The Kitchen - sparked from a query from John and with aspirations of a Bill Bryson.

THE KITCHEN

The kitchen was pretty much the hub of the house. It was not physically central, however as two of the three traditional entrances were from the kitchen and the front door was rarely used it became the defacto hub. Given the quantities of tea consumed by my mother and three sisters you could pretty much find someone there at all times, either brewing, consuming or washing up after. I put washing up in there to imply that we were a tidy household however often if you dropped in with some friends and offered them a cup of coffee you then had to conduct an emu parade to scavenge cups from every flat surface throughout the house. Much to the amusement of my friends two or three cups could often be found in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. I would excuse their presence by explaining that the women in our family liked to recline in the bath whilst sipping a hot cup of tea.

When we first moved to Epping we had one of those laminated kitchen tables which sat at the end of the bench with the sixth chair up against the back wall and the table was pulled out whenever that seat was needed, which once Sue had graduated to a highchair was most of the time until Margaret and I started regularly missing meals with Uni and work. Although handy for plonking oneself down on arriving home it obstructed access to the back door and was a nuisance for more years than I care to remember. The kitchen bench had open shelving on the end, I think the toaster lived on one shelf, but the lower shelves could not be accessed when the table was up against the wall.

We always had sit-down meals, no eating off your lap in front of the TV in the Badger household. Basically because we didn’t have a TV, in fact it hadn’t come to Australia when we first moved to Epping. We didn’t get one until after we returned from England, end of 1962, where we had become accustomed to its presence. That is not to say we didn’t ever see a TV, Hope and Jack had one and we would often go up there in our pyjamas on a Sunday night and watch the Mickey Mouse Show. Having mentioned Hope, she was ever-present in our kitchen, if she wasn’t there when we arrived home from school, there would soon be a Coo-ee from the side door and there would be Hope, just in time for another cup of tea. Ours was a traditional ‘50s family setup with Mum not having worked from the time I arrived on the scene. She was always there, in the kitchen, cooking, baking, drinking tea, it was rare that she was not there when we arrived home from school, not that it mattered as the house was rarely locked. On the rare occasions that the house was locked and empty when we arrived home, we just needed to open the milk delivery cupboard beside the side door, push open the inner door and reach in and up and unlock the side door to gain access to the house.

My earliest memory of the kitchen was of a disaster, Mum was a good cook and had many of the “latest” gadgets, one was a pressure cooker, which she hated, but felt obliged to occasionally use. The stove in the early days was over in the corner near the cupboards on the back wall. I was not familiar with the intricacies of pressure cooking at the time however it appeared that you piled all the food into a big steel pot, placed it on the burners and screwed on a lid. There was a small hole in the top to let excess pressure out. Presumably when the food was deemed ready, one did something to let off the pressure and then unscrewed the catches holding the lid on. On this occasion there was an almighty bang and a clatter followed by a scream of pain or frustration from Mum and there on the roof above the stove dripped our dinner, there must have been peas in it as I recall it looked like green slime dripping off the ceiling. The bang was the lid of the cooker hitting the ceiling followed shortly thereafter by it returning to the stove with an almighty crash. Mum was livid, I don’t think she swore, but she may have as I was too young to know any swear words at that time, but it wasn’t done in those days to use profane language. She never used the pressure cooker again.

As I mentioned earlier meals were sit down affairs, Dad sat at the head of the table with his back to the dining room, I sat opposite under the clock on the back wall. Trish sat on my left, Margaret was beside her and Mum was opposite, which left Sue to sit beside the cutlery drawer, which could not be opened without her moving. For breakfast, Dad  had a bowl of Kellogs Corn Flakes, with 1 & ½ prunes followed by an egg on half a piece of toast, whilst the other half a piece of toast was consumed   with butter and marmalade, all washed down with 2 cups of tea, drunk piping hot before bolting upstairs to clean his teeth and rush out the door to walk to the station to catch the 7:50 train to the city. Mum would have a cup of tea with Dad and a piece of toast which she often broke into mouth sized pieces and would smear a mob of butter on each fragment. The rest of us dithered around, eating and getting ready for school and often only just catching the bus at the corner to get us to Eastwood Public by 9:30.

Tea was served at 6 and was a more sedate meal until I started to pick on Trish, which I did unmercifully for many years. Once Trish bit, then we could start the Tomasina routine which inflamed her even more, in this I must say I was ably assisted by Margaret who had the ”ooh, naughty Tomasina” voice off pat. Regularly I would be sent to my room, which was a cunning way of getting out of the washing up. If that failed we could generally get a fight going with the drier-upper throwing a knife or fork back in the washing up, claiming it wasn’t clean but succeeding in splashing water on the washer-upper who retaliated, culminating in being sent from the room. There really wasn’t a down side to being sent to bed as there was nothing else to do after tea but sit around the dining room table listening to the news and the stock market report on the radio whilst supposedly doing ones homework.

Food, was generally of a fairly high standard, probably considerably better than the average. We always had a baked dinner on Sundays, made going to church worthwhile knowing what you were coming home to. We would often have another baked dinner in the middle of the week, this provide filling for the school lunches, until I turned about 14 at which point leftovers became a thing of the past. I would get home from school at about four, have three peanut butter sandwiches and a pint of milk and then head out on my push-bike till 6. Home , have dinner and by 8 I’d be back in the kitchen having a few leftover sandwiches, ( and maybe another pint of milk.) The other meals were generally grills, chops mainly with spuds and two veg. Sausages maybe once a week and if we were lucky Lambs Brains, yummy. We didn’t do anything special on Fridays, no religious hang-ups in the Congregational church. However we did occasionally have a chinese or fish and chips on a Friday night, just for a change and give Mum a rest. Chinese went over well with everyone but me, I wouldn’t eat anything if I couldn’t identify it and I wouldn’t eat onion. Consequently fried rice was a bit of a challenge. In those days chicken was a delicacy, Mum would serve that at dinner parties, if the quantities were a bit short she would pad the chicken out with some rabbit. Dad starred at dinner parties, guests would bring a bottle of red and halfway through dessert Dad would remember it and ask anyone if they wanted a Shiraz with their Bombalaska. One sure way of curing people of the evils of alcohol.

Ran out of puff,
Trish tooth, cupboards, freezer, deck, side door.