When we Padman girls were young, one of Mum’s aunts, Anne Weedon from Goulburn NSW, stayed with us several times in the 50s and early 60s. Mum’s mother, Libby Weedon, was one of the large family of Weedon girls, at least 11 possibly 12 , who mostly married and raised families out on the Western Plains around Yass, Goulburn and Orange. One, our ‘Grandma in Sydney’ married Ted Croan, and another whose name I don’t remember married and went to Victoria, Narre Warren I think. But really, the only one I recall actually meeting was Aunty Anne, who visited us several times at Bifrons Court in the 50s, when I was young. She did a lot of work for the Australian Red Cross I recall, and I have the impression she’d been involved for years. I remember seeing pictures of her in a Red Cross uniform, so I imagine that was for an active role during WWII, ambulance driving rings some kind of bell. She was a lovely lady, pretty elegant, not married, and I think possibly her life included a relationship with a young man who didn’t return from WWI which was a common, sad, story for many in her generation, born in the 1890s. She had beautiful skin, and I remember watching with some interest how at the end of the day she always cleaned off her makup with coldcream. (I tried that once – yuk) Our mother who also had beautiful skin washed her makeup off with soap and water, and I followed suit, with soap and water followed by a good moisuriser on account of living in the harsh dry Aussie Outback for over 20 years, always with the goal of not developing ‘crepey neck’… anyway, as a result my own skin’s not too bad considering the parched environments I’ve lived in.
Aunty Anne cooked lovely meals while she stayed, and the one thing that all three Padman girls all strongly associate with her is her cooked mayonnaise recipe, and which Mum made for ever more. Of it, Sal once said, “It was the only mayonaise we ever had as kids, and Mum used to make it by the gallon.” – a slight exaggeration perhaps, but there were often at least two big Fowler’s jars of it in the ‘fridge. It’s quick and easy enough to make, and we liked it better than anyone else’s mother’s mayonnaise or salad dressing-
Auntie Anne’s Mayonnnaise
- 2 cups milk
- 2 egg yolks (freeze the whites; use in a pavlova sometime)
- 1/2 cup of sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- level tablespoon flour
- teaspoon of mustard
- 1 cup vinegar
- piece of butter the size of an egg
Combine the yolks, sugar (next time I’m going to make it a scant 1/2cup), salt, mustard, flour and milk ( a minute or two in the liquidiser) Boil the vinegar and butter together, then add the other mixture to it, stirring constantly over the heat until it thickens. Remove from the heat and leave to cool before pouring/spooning all the mayonnaise into a lidded jar – it keeps for weeks in the ‘fridge. And Mum wrote somewhere in one of my cook books that adding finely chopped gherkins makes a nice tartare sauce – that’s true, though I’d add a little grated onion perhaps. Potato salad using the mayo with lots of finely chopped mint is great….
I don’t know why I ever stopped making it, as this lot I made yestereday took all of 5 minutes up to just setting it aside to cool…. There are a couple of commercial mayonnaises I like, but lately I’ve been finding that while they’re great for spreading to make sandwiches, they don’t seem to have much taste – and no, I don’t have covid!
Any mayonnaise, if diluted with some vinegar from the alcaparras/capers jar, white vinegar or lemon juice, plus a bit of sunflower oil, makes a nice more liquid dressing for the kind of all-into-the-one-bowl-chopped-tossed-salad I like to have for lunch several times a week. Perhaps you make a similar one?
There are no fixed ingredients or quantities for this – and it’s easily scaled up for two or more eaters: To a quantity of chopped lettuce in a bowl for each eater, I add diced tomato or a few halved cherry tomatoes, some finely chopped onion or spring onion, some cucumber chunks, croutons if I have them, perhaps a handful of unsalted toasted almonds, some diced fresh fruit, chopped celery, a few sultanas or raisins, some capers or a few bits of chopped jalapeno if there’s an open container already in the fridge … you get the idea, and don’t foget to add those little bits of left over cooked vegetables. For protein I add some diced left over cold meat or salami – even one cold sausage finely diced goes a long way. At this stage I add enough dressing to lightly coat most of the chunks in the salad, and toss well. Then, if I’m adding 1-2 chopped hard boiled eggs/person, or some diced avocado, I add these last and just stir in slightly.
It always reminds me of someone’s ‘garbage soup’ recipe – in which all the leftovers are tossed into a big pot of good home made soup base started from scratch – I’m sure we who don’t eat soup out of a can know this kind of hearty ‘soup recipe’ well!