Mrs Lance Rawson

The Queensland Cookery and Poultry Book Mrs Lance Rawson

First published in 1878, Mrs Lance Rawson's The Queensland Cookery and Poultry Book is a time-capsule of colonial Australian culinary lore.



Aside from the delicious recipes using "normal" ingredients and the informative notes on bacon curing and preserving, Mrs Rawson's book is unique in that it lists the numerous ways Queensland's native wildlife and flora could be incorporated into western style dishes from roasts through to pies and curries. Wallaby, fruit pigeon, flying fox, native wood ducks, parrots and even goannas (Mrs Rawson calls them "iguanas") ended up in the oven or in the pot. This wasn't because the early settlers wanted to decimate the local wildlife, but rather it was done out of necessity. If you didn't shoot or snare a local furred, feathered or scaly creature, then you and your family didn't eat.



There were no supermarkets or butchers' shops on the wild Queensland Frontier of the 1800s.



A pleasant surprise at the end of the book is a whole section on poultry-keeping - good, old fashioned chicken lore.