Scrub turkey and watermelon cake were top fare from kitchen queen

There have been countless celebrity chefs in Australia but Amy Schauer started teaching cookery in Brisbane in 1895 and her cookbooks remained popular in Queensland kitchens until at least the 1960s.

Long before Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s pumpkin scones made her Australia’s best known celebrity chef, Amy Schauer taught thousands of Queenslanders to feed themselves.

Australia has had a diverse range of kitchen kings and queens.

The first I can remember was the galloping gourmet Graham Kerr in the late 60s when television here was still monochrome.

Over the years others vied for the top spot including the matronly Margaret Fulton to the flamboyant Bernard King, Iain ``Huey’’ Hewitson, Geoff Jansz, Maggie Beer and Peter Russell-Clarke, whose YouTube bloopers clip is much saltier than any of his dishes.

Amy Schauer got the jump on them by decades.

Brisbane cooking author Amy Schauer.

She started teaching cookery in Brisbane in February 1895 in a large room in Turbot Street, complete with raised seats and gas stoves. Her cookbooks remained popular in Queensland kitchens until at least the 1960s.

Rather than the elaborate fare now popular on shows such as MasterChef, she advocated basic dishes using whatever was in the cupboard or in the bush nearby. There was braised or roasted scrub turkey, sheep’s head broth, cold tea pudding and sea cucumber soup. Her book Australian Fruit Preserving and Confectionery, first published in 1908, gave the solution for an overabundance of fruit with five options for mango chutney, six for tomato chutney and 12 for melon jam.

There is even a recipe for prickly pear jam to deal with the great cactus scourge that hit Queensland early last century, though Amy warned readers that ``great care is required in preparing this jam’’.

One of Amy Schauer’s best sellers. Picture: Supplied

I’m indebted to Helen Cole who relates in the Queensland State Library’s blog how she made Amy’s ``watermelon cake’’ which has a layer of white cake for the rind, a pink sponge centre with sultanas for seeds and all covered with green icing.

Amy was born on June 2, 1871 in Sydney, the daughter of German immigrants.

She trained at the Sydney Technical College and after qualifying in domestic science taught private cooking classes before heading north to Brisbane with her sister Minnie.

In 1897 The Brisbane Courier reported that Amy was also undertaking classes in ironing and starching.

She also taught cooking at the Mater Hospital for 10 shillings a student.

By 1909 three books she wrote with her sister were on the syllabuses of the departments of domestic science and art in Queensland technical colleges.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, she trained 250 soldiers, chiefly men, to serve in the Army Medical Corps. Her recipes were used for many of the Christmas cakes, puddings and biscuits sent from Queensland homes to soldiers on active service.

Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen with wife Lady Flo holding plate of pumpkin scones.

In 1917 she travelled by train from Brisbane to Nambour once a week to teach cookery at the new Nambour Rural School and as well as teaching mothercraft, judging cakes at fetes and raising money for charities, she was from 1922 until 1937, the senior Queensland instructress in domestic science.

A year after retiring, in an interview with The Courier-Mail at the Aged Christian Women’s Home which she ran in Bowen Terrace, Amy said that while ``a good cook in former years gave her family a balanced diet without understanding all the details, she now learns the scientific reasons and principles of balanced meals.’’

To a Queensland still recovering from The Great Depression and about to enter another world war, she advised that cheaper cuts of meat still had plenty of nourishment in them, but they required long, slow cooking.

And sparking controversy at the time, she told the newspaper that women could cook just as well as men.

Amy died in Sydney in 1956.

Grantlee Kieza’s latest bestseller, Macquarie, is published by HarperCollins/ABC Books.

[e-mail]