I know I’m the biggest sucker out for the buying of countless glossy, well-illustrated and photographed cookbooks, but the cookbook I rely on most, and is my true bible, is my well-worn, dirty (with cooking smears), yellowed school copy of the Central Cookery Book, by AC Irvine, a late “mistress of domestic science” with our Tasmanian Education Department.

In what was, in the good old days of 1961, called E Class (first year high school) at Huonville High, the sexes were firmly separated, with all the girls being forced into Home Economics and Sewing, and the boys into Woodwork and Metalwork. No ‘ifs’ ‘buts’ or ‘maybes’ about it.

If you were a girl, you completed at least one year of cooking and sewing before you were expected to choose which career path you would take and select one of 3 pathways at the end of first year high school: professional (where you learnt French and German along with the standard Maths, English, Science and Social Studies); commercial (where you learnt typing and shorthand, along with the standard Maths, English, Science and Social Studies); or a course called Secondary, which meant you did a bit of everything but at a lower level, and you got to leave school in your third year of high school with a Secondary Certificate in your hand, which obviously wasn’t as high a qualification as the full four year high school Schools Board Certificate.

We were all issued with our Central Cookery Book at the start of E Class, and the boring year of cooking began. Each week was alternated, so Home Ec one week was a double period of sewing, then the next week it was the double period of cooking.

I dreaded the sewing more, as I detested it then, and still detest it to this day. But the cooking class, despite having a pathetic teacher with absolutely no passion for her product whatsoever, and being so totally rigid in her cooking style, still managed to make me feel like I was in that place to stay – and life has proved that to me ever since.

Using the Central Cookery Book as her guide, our teacher took us through the rigours of recipes I had never heard of before (and haven’t since, I must say!) like Scotch Collops! Who the hell gets off on a dish of Scotch Collops? Who the hell would KNOW about them, unless you went to high school in Tassie in the 60’s?

Whatever – it was in this space that I learnt, as all girls in that era did, skills it was deemed necessary for girls to have in order for their future husbands and children to benefit from having a wife and mother suitably trained!

The Central Cookery Book contains the most valuable information ever. It is especially good to flick through when you want ideas for paring back a recipe to taste the true flavour of today’s excellent products. Remembering that the author of this tome, AC Irvine, was ‘late’ when I was at high school, she obviously was from the previous century when she scribed the cookbook so you really are looking at recipes from the 1800’s in Tasmania when you read it.

I don’t know if they still print this gem, but if you ever see a copy at a garage sale, or in a bookshop, as Molly Meldrum says, do yourself as favour, and buy it. I reckon you’ll get a modicum of use from it, as from the latest Jamie Oliver!