Cook Books and Memories

Our family lived in the small town of Coraki (opposite the Catholic church, school, and convent) before we moved to live in Inverell in 1954. Link to  Coraki,    https://coraki.town/history  link below for the history of Coraki, NSW. Dad (Albert Ascoli, 1912-2001) worked my maternal grandparent’s dairy farm which was situated just out of town on the Casino Road. Albert had built a new dairy and was improving the farm. See:   Family Charts    Patrick Gooley and Lenora Lulham family chart (my maternal grandparents) . Mum (Babe Gooley, 1906-1993) decided she could help the family finances by starting a shop from our home. Albert built a shop counter (through to one of the front rooms) so customers could order and collect their goods from the veranda. Babe catered for the school students, their parents and teachers, and any passing customers. It was the school tuckshop and the local cake and sweet shop. Babe recalled later that she also provided a lot of free scones and cakes to the nu

Sponge cakes of all flavours and types are a constant delight in my family – all through my childhood and adult life. My mother, Babe, was the expert sponge maker. She had plenty of practice cooking for her nine siblings and the large extended families (Lulham and Gooley) in the Richmond River district of NSW.  Living on dairy farms (around Casino at Codrington, Gundurimba and Coraki), eggs and cream were freely available. Babe (Bridget Gooley, 1906-1993) Babe also learnt more about cooking from her work, in 1924-1929, when she cared for children who were boarders at the Roman Catholic Convent, Ballina. She learnt there how to use wisely the substantial amounts of donated goods (often dairy products and eggs). Some in the family thought Babe would be become a nun but she had other plans and later went nursing at the Maclean Hospital, in the nearby Clarence River District. There she met Albert Ascoli (1912-2001) who had eights siblings, so more extended families (Ascoli and Schipp) for

I lived the first seven years of my life on dairy farms in the Richmond River district, New South Wales (NSW), at Ewingsdale (overlooking Byron Bay) and at Coraki (near Casino and Lismore). Byron Bay is about 750 km from Sydney and 170 km from Brisbane. Lismore district, Northern NSW. Google Maps In my childhood Byron Bay was not the tourist town it is to-day. Then it was a gritty small town with few amenities and had a whaling station from 1954-1962.  One of my earliest memories is rolling down those green hills, with bright sunshine, cattle and chickens around me. There was no talk of “free range eggs” in the 1950s. You just had chooks and chooks laid eggs. Those chooks had a good life and roamed freely around the farm (as I did). As a three year old chef, I discovered that eggs added to mud and water made the shiniest and firmest mud pies. I soon had to go back to “eggless mud pies” when my mother discovered my recipe. Barbara feeding the chooks at Ewingsdale, NSW. abt 1953 RECIP