘good on the tooth’ i.e. they like eating! They were traditional white Australian foodies! My paternal Grandma was a plain cook and my maternal Grandma was a good cook.
But what does this mean? Is it worth writing or even reading about? What can be said to link the foods eaten before 1970 in the ‘so called’ typical Australian country town to Australian society as it was?
Does it matter? I think it does.
Maybe simmering away within our culinary backstory is the older version of Australia still being harked back to today… Has our political climate always been reflected in the foods we ate? Bloody oath! Look at what’s cooking in the kitchen at Canberra.
On that note cook this recipe very, very slowly as it may be hard to swallow!