The Kitchen Tapes #7

Recorded 19 April 2018

Meals at Craig House

GM:  OK, today is the 19th of April 2018, with Trenna Mahney.  Tren, can you tell me whatever you can think of about Craig House.

THM:  Well, Craig House was quite posh in some ways. It was formal in that we had to dress for dinner each night. 

In the large dining area there were three tables, one very big jarrah, which would have seated one at each end and about 5 or 6 people along each side. Then another one that held 8 people, and another one that held 6 people or thereabouts. 

So it was a big area, and in that room there was also an upright piano, and later on we would get a freezer, a chest freezer as well.

And there was a cabinet, a wooden cabinet next to the fireplace which was in the centre of the dining room, on the same wall as the kitchen.  And next to the fireplace was a little hatch in the wall which you could slide up or slide down forming an opening and that’s where we would queue to get our food from the kitchen.  

A Well Regulated Regimen

The boys would serve the girls, dinner in particular, and Sunday [lunchtime] roast.  There was always a Sunday roast. 

It was very posh, I thought

We would have to dress properly for our meals, the girls had to wear a dress and shoes and stockings and the boys had to wear long pants, a shirt and tie. 

Matron would make sure you were dressed properly.  We would stand behind our wooden back chairs and Matron would nominate someone to say grace, the standard “for what we are about to receive…” 

When you had said the grace then the boys would pull out the chairs for the girls to sit on.  It was very posh, I thought. 

We sat, and then we lined up for our meals, but I think that was only at breakfast time.  At dinner time we would be given a meal by the boys, or the boys who had been allocated that job.  

Matron would allocate the jobs, I think we had them for a fortnight.  Every fortnight we would be allocated a particular job that we were on, either by ourself or with one or two other people, depending on how long the job took. 

Matron loathed the word “serviette”, she thought it sounded cheap

Girls had a particular lot of jobs, and boys had a particular lot of jobs.  The girls had to set the table and make the toast, and always put the jam and marmalade and any condiments, like chutneys or sliced banana and coconut into bowls. 

They were never put out in the jars that they came in, but that perhaps was because the jars would be bulk sized containers.  But they were always put out elegantly.  

Each person had a name on their serviette ring – I said “serviettes” but they were “napkins”.  Matron loathed the word “serviette”, she thought it sounded cheap.

They were cloth napkins and they were kept in the side buffet which was next to the fire.  I don’t remember if that is where all the plates were. I sort of think they might have been in the kitchen, but I’m not sure about that. 

I think the buffet was all drawers so I think it probably contained placemats, serviettes, and I don’t know if it contained the cutlery and glassware and crockery, for I think all of those came from the kitchen. 

I don’t know if it just held other things like tablecloths for when we did have visitors.  Sometimes there were tablecloths as well as placemats, the placemats were made of material I think.

The night time meals were the formal meals, except for on a Sunday. For Sunday lunch we always had a roast, and we would have a light dinner, which was casual.

… boiled swede, which I found the most disgusting vegetable in the world … it was truly a dreadful meal.  

I don’t even think we had to do the formal dressing for Sunday night dinner.  For the formal meals, at the beginning of each term you could decide on the colour of a plate you wanted. 

I know the colours of the plates, I think they went like this, pink was for a small serve, blue was for a medium serve, and green was for a large serve. 

You would nominate what plate so that was quite good, you weren’t forced to eat an amount of food that you didn’t particularly want to have.  Most of the time I was the only girl who had a medium sized plate, all the other girls had a pink plate because most of them were either dieting or they didn’t like quite a lot of the food.  

There were few meals I disliked.  The one meal I know I disliked was what I called “the boiled meal”. 

It was corned beef, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, boiled swede, which I found the most disgusting vegetable in the world, boiled onion and it was a whole onion, and then covered in a gluggy, white, caper sauce. 

I had never heard of capers so I never knew what to expect and it was truly a dreadful meal.  

Matron had a rule at Craig House, and that was that you ate every bit of your meal, but you did not scrape your plate because that was unbecoming, but you ate everything. 

You were not allowed to put salt over your meal, you had to put salt on the edge of the plate, and pinch a little bit of it on as you needed it.  You were allowed to put pepper on your food. 

