March 2025

    Carmen curlers, extra marital lovers, and some damn good food. The quartet of Bernard King’s 1977 seasonal cookbooks as camp texts.
    12 March 2025

    March 2025Through the course of 1977 Celebrity Chef Bernard King released a quartet of cookbooks, one for each season beginning with Autumn. King was an openly camp gay man on …

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    Diggings 10 March 2045
    10 March 2025

    Pies to pavlovas. The culinary landscape of the Australian Hostess Cookbook (1969)In I969 the Australian Hostess Cookbook was published, edited by Hanna Pan. The Cookbook is in the form of …

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    Diggings

    Fags and Dykes at the Table of Love. Finger-food from a meal in progress.
    8 March 2025

    A paper presented at the 2nd Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference at the University of Melbourne, 5-6 November 1999Two moments in the global history of fags, dykes and food resonate across …

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    Kangaroo Tail Soup and Warrenheip Gin. A sixpenny dinner at the Colonial Exhibition of 1886
    7 March 2025

    March 2025The Australian Agents-General propose to startle the culinary connoisseurs of London with a series of sixpenny dinners at the Colonial Exhibition of 1886, the viands being exclusively Australian. The …

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    Variations On A Theme.  Homemade Sausage Rolls 1864 – 1964
    7 March 2025

    March 2025In 1864 Edward Abbott gave a perfunctory description of the sausage roll, you can hardly call it a recipe, in The English and Australian Cookery Book. Cookery for the …

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    ‘The fortunate and indefatigable apothecary of Pitt-street’. J. Tawell Apothecary, Druggist, and Spice-Dealer
    4 March 2025

    July 2024Since first encountering them I have been fascinated by apothecaries in the early years of the colonies and the part they played in the foodways. This advertisement of 21 …

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    ‘Cooking electrically is Simple, Safe, Speedy and Certain’. Electrical Association of Women Cookery Book 1938
    3 March 2025

    March 2025The Electrical Association for Women (EAW from here) was formed in March 1934 by Florence Violet McKenzie based on a similar British Association. The EAW was a membership-based organisation. …

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