JG recently requested his grandmother Ruby's shearing shed cake recipe from his dear mum Raels. she baked one for him too. I like its vaguely sweet ambiguity, somewhere between cake and bread.
once I started looking into the recipe, a number of things came to light about shearing shed cakes (including this glossary of shearing shed terminology, in case you ever need an explicit definition of 'dag'). there is no definitive recipe, each stock-owner's wife invented her own, it seems. it just had to be something that goes with tea and cigarettes, and ensured the hospitality kept the shearers and workers coming back in following seasons. many of these practices seem to have been replaced by self-sufficient contractors, although JG suggests that the "cockies'" hospitality would still be a strong part of the culture on more remote stations such as he worked for a time, and no self respecting shearer would be caught dead passing up tea and cake for instant soup.
these unassuming cake recipes, like much of the world's traditional cooking, can be read as cultural and historical documents which trace people and politics to place.
Ruby's ingredients are brewed tea, sugar, flour and currants. in reconstructing the genealogy of the recipe only the currants pose a problem. the other ingredients are clearly a legacy of the rationing system.
when sheep graziers pushed into new land in NSW and SA around 1815, their workers were paid in a set ration, known as "ten, ten, two and a quarter" (ten pounds each of meat and flour, two pounds of sugar and a quarter-pound of tea. and some salt.) this ration became a real feature of social and political life, according to Michael Symons in One Continuous Picnic, evidenced by its mention in job advertisements, news articles and the like. more usual cake inclusions such as eggs, milk and butter were not part of the rations because they didn't keep (no refrigeration), and the rationing system was implemented when the workforce was new, and mostly comprised of single men. perhaps it was very macho to eat nothing but salted meat and damper, and drink very sugary tea. at any rate the working population seemed to be disinclined to stay in one place too long, so there was no cultivation of fruit and vegetables or keeping chickens.
so this shearing shed cake is a sweet damper made with rations. but Ruby was born around 1918, so we had to fill in some gaps. we can roughly assume that she learnt it from her mother or grandmother, although apparently rations did influence the culinary landscape heavily for most of the century. food trends probably don't change that fast in Kalangadoo, where she was born, raised and died.
which brings us to the currants. Kalangadoo is close to Coonawarra, so the dried vine fruit was perhaps an obvious inclusion. and there may be some influence from the Temperance movement (that's apparently how raisin toast was created: to use up all that vine fruit in California once Prohibition was enforced and wine producers were left with a glut.) in Australia, anti-alcohol policies ranging from earlier closing times to cancellation of liquor licences and outright drinking bans had been implemented in most states in some form beginning around 1850. by 1920 Temperance had become something of a national trend, championed in South Australia by the Women's Christian Temperance Union. (what did the rest of the world make of this dark period of English-speaking history? collective lunacy, perhaps?)
admittedly much of this reconstruction is just us postulating theories while standing around in the kitchen munching on buttered slices of shearing shed cake. we don't really know whether Ruby invented her recipe or got it from someone else, or when it was first made and who thought of adding currants, but it's a bit of JG's family history with some interesting historical references.
Ruby and Raels's shearing shed cake
1 cup of strong brewed tea
1 cup of currants
1 cup of sugar
2 cups of self-raising flour
pre-heat the oven to 180°c.
mix the currant, sugar and tea and allow to stand until the tea is cool (at least two hours).
add the flour and mix to a smooth batter.
bake in a loaf tin for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted tests clean.
