Condensed Cholesterol & Sugar Blindness
The Australasian “Slice”
I’ve got a book of “slices.” Well, one
of those magazine-y books. Can’t remember why on earth I bought it—research,
possibly, I’m no baker. I do recall that at one stage I was hoping to find a
recipe that would be tasty, as healthy as possible, and require no baking. You
know, incorporating mainly rolled oats and a few ground-up nuts or maybe even sunflower
seeds, stuck together with something that wasn’t
full of cholesterol and sucrose. Hah, hah.
Back in the day, when no-one had heard of so-called “muesli bars” and we’d
just started to be health-food conscious, the “slice” emerged in Australasian
cookery, and gradually took over the rôle formerly played by actual baked cakes
or biscuits in morning and afternoon teas. Cakes are still baked, though not as
often as was normal right up into the 1960s, and biscuits (though to a much
lesser extent), but the slice now dominates. It is often served as a dessert,
too. Its huge popularity may be seen on the Aussie website, BestRecipes.com.au, which has hundreds of slice recipes.
What is a slice? The usage appears to be confined to Australia and New
Zealand. The cookbooks won’t enlighten you: they assume it’s a norm, and that you
know.
A “slice” is a kind of flat, low cake. Slices are made as a whole but then cut
up into portion-sized pieces before storing and/or serving. They may consist of
merely one layer, or of one layer, iced, or of a base with a topping, or of a
base with a topping plus an icing or frosting. They may be baked or unbaked. Unbaked
slices may require some cooking on the stove-top or in the microwave, or none
at all. Some recipes may also be eaten as sweets and there is often no firm
dividing line between them, though the sweets tend to have less flour content.
The concept existed for quite some years before the “slice” gained its
name. Sometimes such recipes were called “fingers,” but this never became the
generic term Downunder.
“Scradge”
It’d have been in the mid-1960s—probably
just before we moved to the new house—when Mum began to make the sweetish
non-baked thing that the family came to call “Scradge.” I think the inspiration
for the name was Dad’s, originally. Say a thing fifty times and the kids start copying
you—well, maybe. His favourite (feeble) jokes and boring stories weren’t
copied. But in the case of “Scradge,” it stuck. She must have got the recipe
from the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly,
she always bought a magazine or two even when we were in our first Auckland house:
it was her only indulgence, and if the minute amount of cash left over from the
groceries didn’t run to a shiny McCall’s
as well, it’d be just the Weekly. By
the time we’d moved and Dad had the new job there was more money but she still
bought the good old Weekly, and it
still had pretty much the old format, with recipes every week. Sometimes they’d
be stand-bys, or perhaps a slightly new touch to an old stand-by, but very
often they were new discoveries or someone’s bright idea.
Slice Origins
It’s quite difficult to trace the
culinary history of the slice; there are so many strands to it. Let’s see:
® Baked
“shortcakes”
® Sweetened
condensed milk
® Rolled
oats in biscuits
® Packaged
cereals
® Sweets
made with copha
® Bought
biscuits as an ingredient
® Health
foods and muesli
I think these are the main ones, more
or less in chronological order of their appearance in the Australasian diet.
The basic ingredients, however, were not necessarily adopted in baking in the
order in which they got into the diet.
The 20th-Century Curse: Elaboration Upon Elaboration…
As the 20th century rolled on, slices
became more and more elaborate and the original purpose of the things, to save the
home cook time and provide a relatively low-sugar, low-cost treat for the
family, was completely lost sight of.
Today’s slices may even consist of an oven-baked bottom layer or base, a
saucepan-cooked main layer or “filling” (they’re flat, no sides, so you can’t
literally fill them), and a saucepan-cooked marshmallow or oven-baked meringue
topping. Guaranteed to drive the inexperienced home cook to tears and raise the
temperature of the kitchen to that of an inferno, not to mention the temper.
Junk & More Junk
They may incorporate almost any sweet
junk food you’d care to name and some that you wouldn’t. I've read slice recipes
containing melted Mars Bars, chopped-up marshmallows (very popular), Maltesers, Rolos, lolly bananas (so described), Aero
Bars, Cherry Ripe Bars, Violet Crumble or Crunchie Bars (containing “hokey-pokey”
if you’re a New Zealander, “honeycomb” if you’re an Australian), peppermint
chocolate, caramels, liquorice allsorts, and chocolate-coated Turkish Delight
bars.
