By the time my flock matured, it was obvious that six of them were crowing, not just two. And my grand plan to have one chicken to eat, and eight to keep me in eggs, suddenly looked a little thin.
It took a while before my fluffy yellow chicks grew into laying birds. I had to wait from January until spring before I had my first eggs. What excitement accompanied that discovery one morning as my pullets (young hens) came on the lay, as we say ‘round ’ere’.
Small, as all pullets’ eggs are, my first egg had the trademark speckles and deeply tanned shell of its breed. When I cracked it onto a plate, the white stood to attention like jelly, rather than running all over like water—contrasting sharply with bought eggs. And the yolk? Well, the yolk from a Barnevelder is bright, bright orange. Not brilliant gold like some breeds, but deep, smoky sunset orange. Like you’d used too much saffron in your omelette.
These eggs look too vibrant, too colourful to be true. They became the eggs I used for photography in books and magazines, suspecting most people’s cakes wouldn’t be so golden. Their frittatas wouldn’t glow so incandescently. Their quiches would pale by comparison. And part of me felt guilty that my radioactive-looking yolks would spoil the real-life experience of most home cooks. But then I realised that showing proper eggs gives us all something to aspire to—chickens that are free enough to forage. Chickens that are given the right conditions to produce eggs of quality. The colour merely hinting at the flavour within.
I get to eat these eggs every day now, even in May, as we have added some better autumn layers. Over the years, as I kept my chickens, I discovered that the Barnevelder, gorgeous bird that she is, isn’t a great layer. In fact, she’s a dud layer in autumn, when the days shorten, so for four months each year I have been without my beloved eggs. Hence, a couple of other varieties have snuck into the coop. My flock now includes Buff Orpingtons and Rhode Island Reds. I’ve also experimented with Light Sussex and Plymouth Rocks.
But I still remember the first egg from my new farm and my new life.
I bet you’re wondering, ‘What did it taste like?’
Robust. Rich. Almost as rich as a duck egg. Deeply, movingly, well . . . um . . . eggy. Like an egg should taste. Like an egg perhaps used to taste. Like two eggs’ worth of flavour in one. And just like the egg I remember catching as it was laid then eating when I was ten. This flavour, the true taste of an egg from a free-ranging, grain-eating, worm-finding, grass-scratching, old-breed chicken has spoiled eggs for me forever, whenever I leave home. And it’s the flavour anybody with a decent-sized garden and an ability to care for livestock can— and probably should—have in their kitchen.
Eggy bread to cure a hangover
Serves 2
A rich, sweet, eggy, buttery treat that makes the morning seem like something to savour rather than avoid. The amount of egg mixture you’ll need depends on what kind of bread you’re using and how fat the slices are. Better to have more egg mixture than less. I often use poached fruit, such as pears, and the poaching liquid in place of syrup to lighten the breakfast too.
2 eggs, lightly whisked
1 teaspoon natural vanilla extract
1 tablespoon pure maple syrup
3 tablespoons milk or pouring (whipping) cream
4 fat slices white bread (preferably cut by hand so they’re real doorstoppers)
butter, for frying
loads more maple syrup, for pouring over
Place the eggs in a wide-based bowl and whisk in the vanilla, maple syrup and milk or cream.
Soak the bread in the egg mixture so that it’s really saturated. Better bread takes a lot longer and holds its texture better than cheap, spongy bread.
Heat a generous knob of butter in a large non-stick frying pan over a medium–low heat. Pull the bread from the bowl, letting it dribble a bit back into the bowl for a couple of seconds, then fry gently until brown. Take care not to burn it. Turn the bread over and fry the other side.
Serve with the extra maple syrup on the table for more drizzling, and possibly with slices of banana or poached peaches or pears if you want to pretend this is healthy.
Apples
Ever tasted a Fenouillet Gris? A Pine Golden Pippin? A Twenty Ounce?
If you’re of a certain age, you may have. But for most people, the modern apple is Pink Lady, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious. It’s sweet, crisp and can travel a long way in a truck. Considering there are several thousand apple varieties from around the world, it’s sad but not unexpected that only a handful of styles are sold in any commercial quantity.
