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The right recipe to preserve an icon
words melissa siri
WORDS BY MELISSA SIRI
If you were seeking someone to drive a community project to connect the past with the present and you needed a proud Barossan with a love of food, history and heritage, Sheralee Menz would prove the ideal choice.
So, it’s no surprise that Those Barossa Girls, Sheralee and Marieka Ashmore, are the tour de force behind Rolling Up Their Sleeves, a beautiful new companion to The Barossa Cookery Book – a publication which has helped feed the region since 1917.
Originally printed as a fundraiser for The Tanunda Soldiers’ Memorial Hall, The Barossa Cookery Book is packed with recipes by local women, who generously shared their family’s seasonal dishes, treats, sauces and preserves. Suffice to say no self-respecting Barossa household was complete without a dog-eared, oft-used copy.
Far beyond a cookbook, it’s also a cultural and historic tome, which speaks to the resilience of the early Lutheran German settlers, their homegrown diet and commitment to using every morsel available. Having been continuously re-printed, The Barossa Cookery Book is a ‘living’ piece of history which continues to resonate.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s the story of mothers sharing their “life’s work”, some while grieving the loss of soldier sons. It’s a fact which caused Sheralee goosebumps when she started research for Rolling Up Their Sleeves five years ago and made the connection between the recipes and surnames on the Honour Roll at the Hall.
Originally known by their husband’s names, as was the etiquette of the day, Sheralee wanted to bring the cooks out of the kitchen and into the spotlight, honouring their recipes while sharing their life stories – and most notably – their own names.
The Menz family has strong roots in the Barossa, and this is where Sheralee’s work at the Barossa library, her flair for writing and passion for the area bore its own figurative fruit.
“Rolling Up Their Sleeves was written with the idea that it would reconnect people to the original cook book”
- Sheralee Menz
It was a project with a weighty responsibility.
“The connections that we have with families was one of the most precious things that came out of the project,” Sheralee shared. “This huge extended network now of people that contributed. People who trusted us enough – that’s no small thing – to hand over the story of someone you loved to a relative stranger and trust them to represent that person faithfully.
“And so that privilege and that honour and that responsibility is something that I carry quite closely and certainly the relationship that you build with families as a result.”
Sheralee and Marieka also saw the need for some practical considerations, with more detailed recipes for modern cooks and a conversion to metric.
“Rolling Up Their Sleeves was written with the idea that it would reconnect people to the original cook book,” Sheralee explained.
“… The things like being frugal, using your seasonal produce, doing as much as you can with it, those are fundamental principles to how you live and how much you spend and how you eat and how you feel about what you’re doing.
“Eating simply, doing it well and again those old cook books are a road map for ‘how do we do that?’,” Sheralee said.
With the first print run sold out and the second batch racing off shelves, there are ambitions of finding a national book distributor – and even loftier possibilities.
“I have always seen it as a movie, I see a movie reel in my head, but I’m not a screenwriter…I’d love to see Cate Blanchett in it, we’ll see,” Sheralee said, adding that she’d like to contact Director of The Dressmaker, Jocelyn Moorhouse.
Regardless of the future, it’s an amazing achievement for Sheralee and Marieka to have come this far and inspired the community to join them on the journey.
“The reality is…this is a community project, because all of the proceeds from Rolling up Their Sleeves go back to The Tanunda Soldiers’ Memorial Hall, the same way the original does,” Sheralee said.
“All of those women whose stories we’ve researched, they didn’t contribute their recipes so that we could make a profit off it. They contributed them for the benefit of the community and…we have to do the same thing.”
