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    The Secret Ingredient: The Power of the Family Table
    The Secret Ingredient: The Power of the Family Table
    The Secret Ingredient: The Power of the Family Table
    Ebook289 pages2 hours

    The Secret Ingredient: The Power of the Family Table

    By Chloe Shorten

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    About this ebook

    With treasured recipes, Chloe Shorten shows how eating together as a family offers more than a meal: it can nourish relationships and nurture your children.

    Chloe reveals ways to encourage the connections we make at the family table. She shares her tried-and-true recipes passed down from family, friends and neighbours across Australia: her mum Dame Quentin Bryce’s popular eggplant parmigiana, icon Wendy McCarthy’s perfect roast chicken and a chocolate cake so divine it was served in restaurants.

    The Secret Ingredient invites you to bring the remarkable power of the family meal into your home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMelbourne University Publishing Ltd
    Release dateApr 2, 2018
    ISBN9780522872361
    The Secret Ingredient: The Power of the Family Table

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      Book preview

      The Secret Ingredient - Chloe Shorten

      ALEXANDER

      Every Saturday for the first twenty years of my life, my family sat down to lunch together. Whatever we were into at the time—work, sport, dance, art, drama, some community gathering or just sleeping in—all seven of us would gather in the kitchen of our parents’ home in Brisbane and squeeze around the table.

      Those meals were rarely anything fancy. We might share fluffy bread that you could rip apart instead of slicing, cold meats, cheeses and salads. We kids would help Mum prepare the meal, set the table and tidy up afterwards, although there were times we would have a competition to see who could get out of washing up or drying dishes. It’s the togetherness I remember most about these meals, not the predictable family conflicts or disciplining that were inevitably sometimes part of those meals. It’s the connectedness that lingers in my mind. I knew this was my tribe. They were helping me grow up and I knew they were there for me through thick and thin.

      Breakfast was a less rigid affair, but it was still an important meal. Mum would be at the kitchen bench making cooked meals a few mornings a week: eggs, sausages, bubble-and-squeak (cabbage, mashed potato and cheese—yum!), homemade hash browns, baked beans, bacon, cooked tomatoes with oregano. There would be kids coming in from swimming, netball, lifesaving, judo or rowing training, as well as sleepy ones still in their PJs. I have no idea how she managed to fit that culinary start into her busy days when I often just manage to get cereal, fruit and lunches organised for my own family. Dad’s role was to be the very early morning driver for the rowers in the family, coaxing us out of bed.

      There was always a great deal of organisation going on between my parents: lists constantly written, notes left on benches, a lot of planning and talking. I’m sure that this was what helped them keep it together. Organisation was the key to preventing chaos: there were five kids, with two intensively busy working parents. My dad, Michael Bryce, had an architecture and design practice for thirty years, which meant constant attention to work and saw him often at the dinner table after dinner, after breakfast, before lunch—drafting, scribbling, sketching and writing speeches or reports. My mum, Quentin Bryce, was lecturing in law at the University of Queensland and doing a lot of community and fundraising work for women’s and children’s groups.

      During school holidays we would visit our grandparents, frequent the holiday programs at Queensland University, sit in Mum’s office while she marked exam papers, or take a bus to our father’s office in the city where we would do unnecessary photocopying, make cups of Nescafé and pester the architects and designers.

      When we were older and both parents were at work we would be at home, sometimes with a babysitter, sometimes with my visiting grandma or by ourselves. Whenever Mum arrived home in her suits, always elegant, one of us would be dispatched upstairs to take her things to her room and she would slide on an apron and get down to making the evening meal for us. Homework was being done or avoided in all corners of the house; some siblings were busy with music practice. I loved sitting in the kitchen and watching, helping or just chatting with her. These were the weekdays of tried and true dinners of shepherd’s pie, lamb chops and mashed potato, meat loaf, stews and casseroles. There was regularity in those dishes, and they still taste of certainty.

      Growing up in a big family it was at mealtimes we stitched our experiences together, like one big quilt. It was the everyday ritual of gathering together around the table that helped us understand what it meant to be a member of the family, and reaffirmed the things we believed in and the sense of a shared identity.

      When I had my own kids, I instinctively followed this well-worn path of eating with them no matter what their ages, knowing that the rhythm of those rituals I experienced as a kid gave me the feeling of belonging to my family. I still feel this connection keenly, even though my siblings and parents live in other cities, like so many scattered Australian families.

      Family meals are becoming less common. Talking to friends and people I meet across Australia about family mealtimes has made me realise they are a key part of how I keep my family going in good times and bad. It’s made me reflect on their importance to me. It has made me read widely to see what is happening in other homes. I’ve read dozens of papers and journals and spoken to experts in child health and relationships; all agree that the family that eats together, stays together. The good news in this busy world is, it doesn’t have to be every meal, it doesn’t have to be a hifalutin, three-course extravaganza—just a few shared meals a week has a slew of benefits for families.

