So, scouring the internet for more information on the sharing of recipes, throughout the ages, I found about a billion food blogs and online networks and cooking challenges and internet noticeboards, all designed to help people around the world share their favorite recipes.
People everywhere seem to share the same desire when they make something incredible, they want give it to their friends, their family, and everyone else they can reach.
What I didn't find, was much of anything about how people shared recipes with each other years ago.
I did find one wonderful article however, about a recipe that a woman dearly loved and her attempts to find out where that recipe came from.

This is Maria's story:

I married a prospector who worked for Mount Isa Mines.

We spent a few years early in our marriage travelling the outback and I benefited from his experience there, particularly with cooking on an open fire and with a camp oven.

He called one dish he taught me "Steak Gerard", but it was not a fried or grilled steak at all, nor even a French recipe in my opinion.

It had the aura of the genuine outback - beef, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, flour and water.

Instead, it was what I would call a slow braise of shin beef.

He taught me the recipe from a carefully written piece of paper always carried with us, for he had not invented it.

He too had learned it from someone else and the recipe had been written down by the mechanic on the prospecting team, one Arthur Rains, from their time in Herberton in North Queensland and around Cloncurry in the west.

But my husband Eric, did not know who had taught it to Arthur.

The dish was delicious and it was amazingly easy to make.

I made it for years both out bush and later in our homes on regular stoves.

I served it at dinners and always received praise for it.

Eric had added a yeast dumpling from 'Egerland' (or an Austrian imperial) cuisine which sat alongside it on the plate as if invented with it.

Then came Cyclone Tracy and a lot of my life took off with her over the Arafura Sea into oblivion, including the recipe for Steak Gerard.

Eric had died too by then and it took me a few years to find a settled life again, by which time I was in a quandary about the precise quantities of some ingredients.

Silly really, because there are but a few.

So I set about recreating the recipe and it took several experiments before I had a recipe I thought was acceptable.

Alas, it still was not the same taste as the old one had yielded.

But I lived with it and I have continued to use that recreated recipe for a few decades now, but often wondered about the origin of the recipe and what the original quantities were.

This week on a strange whim I decided to look online for "Steak Gerard", just in case.

To my delight I was whisked through cyberspace to a site for ABC radio in Western Queensland and there was a recipe for Gerard Steak from a cook in Longreach.

I don't think any prospecting team ever looked around that town for minerals, or at least none but the fleece of gold, but that area was generally correct for a regional cuisine based around Mount Isa.

And, yes, the ingredients were the ones I recalled and the quantities similar but subtly different to the list I had recreated.

So, I offer you "Steak Gerard", thanks to Arthur Rains, mechanic and Deirdre Williams from Western Queensland.

I still wonder who put those ingredients together for the first time - for it would have to have been in the outback, don't you think?

Since then, we've discovered a little more about the history of the recipe, or at least two places where it has been published in the past.

Carolyn Willersdorf from Longreach heard Maria's story read out on the radio this week and said, "I knew immediately that I had the recipe in an old school cookery book."

She said the book was one she used when she studied at Domestic Science High in the Technical College grounds in Brisbane.

Mrs Willersdorf thinks she would have first made the recipe in her first year at high school, which was 1956 and it's one she still enjoys today.

"It's an amazing recipe.

"It's one that's sort of stuck with me all of my life anyway, since I've been cooking," she said.

And the cookery book from Mrs Willersdorf's high school days is called "The Simple Cookery Book" and it was published by the Queensland Education Department.

There's also another interesting connection.

The recipe came to ABC Western Queensland from Deirdre Williams and a Miss Williams was Mrs Willersdorf's high school cooking teacher back in the mid 1950s.

The next step in finding out a bit more of the history of this recipe was of course to ask Deirdre Williams herself, how she came to have the recipe.

She also had the recipe in a book she had at school in the 1970s.

The book was called "Day-to-Day Cookery" and Deirdre says she no longer has the book, but she has the recipe written out in the "Big Book" (a large collection of her favourite family recipes).

She says it's a special recipe because it's so easy and it's really well flavoured.

But her memories of the recipe date back before her high school days.

It was a recipe her mum used to cook for the family on Saturday evenings.

"When we were kids, there were nine of us.

"We were a big Catholic family and every Saturday night we went to church and mum would cook this 'Steak Gerard' and put it in the oven with potatoes baking as well.

"She'd put it on before we left and it would be ready to eat when we got home."

Deirdre Williams says she still makes this recipe for her family and has also contributed it to another published recipe book.

It's called "The Charleville School of Distance Education - Back for more".

So the legend lives on.

But we still have no idea who may have invented the original recipe, or how it came to be part of the repertoire of an outback Queensland cook or part of the Queensland Department of Education cookery books.

If you know more, you can add your comment to this story or share your thoughts on the ABC Western Queensland facebook page.