On Custard

Noëlle Janaczewska, the award-winning playwright, poet and essayist, has been commissioned by Powerhouse to write about objects in the Powerhouse Collection. In this work she tells how a handwritten recipe book from the 1930s inspired a deep dive into custard.

So, custard. This recipe book is full of it. Baked custard, custard pie, different takes on custard sauce. A selection of savoury and sweet custard tarts: ham and onion; haddock and tomato; date; caramel and orange; sultana and more. Recipes handwritten, typed and torn from magazines.

It’s a homemade cookbook this one – a personal assemblage of recipes, guidelines and loose sheets used by one Audrey Henshaw in the mid 20th century. The book started its life as a science notebook from St Cuthbert’s College in Auckland. Rules (for Preparing and Serving Salads among other things) copied out in a neat schoolgirl hand, headings underlined and ruler-straight. But as well as Audrey, at least one other person has added to this book. And at some point it travelled from New Zealand to New South Wales.

There’s peach jam and three-way biscuits, walnut croquettes and mock salmon. There’s also a hymn sheet, a knitting pattern and instructions for a gadget called a ‘Food Glamorizer’ which looks like a kitchen version of the Swiss Army knife. But it’s the custards that interest me.

They take me back to classes at school. Where I baked a custard tart in a too-hot oven and ended up with a pastry shell full of scrambled egg. A disaster that convinced the unfortunately named Mrs Hoare to let me do art instead of cookery – sorry, ‘Home Economics’. As for Audrey, she began her cookery book several decades before my culinary flop. When the teaching of domestic arts was to prepare the housewives of the future.