“Kiddies' Delight”

Abstract

Children, as the key defining members of the traditional nuclear family unit, played a central role in traditional Australian ideas about home provisioning, home cooking and family food. As the objects of twentieth century “professional mothering,” children formed the primary focus of many women's time and effort; furthermore, as the future stewards of the Lucky Country much nation-building focused on those community institutions devoted to their care and development. As such, children and the idea and ideology of childhood are strong presences in Australian community cookbooks. Yet their presence in these books is not limited to such passive roles. Children appear in community cookbooks as recipe contributors, as consumers, as arbiters of good taste, and as budding literati. A genre embedded in the structures of community and family life, community cookbooks contain some unusual insights into Australian childhood.