The story of Marie's Kitchen Cookbook

We were always on the phone to Marie. ”Hey, mum how do you make jam roly poly?” or “How many eggs if I want to make individual pavlovas?”. Ever since we left home Marie has always been our ‘recipe book’ for anything we ever wanted to make. She was forever at the end of the phone with that tip, or expertise on how to make that special something you were planning to trial with your next group of friends. When mum was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in early 2007 it suddenly dawned on us, that, amongst other things, Marie’s rock of knowledge was not going to be there forever. An idea that had long been talked about amongst the family started to develop: a cooking book full of Marie’s favourites.

In September of 2007 as part of her illness, Marie lost her ability to safely swallow and eat food and had to be fed with special nutritional supplement through a tube into her stomach. At this time her voice also became noticeably weaker. This seemed to crystallise to us all that we needed to get this recipe book project underway. We had an initial family working-bee weekend and with four laptops buzzing and Marie shuffling from one computer to the next, we started to record decades of Marie’s cooking. Recipes that were scratched on scraps of paper and backs of envelopes were deciphered; cut out favourites from old magazines were transcribed; and recipes handed down from generations ago were all entered into a growing data base of Marie’s recipes. Marie spent the next six months going through over three hundred recipes checking instructions, adding tips and recording fond memories.

In April 2008, with the recipe book project almost complete Marie sadly passed away. Despite the difficulties she faced with Motor Neurone Disease she worked continuously on her cooking book but did not have the opportunity to oversee the final coming together of her endeavours. This responsibility fell onto her family. Although we have been willing editors and detectives looking for missing pieces of the jigsaw of Maries work we cannot vouch that all recipes are as perfect as Marie would have wished.

In a few recipes some instructions and detail may be lacking. It wasn’t unusual to find a piece of paper with a list of ingredients, 160 degrees, 20 minutes. Details of size of tin and procedure were incomplete. In these cases we have taken one of two approaches; either done our best to work it out; or left them as they were. So in some respects this book, like Marie’s life, remains a little unfinished.

We miss you Marie.