Discover SLM
Find a weekly summary of what's new across our channels, look up activities to do at home with the family, including in the kitchen and the garden, explore our properties and our collections, and settle in for some good long reads.
This week's focus:
With a flavourful feast of stories about food and cooking across our museums and historic houses, we invite you to sink your teeth into some of our favourite recipes and stories in our celebration of food this week!
Story
Photo © Jacqui Newling for Sydney Living Museums
A treasure trove of cookery books
Through most of the nineteenth century, Rouse Hill House was the social hub of the district. Discover some of the Rouse family's surviving cookery books dating between 1850s and the 1950s.
Collection item
Photo © Stuart Miller for Sydney Living Museums
Curious kitchen object
Can you guess what this curious kitchen object would have been used for?
Activity
Photo Fiona Brell © Sydney Living Museums
Kids in the kitchen
Check our our wonderful range of kid-friendly recipes that delighted families for generations!
Recipe
Photo © Jacqui Newling for Sydney Living Museums
Baked carrot pudding
Treat yourself to this delicious baked carrot pudding, a much-loved recipe in Emma Rouse's 1863 edition of The book of household management.
Watch & listen
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Eat your history
Duration: 1:54
Eat your history
Colonial gastronomer Jackie Newling discusses her book Eat your history: Stories and Recipes from Australian Kitchens
Duration: 1:54
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Meals
Duration: 1:15
Meals
What was life like for ordinary working-class children living in the suburbs or on the fringes of Australian cities in the early 1900s? How different or similar was their day to yours? Step into the shoes of the Youngein children, Jim and Dolly, from Susannah Place, Sydney and find out how they lived.
Duration: 1:15
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Old-fashioned Lemonade
Duration: 3:20
Duration: 3:20
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Aboriginal food sources
Duration: 01:23
Aboriginal food sources
The expansion of the colony saw colonists take more and more land, pushing Aboriginal people off their lands and depriving them of access to their traditional food supplies.
Duration: 01:23
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Baked Apples
Duration: 5:13
Duration: 5:13
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Food at the Barracks
Duration: 00:33
Food at the Barracks
Jacqui Newling talks through how food preparation and management would have changed for convicts when they moved into the Hyde Park Barracks in 1819.
Duration: 00:33
Online puzzles
NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice and Police Museum
Online jigsaw puzzles
Take a moment to relax and recharge with one of our online puzzles featuring our beautiful collections and museums.
Gardens
Photo Stuart Miller © Sydney Living Museums
The convicts’ vegetable garden
According to Governor Macquarie’s Government and General Orders, 1st May, 1819, it was intended that convicts would raise their own vegetables in a dedicated kitchen garden.
Convicts
Image © Hyde Park Barracks Museum collection, HPB2003/22
What did the convicts eat?
Discover the types of food the convicts living at the Hyde Park Barracks would’ve eaten.
Competition
Photo © Toby Burrows for Sydney Living Museums
Artist in Residence
To celebrate our first artist in residence at The Mint, Dr Lisa Cooper, we’re excited to launch our #InspiredByNature competition for your chance to win a custom-made floral artwork by Dr Lisa Cooper.
Online exhibitions
Photo © Nicholas Watt for Sydney Living Museums
Meroogal Women’s Art Prize 2020
Sydney Living Museums is excited to announce that entries are now open for the 2020 Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, with a prize pool of over $10,000.
Photo © State Archives & Records
A Thousand Words exhibition
‘A picture tells a thousand words.’ This adage is the inspiration for an innovative new exhibition we've just launched in which the public becomes the curator.
Eat Your History book
Enjoyed these stories and recipes? Discover forgotten tastes and treasures from our historic kitchens in the delightful Eat your history book by Jacqui Newling. Visually rich and featuring over 40 recipes, the book dishes up stories and recipes from Australian kitchens and dining rooms from 1788 up to the 1950s.
For a limited time, receive an exclusive Susannah Place tea towel valued at $9.95 when you purchase our Eat your history book $49.99, shipping additional.
SLM members receive a 10% discount, shipping additional.
More stories
A manuscript cookbook from Meroogal
Among the many cookery books in the Meroogal collection are several notebooks containing handwritten recipes. This one was compiled by Helen Macregor, who lived at Meroogal in the early 1900s. Some of the recipes have been edited with tips, comments and adjustments added over time.
Eastern Influences on Colonial Dining
A few years ago the Friends of Historic Houses Trust donated a beautiful, and accurately reproduced, set of china plates, known as a dessert service, for use and display at Elizabeth Farm. These help breathe a little more life, c1812, into the colonial world of John and Elizabeth Macarthur and their family.
Feeding the Confined
While Hyde Park Barracks is best known for its convict history and convict food has been covered before, that is just the start of the story of food at Hyde Park Barracks. Kim Connor, University of Sydney archaeology honours student, tells us what she’s discovered.
On the Macarthurs' menu at Elizabeth Farm
At Australia’s oldest homestead, you can visit the 1820s kitchen and the gracious dining room to get an idea of what was on the Macarthur’s table.
Preserving our culinary heritage
Autumn is the time when families like the Rouses of Rouse Hill House & Farm preserved the last of the warmer weather’s bounty to enjoy in the months to come.
Reviving an heirloom recipe
Wedged between the pages of an old family cookbook is a manuscript recipe for Meroogal Sponge. In the early 1900s the tea table at Meroogal was never thought to be complete without the family's 'signature' sponge cake, baked in a loaf tin and served perfectly plain.
Rouse Hill recipes
Through most of the nineteenth century, Rouse Hill House was the social hub of the district and the Rouse family regularly played host to many events.
Latest news
Employment
20/HC050 Heritage Project ManagerThursday 28 May 2020
News
Sydney Living Museums to reopen from 1 JuneThursday 21 May 2020
Sydney Living Museums is delighted to announce we are reopening our museums and historic houses, with the safety and wellbeing of visitors and staff our main priority.
Foundation
Annual Appeal 2020Monday 4 May 2020
To help us continue our important work, we invite you to support Sydney Living Museums through the Annual Appeal 2020.
Q&A: Jacqui NewlingWednesday 27 May 2020
Join Jacqui Newling, Assistant curator, colonial gastronomer, author of our Eat your history book and 'the cook' in the Cook & Curator blog as we ask her about some of her favourite recipes from across our museums and historic house collections.
Dr Jack Mundey AO (1929-2020)Tuesday 12 May 2020
Jack Mundey, Chair of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (Sydney Living Museums) from 1995-2001, has died aged 90. He was as committed to ‘the workers’ as he was to our historic sites, and is fondly remembered by all who knew him.