Also, if we had a bread roll or when we had toast you would get your butter, which was actually a gruesome mixture of home made butter which we made with some sort of margarine product whipped till it was almost cheese and it was put in a bowl.

You would take some and put it on the edge of your plate.  As you would with whatever your choice of jam or marmalade. 

I don’t remember peanut paste being a choice. I do think there was Vegemite, but I’m not sure of that. 

But none of those went straight onto your toast, and you never used your own fork or knife to get anything out of the bowls of condiments.  You always used the spoon or butter knife provided.

Meals Like Royalty

There was a large variety of meals.  I can’t say anything different, but when I first arrived, Nancy was still there. 

In later life she said  “they were the most fantastic meals in the world, it was like being royalty, we always had beautiful meals”.  She may well be right, that they were beautiful meals compared to what we got at Mofflyn Homes, and I agree they were better than those. 

But we often had offle, and meals that a lot of kids could not eat.  I didn’t have trouble with that except for that particular boiled meal.  Or if we had sheep’s heart, because sheep’s heart looked like a heart would look. 

It was the size of a large potato, but the shape of what a heart would look like, and it had all the ducts, whatever you call the tubes that went through it, and you had to cut through this heart as it jumped around your plate. 

It was usually served with one of the most lothed vegetables, and that was silverbeet, which always had grit in it, and at least on one occasion had a cockroach in it. 

Those were never seen as reasons to be able to be let off from eating your meal.  You ate it, and you were thankful for it, because there were “starving children in Biafra”.  

Dessert

We also got dessert.  I think actually, with the main meal we were offered a second serve if we wanted more.  It’s not so clear to me that, but with dessert, yes, we did got offered more. 

So the desserts were really quite lovely.  I think everybody looked forward to dessert. 

There were no sizes for dessert, you just had an array of puddings.  Some of our cooks were the best at cooking particular desserts like apple strudel, apple crumble, which would be served with hot custard, queens pudding, which would be served with cream and custard, chocolate pudding, I think that was served with ice cream. 

I think Matron made a trifle which we all loved.  She was very good at making meringue, so we got meringues from time to time.  

Even if it was a simple dessert everybody loved it.  One of the most simple ones was ice cream with a granita biscuit crumbled over the top of it, and topping poured over the top of that, with what was in those days called sliced Chinese gooseberries, now known more as kiwifruit. 

There were plenty more desserts like junket, rice pudding, stewed plums.  We didn’t really have canned fruit very much, they all seemed to have been real fruit, so we were pretty privileged in that way.  

The ABC Green Grocery

I think we got fruit sent to us from farms. I know that on occasions when a Legatee would come to visit, and that’s a story in itself,  but sometimes we would drive into the city to go to the ABC broadcast commission building which was on Adelaide Terrace, down towards Hill Street, I think. 

We would walk all through the back way of the ABC, which was really thoroughly exciting because programmes were being aired, and they may be programmes for the television or for the radio, or rehearsals for the ballet or upcoming children’s programmes. 

We had to walk through the areas where all the props and sets were kept and where all the clothing, which was very grand and colourful.  

And there would usually be a “star” there.  Most of the stars I didn’t know because they were older men, and they would give out photos which would have their signature on. 

I don’t think they signed it there and then, but we got photos from people who read the news.  People we knew when we were teenagers and they had just become radio personalities. 

At first they had been mainly presenting the news, and they spoke with a very posh English accent.  People like Peter Holland, Dave Ellery.   Those people who  were still people I didn’t know because they were are a lot older than me.  

But we would, in a corridor, find boxes of vegetables.  That was something I often went with someone to do.

I don’t know why I was chosen because I think we had to carry the boxes. So I don’t know if the boys also did it.

I don’t know where these boxes of vegetables came from. I don’t know if they were just charity, or they were left over from shops and they were getting a bit past their date. 

They weren’t made up products, they were always vegetables and fruits. But of course that wasn’t the only way we got our vegetables and fruit. It just seemed to be an added contribution. 

We got them there. I just know we did that and it was really quite exciting to do that.

We actually grew some of our own veggies ourselves. Nothing much, but we did grow beans and peas and we also had a strawberry patch. 

