Corned beef hash with eggs and cream.

In the beginning this weblog was a place to store improvised recipes that had (kind of) worked - given that I am no chef. Before that I scribbled ideas on scraps of paper and put them between the pages of cookbooks - a random collection that included one with blank pages framed in stock illustrations, in which you transcribed your own recipes. I had dutifully penned in a couple between the parted lettuce leaves and artful scatterings of peas and shards of cheese; and then shelved it. I could not throw the book out because it had been a gift from someone. Who? I forget. Sentimentality makes you a slave, even to the unknown.

Conscripting leftovers was an early gastronomic tic that persists today, given that in this house of coming-and-going teenagers, eating might occur at all hours or sometimes none. On a good day they’ll eat like six tigers; a casserole of stuffed capsicum, the rest of the ham, a cold roast chicken, last night’s pasta carbonara. 

Corned beef hash, gourmet-style.

It had been a large piece of pink-fleshed meat, served thickly sliced under a blanket of parsley-flecked white sauce redolent of mustard, with the usual accessories of cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes boiled in the clove-infused bouillon.

There was still a substantial I lump of beef left over after the following day’s corned-beef-and-egg sandwiches. What to do next?

I sliced a red onion into rings and sweated it in olive oil in a pan on a very low heat. No browning, just soft and sweet.

Meanwhile some peeled colibans had been simmering quietly on the back burner, with just an occasional flubble to remind me they were there. When they were soft enough I drained them and shook the pot, holding the lid on, until they were breaking down and furry. I tipped them into the pan over the sweet, sweet onions, soft now as silk, and flattened them slightly with a fork to add to their indignity and their succulence.

Having chopped the remaining corned beef into bite-sized cubes I tumbled these over the potato and onion basement, where some fell into the potato valleys. Now three eggs, yolks breached; a cup of cream and the same of grated cheese to blanket the scene like snow. Back on the stove, and fifteen minutes later the whole thing had fused like a horizontal frieze, little pinkish boulders rendered golden with melting cheese.

Serve with hot English mustard, the world’s greatest condiment; or if you don’t like the undoubted effect of allyl isothiocyanate, one of the bowdlerized versions is acceptable.

*

Speaking of corned beef, the foodstuff appears frequently in Myrtle Rose White’s autobiographical memoir, being one of the few readily available foodstuffs that would ‘keep’. The author writes of the days before electricity, let alone the refrigerator; recalling life on an isolated station (translation: ranch) in the South Australian wilderness where her husband runs five thousand head of cattle:

There is something soul-stifling in the monotony of one or two hundred days that have no distinction one from the other. The morning breaking pearly-grey above the eastern sandhills. The summer sun thrusting its brazen face above the earth as the day advances; the terrible sands that hold the heat of Hades, burning through the stoutest shoe-leather ... The morning milk was sour by night. Butter was a hope of the future and a thing of the past. ... the terrible unappeasable craving for cool fresh green salads, tomatoes, fresh fruit ... and endless wringing out of clothes from blue water ... to wrap around foods in order to tempt jaded appetites ... there is fresh beef for one day, and salt beef for twenty-nine, I could compile a book wholly ... of corned beef recipes ... or offer a prize for a fresh recipe, so sure I am that there are no fresh ways of dishing up that commodity.

*

Myrtle Rose White, 1932, No Roads Go By, Rigby Sydney.

*

White’s memoir is yet another example of early Australian literature that has been out of print for decades. White writes without over-sentimentality of raising three children in such isolation they may as well have lived on the moon. The book reputedly inspired John Flynn to establish the Royal Flying Doctor Service.