Our Cook (1906)
He's a licensed food preparer of the "Deadly Daisy" brand,And he's guaranteed to poison every shearer in the land ;
A methodical creator of concoctions strange and weird,
A builder up of dishes such as ne'er before were reared.
Scorns to use a cooking book,
Does our cook, our shearers' cook,
Whose undying faith in onions is a factor to be feared. Here's his bill of-fare for breakfast-
First a most delicious smell,
An aroma, pungent, piercing, that's without a parallel,
That proceeded from an appetising sea of molten fat,
Where the burning chops were struggling to escape from onions that,
With a most remorseful look,
Hissed and bubbled at our cook,
Whose yeast, too, had played the mischief, for the bread was hard and flat. But the dinner was his triumph-roasted mutton, extra raw,
With some fork-resisting 'taters, half cooked onions in galore,
An maybe an apple dumpling, minus apple, minus sauce,
With a brew of tea to help it on its stomach-troubling course.
No wonder that we took
Grave objections to our cook,
When a treacle-duff exploded with a sort of dum-dum force. And for supper every evening, same old story, nothing new ;
Here we see the dinner's relics floating all round within a stew,
While a glance at the commotion going on outside the shed
Showed one ringbarking "brownie" and the other sawing bread ;
And the slushy and the cook, Both of them are going crook,
Just because someone suggested that the yeast was trimmed with lead. I could lengthen out my story, but the time is getting short,
I am sure I haven't noted half the items that I ought.
But our cook retired abruptly, with the slushy in his wake,
When they served up curried mutton, which we proved was curried snake ;
Yes, we thought it time our cook
And his slushy took their hook,
When we found a piece of snake-skin
floating in our onion lake. -Justin Thyme. Notes From the NSW Newspaper The Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative 29 Nov 1906 p. 16.