Anne O’Brien’s Recipes — THE O'BRIEN CLAN

Introduction by Rob Landsberry

The O’Briens could all bake - well the ladies at least. I don’t remember Uncles Jack, Cyril et al spending too much time peering into the oven. I guess baking was a skill that the ladies learned from their Mum, a lady who must have baked a cake shop worth of tasty treats just about every day. And this was in the days when there was no fancy shchmanzy food processor, and your oven’s temperature measurement was done by putting your hand in to it. If it came out moderately burned, then that was a moderate oven.

I, on the other hand, am no chef. There. I’ve said it.

I can cook a bit, but most of my cooking is your ‘prepare in advance, easy to serve’ meals. Spaghetti Bolognese, a variety of soups, pasta sauces, and the like. If three or more things are expected to be ready to serve together, you don’t call on me. You call on Leslie. She can make all the elements of a roast dinner appear at EXACTLY the same time. To me it’s some sort of sorcery, and probably would have seen Leslie burnt at the stake back in the 16th century.

And neither of us are big fans of desserts, biscuits and slices. So we rarely bake. Well, aside from my amazingly good cayenne cheese scones once every couple of months.

So, given my clearly inadequate credentials, you may well be asking, why am I presenting Aunty Anne’s recipes? Well, cousin Wendi has the original book with AA’s recipes, and she was kind enough to photograph it all and send it to me. And here we are.

All of the recipes are of the sweet variety, and come from an era when ‘sweet’ meant ‘SWEET’. Years ago I spent a bunch of weekends with Mum making our favourite recipes from when we were kids, taking photos, and writing everything down in detail. From that, Mum and I created a family recipe book – well, volume 1 at least, as we missed some essentials. So one night, some years later, I decided to make ‘Nutty Brown Sugar Pudding’ for Leslie and I, faithfully following Mum’s recipe.

Turns out that the cake part of the dessert was only there to deliver the MASSIVE sugar hit from several kilos of brown sugar. I used to LOVE this dessert. But like Darryl Somers and pale blue Bogart pants, some things are probably best left in the past.

So, the recipes you’ll read here come with this advice: Beware the Devil sugar, for he lurks on every page.

And, if you do cook any of these recipes, I’d also like to apologise if any of the pictures I’ve included don’t ‘quite’ match the actual finished product. It’s a bit like a Maccas ad for a burger vs said burger in person – there may be a vague similarity, but that’s more by chance than design.

And lastly, I’d like to say that some of these recipes are a bit ’thin’ when it comes to detail. And ‘yes’, I do appreciate the rich irony in the use of the word ‘thin’ when it comes to a set of recipes which draw heavily from the Devil’s saccharine mountain. Where some details were missing, I’ve added a note or two prefaced by ‘RL:’, and I’ve also converted pre-metric measures to their metric equivalents.

That said, if you’d like to see the 30 page book in it’s original, un‑augmented, hand-written form you can do so by clicking here.

The first recipe is Aunty Anne’s famous Ginger Fluff. I haven’t had this for YEARS! I’d like to suggest a ‘Fluff‑Off’, which sounds a lot worse than it is. Let’s see how many of us make this Annie classic. Send me your pics by clicking here.

And please, if you make one or more of these recipes, and you can see where some modifications should be made, please let me know: rob.landsberry@gmail.com.