Sticky & Sweet
In order to make the mixtures cohere—that’s
often both base and filling—they may
use of any of these, or any combination or permutation of them:
® Sweetened Condensed Milk ® Butter ® Chocolate ® Sugar
® Eggs ® Honey ® Golden Syrup ® Copha
If using sugar as one of your binding agents your slice’s base definitely
has to be baked; otherwise it may not be, though those with eggs usually (but
not inevitably) are. The list is more or less in order of popularity, though
it's hard to judge. And as I say, it’s not just one of them, it’s often two or
more.
All this, combined with the ubiquitous use of the family car, could just
help to explain why the Aussie media keep reporting worriedly that Australian
kids are some of the most overweight in the world—yes.
Slice Origins
Today I’ll take a look at the first
three strands in the complex culinary history of the slice: baked shortcakes,
the introduction of sweetened condensed milk as a baking ingredient, and the use
of rolled oats in baking. More later.
Slice Origins: Baked “Shortcakes”
Date Shortcake
4 ozs. Butter; 4 ozs.
Sugar
1 Eggs; 4 ozs. Flour
4 ozs. Edmonds cornflour
1 teaspoon Edmonds Baking Powder
1/2 lb. Chopped Dates
Juice of 1 Lemon
Cream butter and sugar;
add egg, then sifted flour, cornflour and baking powder. Knead. Roll out half
the mixture and place on a cold greased tray. Put dates into a small saucepan,
add a little water (about 2 tablespoons) and lemon juice. Cook over a low heat
until dates are soft. Cool, and spread on shortcake. Roll out other half and
place on top. Bake 25 minutes at 375° F. When cold, ice with lemon icing. Cut
into squares.
Edmonds Cookery Book. De
Luxe Ed. ([Christchurch, N.Z.], T. J. Edmonds Ltd., 1955 (1968 printing))
One of the precursors to the slice was
the oven-baked “shortcake.” It’s an old term, but recipes which we can relate
to as modern rather than obsolete appear under various names quite early. A
sweetish dough, halfway between a cake mixture and a pastry mixture, is usually
used. Some versions are baked as a whole, some cut up before baking. In America
the popular “cobbler,” typically with peaches, is a relation. Obviously these
items are related to pies or tarts, and probably developed from them, but they
are not the same: the crust or base is not shaped so as to hold a filling, and
it is not a true pastry.
“Short” here refers to “shortening,” a “fat used for making pastry
crisp” which is related to the meaning of “short” as “friable, crumbling, not
tenacious” (Concise Oxford). These
recipes for flattish cake-like items date back over 150 years: in 1861 we find
Mrs Beeton giving us the full works, from creating the shortening (lard) to the
finished items from the oven.
—You’re not mis-reading it, no (I thought I
was), and it isn’t a savoury recipe, no. “Leaf” is leaf-lard, “made from layers
of fat round pig’s kidneys” (Concise
Oxford).
Scrap-Cakes.
1779.
Ingredients.—2 lbs. of leaf, or the inside fat of a pig; 1-1/2 lb. of flour,
1/4 lb. of moist sugar, 1/2 lb. of currants, 1 oz. of candied lemon-peel,
ground allspice to taste.
Mode.—Cut the
leaf, or flead, as it is sometimes called, into small pieces; put it into a
large dish, which place in a quick oven; be careful that it does not burn, and
in a short time it will be reduced to oil, with the small pieces of leaf
floating on the surface; and it is of these that the cakes should be made.
Gather all the scraps together, put them into a basin with the flour, and rub
them well together. Add the currants, sugar, candied peel, cut into thin
slices, and the ground allspice. When all these ingredients are well mixed,
moisten with sufficient cold water to make the whole into a nice paste; roll it
out thin, cut it into shapes, and bake the cakes in a quick oven from 15 to 20
minutes. These are very economical and wholesome cakes for children, and the
lard, melted at home, produced from the flead, is generally better than that
you purchase.
To prevent the
lard from burning, and to insure its being a good colour, it is better to melt
it in a jar placed in a saucepan of boiling water; by doing it in this manner,
there will be no chance of its discolouring.
Time.—15 to 20 minutes. Sufficient to make 3 or 4 dozen cakes. Seasonable
from September to March.
The lard makes it much cheaper than butter,
which is used in real shortbread (for which Isabella has an excellent recipe),
and thus the result is for the kids, and only “Scrap-Cakes.”
