By Tania Phillips
Growing up in the bush away from the hype of towns and big stores, holiday time took on special meaning and left warm memories for those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s.
And none more so than Easter.
Mum’s firing up the old fuel stoves to keep the house warm as the weather cooled off, lamb or beef roasting for Easter Sunday lunch, whatever fish was available (usually frozen or dried) on Friday and hot cross buns – with extra crosses because they’re the best bit.
For Wendy Maitland, Chief Cookery Steward at the Stanthorpe Show, that’s the Easter of her childhood. In later years it was making hot cross buns for her husband and kids from her old copy of the Woman’s Weekly Cookbook and now, when family and friends come over, it’s fun Easter cakes.
“Mum always used to insist on fish and because of where we lived – and maybe because of the time – the fish was orange smoked cod, it was just horrid,” she said laughing at the memory.
“But Mum would always make hot cross buns, as well as the bread. Then we’d have a roast on the Sunday, that’s when you had the Easter eggs back then there were no Easter eggs before Easter Sunday.
“And Good Friday was when you had the hot cross buns, never before. None of this rubbish of having them in the shops just after Christmas, away with that notion. We shall not have that.
“When I was older and we moved to Tasmania, I started making my own hot cross buns, my husband really liked them so then I was never allowed to buy them. It was a kind of a cooking tyranny,” she laughed.
“He’d say they were so lovely, you’re not going to buy them are you? You’re going to make them aren’t you?”
The Buns are still the main stay of her Easter cooking though pretty Easter cakes with noodle nests covered in dark chocolate have become part of her recent traditions.
“But normally it’s just the hotcross buns,” she said.
“But no peel – I hate peel.
“I’ve been using the same recipe for 30 years, it’s the one out of the old Woman’s Weekly Cookbook that was given to me by the boy I had a crush on when I was 12.
“I think it was a Christmas present. I must have been about 11 or 12, about the same time as when I made the packet cake for the show.
“I don’t know if he had ideas that I would cook for him with the cookbook or whatever. But I still cook with it and that’s where I get the fruit cake recipe that I put I the show every year.”
Wendy’s early childhood was spent up north where she’d watch her mother cook on that old wood stove.
“Growing up I lived in a little community called Kilcummin – there were 22 kids at school and that included me and my two sisters and my brother,” she recalled.
“We were an hour from Clermont and that was in the days before people had big fridges, we didn’t even have the power on so we had kero fridges and a generator. Mum used to make her own bread and we rarely had anything that was bought. I guess that’s where I started cooking and sewing, way back then.
“We always had a wood stove and even when we moved to Wandoan there was still a wood stove, mum got a caravan stove too because it was so hot in the summer. But still in the winter you’d always have the stove going, you’d open the little door and you’d have a toasting fork to make your toast on the little bit of fire in the fire box. You’d try and keep it going all night so you’d stack it up with wood the night before and shut all the dampers down and the next morning yeah!! it’s still got some fire in it. The hot water ran off that as well. If you didn’t have the stove running you didn’t have hot water.”
That love of cooking instilled by her mother and that old Woman’s Weekly Cookbook is what led her to become a steward and then chief steward at the show.
“I just started entering,” she laughed recalling how she found herself as the chief steward a few years after she and her family moved to Stanthorpe 15 years ago.
“I first started entering shows when I was in grade six or seven. I entered the Cleremont Show. I think I won – it was the packet cake competition in the junior section. You had to make a packet cake and you had to include the box-top, I think I made a coffee cake and a man wanted buy it after it won so I was very chuffed with that. I can’t remember how much I sold it for, that would have been 1976 so $2 would have been a lot of money).”
Wendy’s actual involvement in the Stanthorpe Show came through a work, though she’d already won both the Novice Fruit Cake and High Tea for One sections.
“Where I was working was a sponsor of the cookery section,” she said.
“I trundled along with balloons and stuff to hand out to the children to promote the sponsor. The stewards were there too so I was chatting to them, next thing I was steward.”
It’s obviously a job Wendy relishes, getting excited as she talks about the challenges of keeping the section interesting as tastes change and people cook less of the traditional fruit cakes and Anzac biscuits at home. Each year she works with the other stewards to come up with new and diverse sections to keep bakers entering like salted caramel mud cake, red velvet cake and gingerbread houses.
Though this past show she had to do her chief steward work from home – keeping in touch with those on the ground while she battled a badly timed bout of Covid.
“I’ve just always cooked and I remember driving my mum nuts with the things I’d try to make because when you live out of town you have to make it with what you’ve got,” she said.
“There’s no, I need to get saffron or whatever the fancy ingredient is, and that’s before the internet so all the recipes came out of old Women’s Weekly.”
You can find Wendy’s tried and true Woman’s Weekly recipe on the net these days – just don’t add the peel.