      The Bryce family eating al fresco.

      You can see we are waiting our turn for the cordial!

      Rupert, Bill, Gigi and me holding Clementine.

      We’re all having a lot of fun at Christmas.

      On morning TV and radio, from the school pick-up to the floor of parliament, we talk a lot about the almost 7 million families in Australia and the issues relating to family life. The term ‘families’ covers a lot of diversity: nuclear, step and sole-parent families, as well as families with grandparent carers, same-sex parents, foster parents … but there’s similarity here, too. And meals are an irreplaceable part of the rituals and routines—those things that happen in each home, in each neighbourhood—that help make all these families strong and connected. Meals together can be a significant and relatively easy ritual to slip into family life. The benefits are immense.

      Lunchtimes, dinnertimes and the mad rush of breakfast naturally bring families together, often across generations, making common memories and imprinting a sense of belonging, to a family and a wider world. At the heart of these important exchanges, the focus is food: planning it, preparing it, devouring it. Noisily and together. It was for me growing up, and so it is still. But now I see the real work going on beyond what is being eaten. Even with a short twenty-minute window, mealtimes are important times for families, be they two people or twenty, to check in with each other, exchange information, share warmth and affection, and establish connections and, yes, even set boundaries. These are all key predictors of happy children. While I, like so many others, worry about obesity, sugar intake, whether I am serving up enough vitamins and vegies (and if those vegies are getting eaten), food waste, confusion over ingredient labelling, hormones, additives, failed recipes, the burnt chop syndrome, teenagers’ eating behaviours, junk food pressures and all the rest of the food-related issues we’re tackling today, all these are backdrops to the importance of coming together and sharing a meal. Trust me, I have read and talked to enough experts.

      For some families, a collective dinnertime is a struggle because they are shiftworkers or there are competing timetables of children of various ages. Household income, the health of the parents’ relationship and the bonds between the parent and child have an impact on everything in the home. But the evidence is clear: kids are more involved in family life when meals are regularly eaten together. If dinnertime is difficult, try weekend meals, or a set day for an all-in breakfast. Family rituals protect family life. And this only needs to be a few meals a week.

      When one parent travels for work, as is the case in our family, it can be disruptive to a regular routine. There are a huge number of families with the same juggling acts as ours, and many sole parents doing this on their own each night. I know we are like so many modern families. Our family is blended, with one father in another state and the other, Bill, who as the leader of the Opposition means he is often absent from Sunday night until late on Thursday night. There are thousands of defence and fly-in-fly-out families where mums, dads, stepmums and stepdads are keeping the balls in the air while their partner is committing themselves to the very important task of securing the nation and keeping peace while we keep the peace at home.

      At our place we aim for three dinners together a week, and on the nights Bill is away I will eat with the kids, Gigi, Rupert and Clementine, when they aren’t at their various late rehearsals, sports practices or performances (it’s a very musical gang). It is always worth arranging these three precious windows of time. I want to urge everyone to give this a go.

      People bring different rituals and ways of doing things into their family unit. Many of the celebrations in our family are familiar from my childhood. Bill has brought his own family traditions based around games and the service of others. Because his mum Ann was a good baker and he loved her biscuits and pastries, I have started to bake. It’s my latest endeavour.

      There are a few jobs the kids do well around dinnertime: setting the table, chopping up ingredients, packing and unpacking the dishwasher. If they learn that it’s a group effort, it’s good for their confidence and less isolating for parents who may otherwise feel like unpaid workers. I tell my kids I believe in the role of unions and then I say wouldn’t it be good if there was a Mothers’ Union!

      It’s hard. Of course it is. The cost of cooking at home can seem expensive for stretched budgets, and time-intensive for time-poor parents. Takeaway eaten in front of our individual screens or at the study desk can appear tempting. But cooking together, eating together, being together is worth the effort. I felt this intrinsically as a child. It was where I saw my parents come together, and watched my elder siblings navigate the world. Where I could safely be me. I see the same dramas at play around our table now. It may not be easy, but it is grounding and beneficial.

      I didn’t write this book to launch a crusade or tell busy parents how to organise their lives. This is a collection of stories, recipes and ideas that have helped me and, by sharing, might help you. It’s not a list of rules.

      Some of the recipes I have included are taken from old family letters, handwritten in notebooks, while others have been emailed to me by busy friends. Some are from another era and are recipes that I hardly ever cook, but they show how sharing a meal or a recipe is often shorthand for saying ‘I care’.

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