1908: the American Contribution
The general idea of the “shortcake”
was around for the next hundred years (and is still around). Versions with
apples, sometimes other fruit, were very popular with the home cook during the
first half of the 20th century. This is an American recipe:
German Apple Cake.
Make a
biscuit dough; roll out very thin and put on a well-buttered cake-pan. Have
ready some apples. Cut in quarters; lay closely on the cake; sprinkle thick
with brown sugar; add some cinnamon and a handful of currants. Pour some fresh
melted butter over the cake; set in the oven to bake until done. Serve with
coffee.
365 Foreign Dishes: A Foreign
Dish for Every Day in the Year. (Philadelphia, G.W. Jacobs
& Co., [1908])
Here a "biscuit" dough would
be similar to a scone dough. This shows us that such recipes, whether ostensibly
“German” or not (it's the apples), were already established in the
English-speaking repertoire at the beginning of the 20th century.
1940s/1950s: Going Strong
Downunder
By the late 1940s/early 1950s such flat
baked items cropped up regularly in the cookbooks. There is still no generic
name, but they’re nevertheless a discernible grouping, and it's easy to see how
they would become “slices.” Both the Calendar
of Puddings and the Calendar of Cakes
from the South Australian Country Women's Association, around 1951-52,
contain recipes for apple shortcakes, and so does the Green and Gold Cookery Book, 15th ed. (rev.), circa 1949.
Here’s one of them that I just picked at
random—they’re virtually indistinguishable.
Apple Cake
(Quantity Makes Two
Cakes. Each Serves Six.)
2 large cups S.R. flour,
3/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter, 2 eggs, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 2 large cups
stewed apples.
Cream butter and sugar,
add beaten eggs, and mix well. Add sifted flour and cinnamon. Knead into light
dough and divide into four equal pieces. Have ready two 8-inch sandwich tins.
Roll out one piece and line tin. Spread with one cup of apples and cover with
similar piece. Repeat for second tin, pinching edges together. Bake in moderate
oven to 3/4 hour. Serve hot with custard or cream. When cold, may be iced and
sprinkled with nuts.
-MRS. L. W. CLEMENTS
(Cobdogla).
Calendar of Puddings (South
Australian Country Women's Association, circa 1952)
Then as now these “cakes” could be
served for dessert or afternoon/morning tea. The sandwich configuration was
quite popular, but not mandatory.
It didn’t have to be apples, you could use other fruits or jam. This one’s
from the Calendar of Cakes, not
puddings, but it’s the same basic idea:
Blackberry Shortbread
1/2 lb. S.R.
flour, 1/4 lb. butter, 6 ozs. sugar, 2 eggs, blackberry jam, 1 cup chopped or
minced nuts. Rub butter into sifted flour and mix in the sugar. Then take out
one-third of this mixture. Mix the remainder with the beaten eggs. Press into
greased cake tin and spread with blackberry jam. Add the nuts to the mixture
previously taken out and sprinkle this over the jam. Bake about 40 minutes in a
moderate oven. This amount fills two 7 in. sandwich tins.
--MRS. H. A.
GARDNER (Tailem Bend).
Calendar
of Cakes (South Australian Country Women's Association, circa 1951)
(The crumb mixture appears in several
recipes in this book, it seems to have been a fad of the time. Later revived
off and on.)
Shades of the Modern Slice
Begin To Close, Around the Glowing Oven…
I was quite rocked when I discovered
the recipe for “Marshmallow Shortcake” in my 1968 printing of the New Zealand Edmonds Cookery Book, De Luxe Ed., 1955.
At first glance it seemed to have gone back to the future. But it isn’t a modern
slice at all. Everything is made by hand, including the marshmallow.
(Version 2 of the “filling”, i.e. topping, makes a concession to modernity in
that Edmonds packet jelly crystals are used instead of the tricky business of
making marshmallow from scratch.)
Marshmallow Shortcake
4 ozs.
Butter; 4 ozs. Sugar; 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla Essence;
1 Egg; 8
ozs. Flour; 1 teaspoon Edmonds Baking
Powder
Cream butter
and sugar; add essence. Add egg, then sifted dry ingredients. Roll on
greaseproof paper to about 1/2 inch. Place on cold tray and bake 30 minutes at
350° F.
