Putting Australian post-war cookery into perspective: Austerity, economy and creative cooking

This article uses cookbooks and articles published in women’s magazines and the women’s pages of daily newspapers to examine the origins of a persistent memory that the food of 1950s’ childhood was bland and dull. It argues that this memory has been influenced by austerity measures followed by housewives during World War I, the inter-war period and World War II. It concludes that the memory is not reliable, and that food writing of the 1950s shows that during that time Australian housewives were no longer concerned only with economies in the kitchen and that the food from that period was not the dull bland cooking so often recalled.