Mrs Forster Rutledge was ahead of her time with her ideas on food waste and healthy eating. Photo: As seen in the 40th edition of The Goulburn Cookery Book, printed by the National Trust.
In 1899, Bungendore resident Mrs Forster Rutledge wrote a humble cookbook and gave the copyright to the Church Society of the Diocese. The sales of her publication, titled The Goulburn Cookery Book, were to support the church’s activities in the region.
What Mrs Rutledge didn’t know is that she had written a bestseller that rivals some of Australia’s biggest cookbook authors, having sold 250,000 copies across 40 editions that span 76 years.
The child of Irish immigrants, Mrs Rutledge lived at Gidleigh, a prominent homestead and farm in the Bungendore region, and was raised with the practicalities of rural life, where it was a woman’s job to run the household, staff and all.
With no ability to see the global phenomenon that cookbooks were to become in the subsequent 126 years, Mrs Rutledge states in the preface of the 1899 edition: “Although there hardly seems any necessity for another cookery book, yet I cannot but think that this collection of recipes will meet a want, especially among the women in the bush who often have to teach inexperienced maids.”
Mrs Rutledge, even in 1899, thought the cookbook market was flooded, yet all these years later, the likes of Jamie Oliver and Yotam Ottolenghi can still move more than a million units of one cookbook title in a year, suggesting that the global appetite for the genre is absolutely more of a want than a need, as she suggested.
On the scale of things, the fact that 250,000 copies of The Goulburn Cookery Book have been sold is monumental. To put it in context, in Australian publishing, if you sell more than 100,000 copies of a cookbook, you have a blockbuster on your hands, and the bestselling cookbook in Australia in 2023, Dinner, by Nagi Maehashi, sold just over 250,000 copies.
A well-loved 40th edition of The Goulburn Cookery Book, printed by the National Trust in 1975. Photo: Tenele Conway.
As well as being a bestselling author, Mrs Rutledge was also a bit of a hustler, evidenced by the story of how she funded the book’s first print run by leveraging connections across the region.
The butchers of Goulburn were particularly keen to support the book, as was Dr Robert Waugh, who produced baking powder, and Patrick McShane, a wool and produce merchant in the region.
That first edition of The Goulburn Cookery Book set off a chain of annual reprints that took place for 30 years and in that time sold 205,000 copies. There were a few more revivals after her death in 1932, and then the presses went silent for nearly 40 years until, in 1975, the final edition was printed by the National Trust, which took the total number of prints to a quarter of a million.
This final version is the one that I have in my cookbook collection. The inside and back covers are filled with extra recipes added by a former owner, and the food-flecked nature of the cover and pages would suggest that it has been a well-loved reference point.
What strikes me about the book is its practicality and relevance to today. Yes, there is still the odd aspic, an inescapable meat jelly recipe from our past, but when compared with many other cookbooks published in this era, the recipes are not too dissimilar to how we would eat today. Pancakes, cakes, souffles, curry, salad, chutneys and jams are all familiar, and the recipes are written in a way that they can easily be replicated today.
I do draw the line at the recipe for toast water, which is exactly as it sounds: toast soaked in boiling water. If you intend to try this recipe, be sure to heed Mrs Rutledge’s advice and let the water go very cold, ”because warm toast and water is quite disagreeable”.
There are also notions in the book that suggest that Mrs Rutledge was ahead of her time. If you think that waging war on food waste is a modern conversation, Mrs Rutledge got there first and abhorred food waste.
If you think the idea of avoiding overly refined foods came about in more recent times, Mrs Rutledge proved otherwise. In her later years, she was said to have been fanatical on the subject and wrote a supplement titled Health Foods, which was printed in post-1930 editions.
On the other hand, Mrs Rutledge was no teetotaller; she even included recipes for cherry wine, claret, draught beer and chilli beer, in which she notes that you will have to source the chillies from the chemist.
If Mrs Rutledge were alive today, I like to think she would have a sassy Instagram account that disseminates practical living and affordable cooking to the world, and based on her cookbook sales, I bet it would go viral.
Copies of this bestselling cookbook from across the ages can be found in antiques stores and through online vintage sellers.