FILLING (1):
2
dessertspoons Gelatine; 3/4 breakfastcup Cold Water;
3/4
breakfastcup Sugar; 1 Egg White;
3/4
breakfastcup Icing Sugar
Soften gelatine
in cold water, add sugar and boil 8 minutes. Cool. Beat white of egg stiff,
fold in icing sugar, then slowly pour in cooled gelatine. Beat until white and
thick (about 3 minutes). Spread on shortcake immediately. Ice with chocolate
icing and sprinkle with walnuts.
Rotary
The amount of beating this topping
needs is typical of an enormous number of dessert and cake recipes of the
1950s: by this time, “rotary beaters” (hand-held eggbeaters with a handle that
you turn) were very big. Of the many contemporary recipes which require a lot
of beating, several mention the rotary beater. Only the very affluent or those
with connections in the trade, like one of my aunties, would have had an
electric mixer on a stand with its own bowl. She had hers around 1950 and in 1986
it was still going strong!
—You’re right, if we served it today in New Zealand or Australia
everyone would think it was a slice.
Slice Origins: Cooking With Sweetened Condensed Milk
Sweetened condensed milk, usually just
called condensed milk, was invented in the middle of the 19th century. It made
a spectacular breakthrough in the 1860s as an official U.S. Government
foodstuff for the Union troops. From then onwards its place as a foodstuff was
assured, but at first it doesn’t seem to have been used in baking. Back then,
as now, it consisted merely of milk and sugar. The “sugar is added until a 9:11
(Nearly half) ratio of sugar to (evaporated) milk is reached. The sugar extends
the shelf life of sweetened condensed milk.” (“Condensed milk”, Wikipedia).
Earlier cookbooks only seem to use it in (ugh) the sort of salad
dressing which was to become one of the banes of my childhood. In the late 19th
century Australian cooks (mainly housewives, except the relatively well-off in
the larger towns, who could afford to employ a woman as cook) are told to use
it in a salad dressing by Mrs Wicken, but it doesn’t appear elsewhere in the
book. The recipe is “Lettuce Salad,” and the dressing is made with 1
tablespoonful condensed milk, 2 teaspoonful mustard, 1/2 gill vinegar, 1/4 gill
oil, and the yolk of a hard-boiled egg: “take the yolk of one and put it into a
basin and work it quite smooth with a spoon. Then add the mustard made with
vinegar instead of water, the condensed milk, pepper, and salt, and then the
oil slowly; last of all the vinegar. Mix it all very thoroughly.” (From Chapter
XXI. “Fifty Recipes For Salads And Sauces”, The
Art of Living in Australia, by Philip
E. Muskett; together with three hundred Australian cookery recipes and
accessory kitchen information by Mrs. H. Wicken. London, Eyre and
Spottiswoode, [1894])
New Zealand and Australia would still have been importing tins of condensed
milk back then. However, it wasn't very long before factories were set up in
both countries to process home-produced milk. In 1890 the Underwood Milk
Condensory was set up in Invercargill in New Zealand’s far south.
In 1898 the Cressbrook Condensed
Milk Factory (above) (more properly the Cressbrook Dairy Company's Condensed
Milk Factory) was built on Cressbrook, a large dairying property in Queensland.
(The township which arose round it is now called Toogoolawah.) The Nestlé &
Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company bought out the Cressbrook Dairy Company in 1907.
During World War I the Dennington Condensed Milk factory in Victoria, Australia,
which had opened in 1911, was the largest condensed milk factory in the world.
(“Cressbrook Condensed
Milk Factory” [photo], http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:132767;
"Cressbrook:
Settled: 1841" http://cressbrookstation.com.au/the-mcconnels-toogoolawah/;
“Inverness residence,
Toogoolawah”, Wikipedia;
“Nestlé International”,
https://www.nestle.co.nz )
Sweetly Condensed
By the 1940s condensed milk was an
established ingredient in sweets. The South Australian Green and Gold Cookery Book, 15th ed. (rev.) (Adelaide, R.M.
Osborne, circa 1949) has several confectionery recipes which use it. This is
typical:
Cream Caramels
One tin
condensed milk, 4 oz. sugar (No. 2 sugar, sand colour), 2 oz. butter, one
teaspoon vanilla. Put sugar, butter and
milk together. Boil 15 minutes, and stir in a double saucepan. Add vanilla when
cooked. Pour on buttered plates.
--Dorothy
Sibley, Angaston.
Condense Your Baking
Condensed milk had started to appear
in baked goods, presaging the slice, by the early 1950s. It turns up in both
the Calendar of Puddings and the Calendar of Cakes from the South
Australian Country Women’s Association, both circa 1951-1952.
