Olive

Olive was Rose and Fred’s second youngest. She was the last child born in the country and was a very little girl when the family moved to Granville. She has answered many of my questions about the family’s food history in particular about Nana, and about a salad dressing, ‘mayonnaise’, made from condensed milk. At Cousin Richard’s 18th birthday party and many other gatherings it was served with sliced tomatoes, ice berg lettuce and accompanied by sliced cucumbers dressed with brown malt vinegar. Condensed milk mayonnaise remains a favourite to this day with Olive’s family.

Cake decorating was a popular past time in the 50s and 60s. Being quite talented at this craft she made and decorated my parents’ wedding cake. She also made Dolly Varden cakes; at the time every little girls dream. A plain vanilla cake was cooked in a pudding bowl. Inverted, it became an enormous skirt, like the hooped skirts worn Southern belles; imagine Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind”. The top half of a doll was anchored at the waist to the cake before it was exquisitely decorated and embellished with icing so that the finished product was layered and lacy. A matching hat topped it off. My Dolly Varden was dressed in shades of sky blue. A Barbie doll could be used these days. To avoid a ‘surgical procedure’ carve a hole for Barbie’s legs into the inverted baked cake. This would also work well as an ice cream cake.

When cake tins with a recessed base became available Olive made frog-pond cakes for our birthdays. The recess in the cake was filled with diced green jelly, chocolate frogs embedded here and there and the edge piped with cream.

Olive was also responsible for introducing other food trends to the family; coleslaw, thousand island dressing, cheesecake and in later years mud cake.