So it was a joy when I visited Tasmania in the year 2000 to find a very special apple stall at Salamanca. Sure, there were and still are a few apple stalls at the market, but I’m talking about a specific stall—the heritage, organic apple one. When I first stumbled across this stall, it was staffed by sombre, pretty girls with apple-like complexions. I made it a must-visit on my frequent travels to Tasmania before I moved. I’d always end up with a paper bag full of flavours I’d never experienced before, with names I wasn’t sure how to pronounce or what to expect. Boskoop. Gravenstein. Lord Lambourne. The stall’s still there, run by the son of the original orchardist. Adrian Steenholdt isn’t quite as easy on the eye, to me, as the previous staff, but he can tell you the varieties, their uses and keeping qualities, and describe their taste. And they taste incredible.
Tasmania is called by many, including the islanders themselves, the Apple Isle. Erroneously, in my view. Sure, for a while there, for a long while, apples reigned supreme in the state, as Tasmania exported 80 million tonnes, often direct to the UK in little hardwood boxes.
Until the European Union agreements and cold storage put paid to that.
Now, around where I live in the Huon Valley, which was probably the core (boom-tish) of Tasmania’s apple-growing regions, orchards still dot the landscape. But so do— increasingly—cherries, with their extraordinarily expensive nets showing where the money lies. And year upon year, since I’ve been travelling the state and since I moved to the Huon, apple orchards have disappeared. Bulldozed out. Or chainsawed off at the roots. The trademark vase-shaped trees, pruned by caring orchardists over the generations, are uprooted, shoved into enormous stacks and torched early in spring. Come October, the region is scarred with bonfires built of apple trees, the incendiary end to many a farmer’s life work. From a high of 120 000 tonnes exported from the region annually, as I type there’s not a single apple sent overseas from the Huon Valley. Victoria is the biggest apple producer in the nation now, yet Tasmania still wears the mantle of the apple.
Despite the downturn, apples still abound, and they are still a signature of my corner of the world. When I moved to the valley, the Grove Research Station, run by the state government, boasted most of Australia’s 600 varieties, with many on show at the nearby apple museum on the Huon Highway. Bob Magnus was still waxing lyrical about the heritage varieties he had established on his property near Woodbridge 30 years before and that he had sold to a generation or two of apple aficionados.
Grove is now in private hands, though you can still source the old breeds of apple through them if you’re a wholesaler, and Bob’s trees are still available through his son’s heritage fruit tree nursery. So despite the grubbing out of orchards, appley things are ticking along. In fact, there are now three cideries operating in the valley and another just over the hill at Middleton (at Clive Crossley’s orchard, which contains Australia’s largest collection of cider varieties). Local small-holders are planting semi-dwarfing heritage apple trees that are easier to care for. There are two fresh juice companies bottling the sweet nectar of the fruit, and you can buy slivers of air-dried apple at local farmers’ markets. All of that in the Huon. There’s also a concerted effort to produce apple products of quality around the rest of the state too, despite the sight of drums of imported apple concentrate at local brewer Cascade. A friend is experimenting with a reduced apple juice, not dissimilar to a form of maple syrup in
its texture and sweetness, with more sprightly acidity, and cider vinegar and apple brandy are being made in the state.
Tasmania shouldn’t be called the Apple Isle, really. But it still is.
Apples really defined my region for a long time. Let me tell you a little about the Huon. You enter the area, almost without fail, from Hobart via Vince’s Saddle, an occasionally snow-lined high pass 25 minutes drive from Hobart’s GPO. From there you can see the flat land of Grove and the mountains to the west that are the start of the wet, wild, wonderful World Heritage Area. Up there, where the trout fishing is fine and the trees ancient, are the headwaters of the Huon, a decent river by Australian standards. A river that received its name from a French explorer, then in turn gave its name to the prehistoric, fine-grained and highly prized Huon pine.
The Huon Valley region, as defined in tourist guides, runs from Mountain River near Vince’s Saddle, nearly 100 kilometres south to Cockle Creek, not far from where the French explorers established Tasmania’s first European-style garden, at Recherche Bay. Always keen on fresh vegetables, and surrounded by unfamiliar plants, the French sailors in the d’Entrecasteaux expedition planted what they had, so they could come back later and harvest their cabbages, potatoes and chicory. Sadly, like many Tasmanian gardeners who followed in their footsteps, including myself, they found their crop plundered by wallabies and possums.
The French buggered off and left the Brits to this corner of our southern isle. They were very keen to farm it. The countryside, when relieved of its tall timber, was well suited to temperate fruits, so gooseberries, raspberries and other small fruit, and pomes such as pears and apples thrived. Forests, many of them ancient and enormous, were cleared at least in part to establish farms, and rough bush tracks were forged to the nearest waterway. Much of the good timber was prized in boatbuilding, a modest but important third local industry after orcharding and timber cutting.
