‘Pig’s bum and cabbage’: Looking back on the fanciful feasts of my childhood

After all, some remembered “recipes” did border on the hostile. In more scatological households, the meals involved “poo on a stick”, often combined with a cat’s bum or a chicken’s eyebrows.

There was also a theme of privation. “What’s for dinner, mum?” “Snake’s bum and biscuit,” would be the answer, the joke being that snakes don’t have a bum, so it was just a biscuit.

All this, I know, sounds harsh to the ears of 2022, but some mitigating factors should be mentioned by the barrister for the defence.

Firstly, children are very annoying. The parent who gave a straight answer – “It’s rissoles and mash, darling” – would be greeted with howls of complaint by child Number One: “Oh, no, not the rissoles, they are the worst.”

Then from child number two, three, four, five and six – families were bigger then – a chorus of agreement: “Oh, can’t we have something other than the rissoles?”

Second, all food in the Australia of the 1960s and 1970s was disgusting, so it wasn’t a good idea to make too much of a song and dance about what was on offer.

In most households, the true answer to the question “What’s for dinner?” would be “tuna mornay”, or, more accurately, “wallpaper paste which has been momentarily placed in the same room as a can of tuna”. It was the sort of meal that had to be eaten quickly, otherwise it would set.

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Or it may have been: “Defrosted chops, rescued from the very bottom of the chest freezer in the garage, at least I think they’re chops, the label fell off, served with peas that have been boiled for three weeks.” Or, in gourmet households, “A steak cooked on the BBQ so as to appear subject to nuclear incineration.”

More importantly, for parents answering this question – or rather not answering it – this was seen as a daily opportunity to teach a life lesson, one drawn from their own experiences, and those of their own parents, during the Depression and the Second World War. The lesson was: “Be grateful you’ve got anything at all.”

This message was then repeated as the meal proceeded. The merest pause in the eating, the tiniest reluctance to tackle a limp, bleached green bean, would bring the reminder: “Think of the starving children in Africa. They’d love to have that bean.”

It was a fair point, although whether the constant talk of world starvation assisted a healthy attitude to food remains unclear.

And yet I find myself saluting the creativity of the time; the love of language, the raucous humour and the sense of family tradition, that created these fanciful foods.

Oh, to sit down to a plate of “Fresh air and excitement.” Or of “Fried snowballs and a rasher of wind”. Or even of “Wait and See Pie.”

Once you consider what was actually being served, it all becomes an act of kindness.