Three-Layered,
Twice-Cooked Summer Martyrdom
This recipe is for January 7th, when
it’s often 40 degrees Celsius in the shade in South Australia. It doesn’t
indicate whether to eat the elaborate three-layered, twice-cooked confection
hot or cold—typically of the cookbooks of its time. My advice? Have a cold beer
and give the whole thing away. But you can see it was popular with the
contemporary voluntary kitchen martyrs: three of them wrote in with it:
Creamy Lemon Tart
8 ozs. S.R.
flour, 4 ozs. butter, 3 ozs. sugar, 1 egg, a pinch of salt. Sift flour and salt, add sugar, and rub in
butter. Mix to a stiff dough with egg and a little milk. Roll out and line two
9-in. tins or deep tart plates. Bake in moderate oven until cooked (about 25
minutes). When cold, mix this filling: 1 tin condensed milk, 2 yolks eggs, rind
1 1/2 lemons, 1/4 pint lemon juice. Stir all together and pour on cooked pastry
cases. Beat the 2 egg whites stiffly, beat in 3 dessertspoons sugar, and pile
on lemon filling. Bake a golden brown in slow oven (about 20 minutes).
—MRS. E. G.
PEARSON (Ungarra), MRS. H. GRIFFITHS (Smithfield), and MRS. K. FEIGE (Monash).
Calendar of puddings (South
Australian Country Women's Association, [1952?])
Slice Origins: Rolled Oats in Biscuits
Of course rolled oats predate condensed
milk as a human foodstuff, but they don’t seem to have been used in baking
until the early 20th century. Traditionally they were only used for porridge in
the human diet. Gradually they made their way into biscuits, and thence into
slices.
Just By the By: Oatmeal ain’t
Rolled Oats
If you’re confused by the usages
“rolled oats” and “oatmeal” you’re not alone: Wikipedia, which of course is
American-based, has failed to sort it out, as the suggestion that the entries
for the two should be amalgamated indicates. Americans use “oatmeal” to mean
porridge made from rolled oats (of which they have several qualities). But in
standard English “oatmeal” is a fairly course flour made by grinding oats in
the same way as wheat flour is ground. It has a much older history as a
foodstuff than rolled oats: “oatcakes,” firm biscuits made from oatmeal, were a
common food in northern England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland for centuries: “In
the eighteenth century, sacks of oatmeal were as a common a sight in Manchester
market as sacks of wheat were in the south. Fine white flour was a luxury in
the north until modern times.” (Jane Grigson. English Food, Penguin, 1977 (first published 1974), p.267.)
Oatmeal is described on the website of Hamlyns, the company which sells it
in Scotland: “Hamlyns Scottish Oatmeal, in its distinctive red pack, is
Scotland’s leading brand of oatmeal. We use only premium Scottish oats, which
are stoneground, using traditional milling stones, milled to a medium grade,
which makes a superb smooth porridge.” http://hamlynsoats.co.uk/product/hamlyns-scottish-oatmeal/
I can just remember Mum using oatmeal to bake the most delicious oblong
biscuits when I was about three or four, around 1948. The flour she used would
have been a smoother grade than the sort sold in Scotland for porridge, but it
was still faintly gritty.
Rolled oats, by contrast, are whole oat grains, without their hard outer
husk, that are steamed and then flattened out, rolled into flakes. The ones we
buy are typically further heat treated in some way, which stops them going
rancid and makes them easier to eat. (“Rolled oats”, Wikipedia: this article is
okay, it’s the one on oatmeal which is confused.)
Sugar Blindness: Caused by
the Rolled Oat
It’s become a familiar syndrome in
Australasian cookery. The rolled oat is such a HEALTHY ingredient that it
causes complete blindness to the effect of sugar.
—Make that to the effect of sugars.
The slice is the great exemplar of this syndrome. You can add any amount of
sugar in its various manifestations and the recipe will still come out healthy.
It can be ordinary white sugar, brown sugar (the brown makes it healthier,
too), raw sugar (the raw makes it even healthier), honey (very health-giving
and in fact tends to cause sugar blindness all by itself), golden syrup (very
traditional, much less processed than white sugar, can it be bad?), and any
kind of dried fruits at all, in vast quantities. Dried fruits are terrifically
healthy! But rolled oats are the most humungously healthiest of all.
