Peek into our recipe archives with this online exhibition.

ACT Historic Places’ collection of cookbooks, newspaper clippings and recipes, carefully written by hand by the women at Calthorpes House and Mugga-Mugga Cottage, give an insight into the importance of bottling and preserving in the lives of many families last century.

For the Curley women at Mugga-Mugga using their preserving pan on their Metters’ wood stove would have been an important way of making do during austere times, while for the Calthorpes long summer days were left free to focus on the abundant produce from their garden, lest any of it go to waste.