We also had a beautiful large mulberry tree up the back of Craig House, but that was really just us kids climbing the tree and eating the mulberries throughout the day. They were never harvested as such and used for a dessert. 

We were just able to eat them wherever and whenever.  There didn’t seem to be control over that.

Weekends

We always had cooked breakfasts except for on the weekend.  Weekends were when we got cereals because the cooks didn’t work on the weekends, except for one of the cooks would make the roast for Sunday lunch. 

I’m not sure about how we got a meal on Saturday nights.  I was thinking whether it was something like a stew, made ahead, but it also was a time when I think we did have curries. 

I know Matron was responsible for making the curry.  She had lived a long while in India. She was brought up in India as part of the Raj, but she knew how to make the curry. 

I presume though that all the hard preparation of the meat had been done by the staff before they took their leave.  

We loved Matron’s curry, it was really delicious.  In hindsight it was probably not a traditional curry, it was probably a bit more Australian, because I think there were sultanas in it, so the sweet sort of curry. 

But it was fancy in that we always did have sliced banana, desiccated coconut, onion and tomato, and fruit chutney to add to the curries.  It was my first time of ever eating “foreign” food I guess. 

One of her other favourite meals, I think this might also have been had on the weekend, was chicken chow mein.  We sort of liked chicken chow mein.  It was a hit or miss meal.  

Sunday nights were an easy night.  It was different from all the other meals.  We wouldn’t have a formal dessert, we would have fruit that was quite often apples or grapes or whatever fruit was in season.  I’m not sure where they came from. 

Interestingly we ate our fruit off a side plate.  We were allowed to use our fingers to pick the fruit up, but fruit needed to be cut.  I don’t know where or if Nancy my sister got the notion of cutting her fruit up from there, but she still cuts fruit every day today. 

But we used to do what Matron did and that is I think we ate Granny Smith apples which were tart  and she would put salt on the corner of her plate and dip the apple thoroughly in salt and eat it. 

we both loved brain patties. But we knew a lot of kids didn’t.  So we would ask for brain patties

I know I did too and I thought that made them yummy.  I don’t know where that originated from, but a lot of kids did it.  Maybe some didn’t, but anyway, I did.

The meals … Well, I think I’ve said enough about the meals.

The house master and house mistress sat at the head of the other two smaller tables and they just basically kept control of those tables and made sure everybody ate their food. 

Brain Patty Shenanigans

Oh yes, the weekend Sunday night meal could be something as easy as scrambled egg on toast, which a lot of people liked, fish patties, but one of the ones that they lothed was a breaded brain patty.  

We would see everybody take small mouthfuls of their brain patty, put it in their mouth, bulge their eyes, and swallow

Helen and I were a bit naughty, because sometimes if Matron was in a good mood she would ask you if you had any requests for what went on the upcoming menus.  And we both loved brain patties. But we knew a lot of kids didn’t.  So we would ask for brain patties. 

With me having a medium sized plate I would get two large brain patties, which were the size of normal rissoles, I guess.  The pink plates would only get one brain patty. 

It would be hilarious to watch everybody eat the patties because we were meant to eat our food without drinking water until after the meal.  It was considered bad for your digestion to drink water while you ate. 

We would see everybody take small mouthfuls of their brain patty, put it in their mouth, bulge their eyes, and swallow.  Quite often people had coughing attacks, and Matron would allow them to drink water.  That always seemed to happen there.  

Helen and I had to shovel as many brain patties down our neck as we could before Matron got back

There was at least one occasion when the phone rang during dinner, and someone was sent out to answer it.  The phone was in Maton’s study and Matron had to go and take the phone call. 

When that happened everybody who could chuck their brain patties on to our plates would. 

Quite often the house master and house mistress would have a weekend away.  I guess that was one of those times because they would have stopped it or maybe they would have got out of eating the brain patty – I don’t know. 

Maybe they would have chucked us their brain patty too.  

But Helen and I had to shovel as many brain patties down our neck as we could before Matron got back. And then disperse left overs. 

Under the table was a ridge of wood that supported the table, and whenever anybody could they would put food they didn’t like along that ridge. 

Sometimes it would stay there until they were discovered at school holiday time but sometimes they disappeared either because the culprits would get them and dispose of them, or a rat would come and visit and have a feast.

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