Sadly, I’m not kidding. I picked this modern recipe up from the RobernMenz website. It’s a family-owned Australian company, owners of the famous
South Australian brand “Menz.” Well, famous in South Australia. Their products
are lovely for a treat, specially their specialty, “FruChocs,” small chunks of
dried fruit lightly coated with chocolate. But their recipes, frankly,
horrified me. Wot they should not of, after my experience of the terrifying
slices on BestRecipes.
Here it is: a prime example of sugar blindness caused by the rolled oat,
unchanged except for the layout and order of the ingredients. Hold onto your
hats!
FruChocs Oat Slice
[Whole grains] 2 1/2 cups rolled oats;
1 cup quinoa flakes
[Fats] 140g butter; 1/2 cup
shredded coconut; 1/2 cup slivered amonds [sic], lightly toasted; 1/2 cup mixed
sunflower and pepita seeds
[Sugary Fruits] 300g Menz Mini FruChocs,
roughly chopped; 1/2 cup dried cranberries; 1/2 cup dried apricots, roughly
chopped; 1/2 cup sultanas
[Sugars] 1/2 cup brown sugar; 2
tbs honey; 4 tbs golden syrup
1.Preheat
oven to 170c and line a 30cm x 20cm bakimg [sic] tray with baking paper.
2.In a small
saucepan, melt butter, brown sugar, honey and golden syrup.
3. While
butter mixture is melting lightly toast almonds in the oven for 5 mins.
4. In a
large mixing bowl, add toasted almonds, oats, quinoa, dried cranberries,
shredded coconut, dried apricots, sultanas and Menz Mini FruChocs. Mix through
to combine.
5. Add
melted butter mixture and stir through.
6. Place in
the lined baking tray and press down firmly to compact, smoothing out uneven
surfaces.
7. Bake in
the oven for 15 mins.
8. Once
baked, remove from the oven and set aside to cool.
9. Once
cooled, cover and transfer to the fridge to set for at least 3 hours.
10. Once
set, cut the slice into 18 pieces and serve.
[NB in the
picture the slice seems to have been scattered with extra chopped FruChocs]
The web page describes it as, no
kidding, “A healthy snack with a sweet twist -Great for the kids.”
I know nuts are good for you in that they contain good fats and protein;
nevertheless they are not slimming. Likewise fruit is good for you, but drying
concentrates the sugars, and a cup of dried fruit is laden with far more sugar
than fresh fruit of an equivalent bulk. And don’t get me started on coconut, the
21st-century foodie fallacy!
I’ve got nothing against this slice as an occasional indulgence, in fact
it sounds scrumptious. And it would be a great treat for the kids. But healthy?
No. The really sad thing is that it’s not an exception, it's typical of the
modern slice.
Anzac Biscuits, or, Don’t
Let’s Get Into That
I’m not even going to try to decide
when the term “Anzac biscuits” was first used, let alone on which side of the
Tasman. They’ve become an Australasian culinary icon. Let’s just concede that
they’re lumpy biscuits made with rolled oats and golden syrup or treacle. Being
good keepers, they were favourites for sending to the troops—probably, as their
modern name suggests, as early as the First World War. They’re significant in
the history of the slice, as this type of biscuit is probably the first example
of rolled oats being used in baked goods.
The recipe has been around at least since the beginning of the 20th
century, under various names, and it isn’t confined to Australia and New Zealand.
The earliest example I've got was published in America in 1914, in a book of
recipes dating back into the 19th century that describes itself as: “a
collection of old time recipes, some nearly one hundred years old and never
published before.”
Oatmeal Cookies
2 Eggs; 1
Cupful of Sugar
1 1/2
Cupfuls of Oatmeal or Rolled Oats
2/3 Cupful
of Cocoanut; 1/4 Teaspoonful of Salt
1/2
Teaspoonful of Vanilla; 2 Tablespoonfuls of Butter
Cream the
butter and sugar together and add the well-beaten eggs. Add the remainder of
the ingredients and drop on a well-greased baking-pan. Bake in a moderate oven,
from fifteen to twenty minutes.
Lydia Maria Gurney. The
Things Mother Used To Make. (New York, Frank A. Arnold, 1914)
For over half a century such recipes were published and republished in
successive editions (often just reprints) by the Australian cookbooks such as Green and Gold Cookery Book. In its 15th
edition, around 1949, it has 6 versions of this rolled oat biscuit: “ANZAC
Crisps” (with golden syrup, no coconut), “Brown Biscuits” [Version 1] (with
treacle, no coconut), “Brown Biscuits” [Version 2] (with treacle &
coconut), “Brownies, Or Munchers” (with treacle OR golden syrup, &
coconut), “Rolled Oats Biscuits” (with treacle, no coconut), and “Soldiers'
Biscuits” (with treacle, no coconut).
