Remembering Roast Dinners, Chocolate Fudge, and Ron Barassi

Growing up in country Tasmania, in the 60’s and 70’s, we didn’t have much in the way of sweet things in our house. I didn’t get the supermarket cakes or biscuits in my lunch box that my friends would get. It seemed like my mother was on a perpetual diet. And with four kids to feed, there wasn’t money to waste on luxury or unnecessary items. 

And unlike the quintessential CWA mums, she wasn’t much of a baker either. No lovely warm bread or homecooked biscuits for us. Don’t get me wrong, Mum was a very good country cook. She could always produce a tasty dinner from anything, and very rarely followed any recipes. I certainly don’t recall her experimenting with anything new from one of the few fancy dinner party cook books she owned. You know the ones. Greenish-toned coloured photos of prawns in silver goblets topped with orange sauce. Devils on Horseback and artfully sliced cantaloupe. Oh, how I wanted to make all those dishes. But that’s another story.

In 1975 my mother found her 15 minutes of fame when several AFL coaches came knocking on our farm house door, all vying to recruit my eldest brother Nick, an exciting schoolboy footballer.

Ron Barassi, the charismatic Australian football legend, was at the time coach of North Melbourne Football Club. He and club President Alan Aylett , flew in to Tassie, hired a car, got a bit lost and bogged in our neighbour’s paddock, and finally arrived still in good spirits, to talk turkey. Mum served up a lunch of roast lamb with all the trimmings. I distinctly remember feeling rather impressed by the company at our table. Ron Barassi later complemented Mum in a newspaper article, praising the splendid meal and suggesting Nick may not want to leave Mums home cooking. From then on, we always fondly referred to him as Uncle Ron, as if we had some claim to him.

In later years, after us kids all left home, Mum would expand her repertoire broadly, but back in those days on the farm, things were simple, tasty and nearly only ever savoury. So the few times Mum pulled out her navy blue, hand written recipe book, were times to celebrate. The book is chock filled with recipes, sweet and savory, written in pen in my mother’s even slanting cursive writing. But it’s only the sweet recipes that I can ever recall her using the book for.

Golden Dumplings were a family favourite, and once old enough to cook, I was often called upon to whip up a saucepan full of those delicious sweet dumplings. Or, the strangely named family recipe called God Bless May which was a chocolate self saucing pudding. 

But it wasn’t all good in that book. There was another recipe that my mother seemed to like making, that was called Simplicity Cake. It was a quick, just chuck everything in, sort of chocolate cake recipe that had been passed to her from her mother in law. Truth is, I never really liked it much, it was kinda dry and uninteresting. But still, the scarcity of cake in our house, I’m sure I managed to chow down on a few pieces if one was there.

So, if I had to pick just one that was the favourite for me and my three brothers, it would have to be Mum’s Chocolate Fudge. 

It was totally unlike anything else I’d ever eaten. Soft, sweet and chocolatey with a hint of texture, and a morishness that cannot be explained.

We’d watch it bubble away on the stove, counting down the minutes. The effervescent mixture was then poured into the same square cake tin, known as the fudge tin. Oh, it was such a torment waiting for it to cool down enough to eat. 

Finally mum would roughly hand cut the pieces into squares, and if you were quick, you could grab one of the bigger pieces. 

My youngest brother, Rowan, now lives in the house I grew up in on the family farm. And as is fitting, the Blue Recipe Book has made its way home to the farm, so Rowan is the keeper of The Book. He gets called on to text through a photo of a required recipe. Brandy Sauce that goes on the Christmas Pudding is one that has been well circulated, depending on who’s hosting Christmas.

I asked Rowan to take a photo of the Chocolate Fudge recipe. He sent it, in two parts because even though it’s a very short recipe, it had been spread over 2 pages. So typical of my mother! You wouldn’t want to start a new page and waste a couple of lines at the bottom of the last one. We cheekily referred to this and other frugal measures, as her being Half Scottish, which she was.) I asked if he could make it a little more artistic, and after some pics of the book next to randomly placed fruit and household objects, I think this one of the cover is his best effort. Sigh. 

The pages are falling out and faded now, and there are any number of stains over the recipes, as is appropriate for any well loved cook book. 

So, I hope you can see, the times of having Chocolate Fudge were very special indeed. A very decadent treat to be savoured. I asked Rowan if he’d ever made it since, and he said he hadn’t in case it didn’t taste as good as he remembers it, when mum made it for us as kids. 

Ok fair enough, but I can’t be sharing a favourite recipe if I haven’t tried it lately, so here we go.

Chocolate Fudge

Ingredients

2 ½ cups sugar

½ cup milk

¼ lb butter (115 gms)

2 teaspoons of cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Boil the milk and sugar until the sugar dissolves, stirring occasionally.

Add butter and cocoa and boil for 20 minutes.

Add vanilla, remove from heat and beat.

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When I read this last line, I thought it said remove from heat and eat. So the beating got left out.

Anyway it still turned out how I expected. Maybe a bit more grainy than I remembered or maybe that was just because I didn’t beat it. But sweet, comforting and full of memories.

So if you do make this, you need to think of it in context. A young girl living on a farm, with no cakes or biscuits, no corner store to run to, to get some mixed lollies or a Polly Waffle. And no trips to cafes or chocolateries…, well you get it. 

But having said all that, it still went down the bomb in my house. My 9 year old kept asking when would the chocolate fudge be ready. And when it finally set, he tried a piece, then right on cue, he sorted through the squares to pick out the biggest bit. 

So maybe it is as good as I remember it!