Nana Ling's Handwritten Recipes

This is a collection of recipes recorded by my great grandmother Lydia Louisa Ling ("Nana Ling") in the 1930s and 40s. Nana Ling's Handwritten Recipes are a family treasure but are also valuable from a historical perspective. They capture the way people in regional Australia cooked during this time and coped with wartime rationing and scarcity. Among her recipes, are one of the earliest records of Pavlova (she includes a note that it should be "hard on outside and like marshmallow inside), a fruit cake designed to be sent to soldiers during WWII, Mock Chicken and a beautiful old-fashioned Sultana Cake.

These recipes are so special to me and I hope you'll love them too. The original handwritten recipe appears in each post along with my "tested and tweaked" version in the recipe card.