The golden syrup or treacle seems to have been the Antipodean
contribution.
By the 1950s the name “Anzac” does seem to be widely used: around 1951-2
Calendar of Cakes from the South
Australian Country Women's Association gives us “Anzac Dainties” (golden syrup OR
treacle, & coconut). The New Zealand version appears in Edmonds Cookery Book, De Luxe Ed., 1955
(1968 printing) under the name “Anzac Biscuits” (with golden syrup &
coconut):
Anzac Biscuits
2 ozs.
Flour; 3 ozs. Sugar; 1 teacup Coconut;
1 teacup
Rolled Oats; 2 ozs. Butter;
1 tablespoon
Golden Syrup; 1/2 teaspoon Winson’s
Bicarb Soda
2
tablespoons Boiling Water
Mix together
flour, sugar, coconut and rolled oats. Melt butter and golden syrup. Dissolve
Bicarb Soda in the boiling water and add to butter and golden syrup. Make a
well in the centre of flour, stir in the liquid. Place in spoonfuls on cold
greased trays. Bake 15 to 20 minutes at 350° F.
Oaty Slices
Rolled oats were a standard ingredient
in the early “healthful” slices. “Golden Apricot Bars” comes from Early Settlers' Household Lore by Mrs L.
Pescott, first published in Ballarat in 1977 and reissued in 1980. Of course
this is not an early settlers' recipe at all: it’s an example of the Australian
“slice,” even though it isn't yet called one.
Golden Apricot Bars
Base:
3/4 cup
flour; 1/2 cup cornflour; 1/2 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup
sugar; 1/2 cup butter; pinch salt
Topping:
1 cup dried
apricots; 1 cup brown sugar; 1 1/4 cups coconut
1/2 cup
sifted flour; 1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon
maize cornflour; 2 eggs (well beaten)
1/2 teaspoon
almond extract; 1/4 teaspoon salt
Extra 1/2
cup of blanched almonds and coconut
Combine
flour, salt, cornflour, sugar and rolled oats. Cut in butter until mixture is
crumbly. Press this mixture evenly into a greased shallow tin. Bake for 20
minutes in a moderate oven.
Cover
apricots with water, bring to the boil, and allow to simmer for 10 minutes.
Drain well and cool. Cut apricots into small pieces.
Sift flour,
cornflour, baking powder, and salt together. Gradually blend together the brown
sugar, almond essence and beaten eggs. Stir in flour mixture and apricots.
Spread this
mixture carefully over hot baked layer. Sprinkle with coconut and coarsely
chopped almonds. Bake in moderate oven further 30 minutes. Cut into bars.
It’s not too bad, is it? Sure it has
sugar, but it lacks the very sweet, sticky ingredients such as golden syrup,
honey and condensed milk.
Passion in a Biscuit: The
Apotheosis
This 21st-century Australian slice—I’d
have missed it in my database if I’d looked under “rolled oats” instead of
“Anzac”—is the apotheosis of rolled oats in baking. Here the rolled oats exist
only in the commercial Anzac biscuits:
Anzac Slice with Passionfruit
Icing
400 g packet
Anzac biscuits; 1/2 cup coconut
75 g butter,
melted; 1/2 cup condensed milk
1 1/4 cups
icing sugar; 2 tablespoons passionfruit pulp
Finely crumb
the Anzac biscuits in a food processor or by hand.
Place the
crumbs into a large bowl. Stir in the coconut, butter and condensed milk. Mix
well.
Press the
mix firmly into a slice tin 20 cm x 30 cm. Refrigerate for a few hours or until
firm.
Sift the
icing sugar into a bowl, then stir in passionfruit pulp to make a firm paste.
Microwave it on high for 30 seconds or until it is warm and spreadable, or place over a bowl of simmering
water.
Spread icing
over the base. Return to fridge until the icing is set, then cut into squares.
Recipe
notes: You don't need to heat the icing, just mix a bit extra pulp into the
icing sugar - it is optional.
Says it all? More or less, yeah! But I
haven’t yet looked at the other strands of the slice’s involved culinary
history; the use of packaged cereals, especially, is a very important factor—
Later.
