social image – Pickled Gizzards

Dad’s various community involvements such as Rotary, and a committee that organised post concert hospitality for the visiting state symphony orchestra several times a year, meant they often entertained people including some relative strangers in our lovely house which was perfect for both sit down dinners and buffet meals. We kids had to be on our best behaviour, and often helped as we got older.

One of Mum’s popular items for such entertaining was chicken fricassee, initially served with whipped potatoes and peas, but in later years, rice. There are lots of recipes online, and though Julia Child’s sounds yummy, here’s a recipe illustrated with a pic that looks most like Mum’s Chicken Fricassee recipe.

In my childhood, chicken was rather expensive, plus it was a serious meat and nothing like the fast food snack role it has today. It might be my imagination, but I think overall the birds were bigger and had more flavour back then. Many people kept chickens, or as we call them, ‘chooks’ in the back yard for eggs and meat, even if a chook was an old boiler destined for the stew or soup pot by the time its egg laying value had gone. Roast chicken probably appeared on our menu half a dozen times a year including birthdays and Christmas. It was never eaten all in one meal, as a roast would be followed by a chicken pie or chicken an aspic collation. Finally the carcass was always put into a pot to boil up for stock.

So chicken would impress, and a fricassee was a good way of making it go as far as possible. To cater for 16-18 people, Mum would buy a couple of chickens, boil them and remove the meat from the bones to put in with creamy white sauce with sauteed onions, mushrooms, plenty of herbs and a little bacon. If the number was 25-30 people, she’d do likewise with a pair of rabbits to add extra quantity with little extra expense. Once rabbit was cooked, removed from it’s distinctive bones and chopped pieces, it was mixed in with the chicken mixture and left to stand a while. Reheated together, no one was any the wiser that rabbit had been added. This mattered because of social taboos that had grown around rabbit during its history in early twentieth century Australia.

European rabbits were introduced to Australia by early colonists for meat and skins. Originally kept in captivity, they eventually escaped to go wild, and their population rapidly exploded to the point of them becoming a serious pest, ravaging cultivated farm crops and competing with domesticated animals for pastures.

By the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s they were in plague proportions all over the continent. In those hard times, plenty of people on farms and in rural towns were able to trap and sell or eat them, and as a source of meat, and rabbit helped keep many struggling families stay just on the right side of starvation. Rabbit became known as ‘poor man’s chicken’.

Biological control of the pest began the 1950’s with the introduction of the myxoma virus. This virus made the rabbits sicken and die a horrible death, and as healthy unaffected rabbits became harder to find, people stopped eating them. A social taboo thus grew around ‘rabbit’, and as we often helped serve and wash plates for extra pocket money when supper was served, we were always reminded to never mention the word ‘rabbit’ on those occasions.

Today, something of this taboo lingers, as although ‘poor man’s chicken’ is now farmed in places, there are still people in Australia who won’t eat rabbit.

These days Aussies eat mountains of rice, and grow plenty of it, too. So for a little background to this post, I went to the Ricegrowers Association of Australia’s website which confirmed what I knew, that rice is grown in large parts of New South Wales and northern Queensland, and the different climates of those regions favour production of different varieties. My personal favourite rices are bismati and jasmin … different rices are best for different things. I don’t make it, but I do enjoy sushi, for which sticky roundish grain rice is required – it probably has a name, but I digress. I read one company, SunRice, has been supplying rice to the Australian market for over 50 years, and that gels with the memories I’m sharing here today.

Today’s Aussie kids grow up eating a much larger variety of foods than we did. In the decades since the Vietnam War, especially, many of us have travelled in nearby Asian countries ranging from The Middle East right across to Japan. As a nation we love Asian food, and various Asian national dishes including the ubiquitous staple, rice, are on the menu in most Aussie homes and many restaurants around the nation. People from African and South American countries also eat a lot of rice in their cuisines. All that cultural diversity we’ve embraced in the waves of immigration in my lifetime since WWII has introduced us to many other foodstuffs like quinoa, tabouli and hummus, now so everyday common, but we’d never heard of them 50 years ago.

Tasmania produces mountains of potatoes, and like most people then, we ate potatoes every main meal and often two meals per day. Some time in the 1950s, for several winters in a row, there was serious outbreak of blight in much of Tasmania’s potato crop, making them scarce and very expensive. When this shortage hit, Mum substituted noodles and rice for potatoes, serving them only when we had visitors; and we understood this was to be strictly without any comments from the peanut gallery.

It probably wasn’t only Mum’s basic social insecurity, as a lot of the British stiff upper lip and sturdy Scots endurance ran in our blood, too. There was always an underlying concern that people outside the family shouldn’t know when things were financially tough, as they really were from time to time. One contributing reason for that was that Dad may have over-reached a bit to buy the Bifrons Court house in 1954 while at the same time starting to build up his optometric practice with extra staff and plant. There was tension whenever shoes needed mending or replacing. We each had a pair of sturdy lace-up leather school shoes and a ‘best’ patent leather pair for sunday school and parties. Shoes were only passed down in the family and usually worn out completely. As we girls grew out of them, clothes were handed down first within the family and then around Mum’s friends with daughters. I’ve always wondered where the beautiful Viyella dresses Mum smocked for us each year ended up… God forbid that people might hear that the Padmans of Bifrons Court were being forced to economise, and were actually eating far more rice and noodles than potatoes – but really, who could give a fig?

However, probably because everyone else had also switched to rice on account of those severe shortages, within a few years it became socially acceptable, indeed fashionable, to serve rice at even the swishest events 😉