Kerry Packer was not amused. He’d ordered a batch of pink-iced finger buns, his favourites, and eagerly awaited their delivery straight to his office. But when the treats with their soft white yeast dough, sultanas and shaved coconut arrived, they were missing a crucial ingredient – the large slathering of butter he craved.
“He was on a very strict diet due to his heart condition,” Pamela Clark, who joined The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Test Kitchen in 1969, recalls from her home in Fiji today. “I said to him, ‘We can make your finger buns, Mr P, but you can’t have butter’. He wasn’t interested after that.” It was testament to the might of The Weekly’s Test Kitchen that “Mr P” didn’t sack her on the spot. For the kitchen was perhaps the hardest worker on staff at his favourite magazine, and certainly the most valuable.
Since its inception in 1933, tried and tested recipes had not only been a staple of The Weekly but shaped the way readers at home – and abroad – looked at food, how they ate, and the way they prepared their favourite recipes.
Readers have always turned to The Weekly’s food pages for inspiration, from mock meats invented during the austere times of WWII, to the arrival of the classic Children’s Birthday Cake Book in 1980. In recent years, we’ve embraced cultural diversity, while fail-safe cookery methods help home cooks nourish family and friends and forge new connections through the love of a shared meal.
“Since the beginning, has always answered the question of ‘What am I cooking for dinner tonight?’” says Lyndey Milan, the Food Director from 2000 to 2008. “We were at the forefront, bringing new
