This recipe was published by the Australian Meat Board to promote lamb and Mum would have picked the leaflet up from the counter at her local butcher’s shop. It’s a recipe I’ve cooked a lot over the years and still do. You can’t beat a lamb casserole on a cold winter’s night can you?
This is a very hearty beef casserole great for these winter nights. I like the fact that everything is thrown in one dish and you can put it in the oven and forget it for a couple of hours. The recipe converts to 250g of blade steak, but you could put more in if you want to bulk it up a bit.
Ham is one of the things that has changed enormously on our table and in our cooking over the years. In Australia it wasn’t served very often. At Christmas the big treat was chicken, not turkey or ham which were very American and not available as they are today. The only way we saw large pieces of ham at our house was from a tin – the best brand being Mayfair. This old recipe at first glance sounds a bit strange, but the combination of ham, mustard, ginger and pineapple could taste quite good, I think I’d top it with a bit of cheese though. Might be worth retrying with a better quality piece of ham?
This recipe is in my brother’s lovely flowing handwriting, which means that my sister-in-law gave to Mum back in the 60s. Mum used to make it for casserole style entertaining and it tasted quite good, although personally I was never that fond of the tinned pineapple, you can use fresh pineapple instead if you have the same problem. You need around 750g of sausages.
Rabbit was a much more common ingredient when I was growing up and although it’s not as popular or as readily available these days it can still taste good if cooked correctly. The secret is to make the meat tender, but not dry. This is one of the recipes that Mum used.
What did we do before coconut cream in a can? The answer is in this old recipe of Mum’s. She may not have had canned coconut cream or a jar of curry simmer sauce or paste, but Mum’s curried sausages were still great and you can see by the age of her recipe that she’d been making them for a long, long time.
CURRIED SAUSAGES
Put coconut in saucepan with cupful of stock or water. Bring to boil, boil for a few minutes. Strain off liquid, discard coconut. Fry flour and curry powder in a little fat for a few minutes, add liquid from coconut, add sugar and lemon, stir well. Cook until smooth, pour into saucepan. Fry sausages till brown add to curry sauce. Slice onion and apple, fry till brown in little of sausage fat. Drain. Add to sausage and curry sauce. Cook slowly for 1 hour. Rice or chutney may be added.
Instead of using mince steak this meatloaf uses minced lamb and it’s other unusual ingredient is a container of potato salad. Usually potato salad accompanies a meatloaf instead of being mixed in, but the potato and it’s mayonnaise dressing combined with the French onion soup mix make this a tasty change.
As you can see Mum’s cut this recipe off the back of a packet of Cream of Chicken soup mix. It’s a really simple patty recipe that you could add other vegetables to if you wanted, but would be nice with just the potato and shallots.
This is a bit more modern curry recipe than Mum originally made. Mum made curries using just curry powder and nothing as fancy as red lentils and coriander, but I think this recipe appealed to her as it had pumpkin and cauliflower in it, vegetables she really liked.
By the yellowing of this newspaper clipping Mum cut it out of the Herald Sun quite a long while ago, but meatloaves never go out of fashion. The article talks about how good cold a meatloaf is and how good it is for picnics and sandwiches, but hot meatloaf with roast potatoes and gravy is really very hard to beat. Great hot for dinner and great next day for sandwiches – as the article says, it’s very versatile.
Beb's Recipe Drawer 