The art of the joy

I have this vague fascination with domestic cookery. Actually that’s a lie I have a near pathological obsession with domestic cookery.

In my mind I have visions of struggling 50’s housewives trying to stave off madness with valium and the perfect cream filled sponge. There has been this transition for women until the sexual revolution of going from being someone’s daughter to being someone’s wife and there are thousands of books that were written in order to assist women through this ‘delicate phase’.Margaret Fulton made a mint out of it; Mrs. Beeton had been dead for years though not to the knowledge of her readership who devoured titles like Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday cookery and Mrs. Beeton’s hints to housewives.
There is for me a kind of morbid fascination with this perception of generations of women sublimating the rage of their lost ambitions with perfectly arranged buffets and also I have to say a certain amount of admiration for women who can take something that they have to do day in day out and find a little art in it.
I’ve collected over the years a number of cook books and my favorite ones tend to be the older books, the Mrs. Beetons, the CWA books, the Good Housekeeping Cookery Books- Authored by the Good housekeeping institute don’t you know, there was an institute? Is that like the ponds institute? I can’t help but imagine stern women with tight perms in white coats berating women whose jelly wont gel-.

It seems to me in reading these commercial domestic cookbooks that there is a disconnection from the food, which kind of plays into that idea of everythings alright in the suburbs if you don’t look under the surface,it’s not so much about how something tastes but that something is prepared correctly and looks perfect.
Read Elizabeth David for instance and you can tell that she is someone who loves food and flavour and is deeply connected to both, her recipes read as though you were standing next to her and she was throwing things in a bowl which is very much the style of most of today’s cookbooks and why I think her writing endures.
For me the present trend toward cooking shows, books and the slow food movement does highlight this idea that in the past home cooking was the province of the housewife and that it was a duty separate from the kinds of cooking that was undertaken in restaurants run by mainly male chefs. Now there is a drive to replicate the kinds of dishes and techniques used in restaurants by cooks at home where as previously I would argue that in the past there has existed a clear delineation between ‘good housekeeping’ and gastronomy.

In late 2004-2005 my friend Rob was starting work on a show that he was going to be directing as part of something called the Builders initiative which was a project to build bridges between young Australian theatre actors, writers and directors and their older counterparts, enabling new works by writers who had been around at the creation of La Mama and the pram factory to be performed and directed by younger actors and directors and vice versa.
The first and thus far only installment in the project was a play called Tyranny written by Barry Dickens and directed by Rob at La Mama in March of 2005. I cook for Rob pretty regularly, he’s kind of my food muse, and he had decided that he wanted to incorporate food into one of his shows and had talked about it a couple of times so when Barry came up with what essentially was a really surreal, experiential piece he through why not. Directors had often used smell in theatre to highlight elements within the script so why not taste.

I had gone along to the first reading of the script as an observer as there was no actual role for me in it other than providing whatever food we decided was going to be part of the experience but one of the actors that had been cast wasn’t able to make it to the reading so I read in for him and Barry ended up liking how I read so he went away and wrote a character in for me. My character was referred to as the spinster though she was kind of an uber 50’s housewife, a representative of the whole idea of suburbia and the struggles of the suburban housewife. Through rehearsal and readings the point at which Rob wanted to introduce the food became apparent, there was a scene at the end of the show where an older female character was being attacked, raped to death, almost devoured by the young men that she had let into her house and into her life and while this was happening on stage Rob wanted the audience to be complicit in the act by having them also devour something. I wanted for the show to create something like highly constructed party food, to take this idea I had about the style of food produced for occasions by a harried 50’s housewife, being about design and novelty, and also take the idea of kids food and harking back to the kinds of things that we all would eat at parties as children, an ideal of innocence. I had to be aware that I had nowhere other than my own kitchen to prepare food and nowhere at the venue to heat or really store food so it had to be something that I would be able to readily produce, not have to heat up and wouldn’t perish easily and considering we were doing 5 shows a week, I work full time and I had to be able to produce at least 40 pieces of whatever we decided on. I went back and forth with things in my mind a heap of times and would ask the cast what they thought of when they thought of party food and the two things that kept coming up were honey joys and chocolate crackles and then in the heat of sugar fuelled madness someone suggested combining the two. It sounds horrible I know but eventually we came to the Crackle joy, a kind of honey joy chocolate crackle hybrid that is constructed to look like a sunflower. At the end of the show I would go out on stage to do my final monologue while handing out the crackle joys and during the final scene while this poor woman was being attacked the sounds of her struggling were punctuated by the rustling and crunching of the audience as they devoured their crackle joys.
You’d be surprised how good they taste actually, I often had to stand guard over the crackle joys at the end of the night as remaining audience members tried to weasel them out of me, anyone who sat in the back row and missed out would always complain. So here’s the crackle joy, lesser known honey joy chocolate crackle hybrid, hitherto only experienced by those who work at my work and have gone to see the show at La Mama though they were recently revived for Rob’s surprise party.

Crackle joys.

(makes about 20)

Preheat your oven to 150c. Melt 1/3 of a cup of sugar 1 ½ tablespoons of manuka honey and 90g of butter in a saucepan. Measure out 4 cups of cornflakes and pour the melted honey butter sugar mix over. Stir to ensure that the mix covers all the cornflakes and then sit yourself down in front of the tv coz this next bit is gonna take a while. Spoon out the honey joy mix into patty pans and arrange the flakes into a cup shape, for the show I tried to do this as painstakingly as possible with the larger flakes forming petals but I did a dry run of them last night so I could take a photo for you to see what they looked like and you can be a little slap dash to a certain extent. As long as they are roughly in the shape of a cup then you are still within the normal bounds of crackle joy accuracy. Bake in the oven for about 10 mins and then let cool briefly while you prepare the chocolate crackle part. Take 1/3 of a 250g block of copha and melt. Measure out 2 cups of coco pops 2 dessert spoons of icing sugar and an equal amount of a nice bitter cocoa powder. Combine the copha and the coco pops and with a teaspoon place a little mound of chocolate crackle in the center of each honey joy flower. Chill in the fridge for a few minute and they are ready to go. I used manuka honey in this recipe coz it has a slightly bitter after taste I find and I wanted to pare back from the sickly sweetness of the honey joy.