Just about everything went by sea. Hobart, these days a lazy, meandering 45-minute drive from my local hamlet of Cygnet, was almost inaccessible by land. If you had an orchard, you had a little jetty, or access to one. Port Huon, on the other side of the Huon River, was a phenomenally busy port, shipping apples direct to the UK.
Old-time locals talk fondly of the apple season. How the kids were taken from school during the harvest, as all hands were needed on the farm. How a one-room picker’s hut might have housed a family of eight. How the apples were plucked from the trees from first light to the last flicker of the sun’s rays, when the pickers retired to the sheds to saw and nail the hardwood boxes for the next day’s haul. At night, the hills rang to the sound of hammers hitting tacks. These same boxes of apples were sent to the UK, where I imagine even now many are being used in sheds and country kitchens, some ancient Tassie hardwood sent across the oceans.
All that changed when Britain joined the European Common Market, effectively shutting out Aussie imports. That, and the use of cold storage, which extended the life of harvested apples by several months, meant Tassie, and in particular the Huon, suffered. The Brits didn’t need little wooden boxes of crisp autumn goodness sent from the nether regions of the earth.
Times got tough. When bushfires swept through southern Tasmania in 1967, many families gave up the fight. They sold up and moved away, leaving a remnant population of timber-getters, orchardists, fishermen and dairymaids. The jam-makers closed (though an apple cannery remained open in Cygnet until 2012). Hard times hit and hard times stayed.
Not that this fazed the locals. Ever since the convict era (Tassie was first and foremost a penal colony in the early days of European settlement), Tasmanians were encouraged to forage for themselves. Like the original inhabitants, the Tasmanian Aboriginals, new arrivals hunted and fished for their food. And it’s this bond with nature that still pervades the mentality of all Tasmanians. They can grow things. They can fish for their dinner. They can find wallaby for the table. Where I live, the difficult geography and lack of roads only reinforced this self-reliance.
The isolation of the Huon, a rough, sometimes impoverished region at the bottom end of the island, which is at the bottom end of Australia, which is at the bottom end of the world, bred a certain resilience. If you couldn’t make it, grow it, fix it or cook it, you didn’t have it. When I moved to Puggle Farm, the first bloke I had a long chat to was an old hand at fencing whose body was worn by the work. Living about half an hour away, up towards Hobart, he felt nostalgic on this trip to the Huon. He told me that in his day he used to work for the roads department. And they would get their shovels and picks repaired at the Cygnet blacksmith. That’s right, I said blacksmith.
In this day of discardable tools, of replacement axe handles that cost more than a whole brand new axe at the local hardware store, where just about everything comes from overseas, a local blacksmith seems unimaginable. To those of us, in particular someone like me, raised in the just-built, brick-venereal suburbs of Canberra, that kind of skill and ingenuity seems prehistoric. Funnily enough, one of the first Tasmanians I befriended was a blacksmith too, though John Hounslow Robinson is more an artisan knifemaker than a shovel fixer for the department of roads.
Lost skills, like shingle splitting or post-and-rail fence making, still exist in the back blocks of Tasmania. Look at the one-time shepherd, Hedley, from whom my son takes his name. A sheepherder. You don’t hear that expression very much these days, certainly not when you live in a terrace house in Sydney. When you live where I now live, and you meet these people, be they dry-stone wall builders, or scythe club members, you start to realise that Tasmanians are indeed a curious mob.
Anyway, as the arse fell out of the apple market, and as farmers reeled from the physical and emotional devastation wreaked by the 1960s bushfires, the Huon region fell into decline. Previously more densely populated properties emptied of workers. Houses started to lie empty. Pretty, lush green rolling hills were engulfed by blackberries then left to return to bush. Things were in a state of slow and steady rot. Sadly, it’s not an unusual scenario when you look at just about any rural area in the nation without a large population base.
Things changed when the hippies arrived. I’m not sure when it happened, but the relatively fertile soil, the extraordinarily cheap land and the ability to be self-reliant attracted a whole bunch of alternative thinkers to the part of the Huon around Cygnet. Hard-line timber cutters were suddenly lining up at the general store with dreadlocked greenies. The often staunchly Catholic and conservative local dwellers found the snotty-nosed barefoot toddlers with proudly dirty faces confronting. Change came rapidly, and as usual with dramatically different groups suddenly thrust together in the one space, not without rancour. But mostly the old farming families looked upon the interlopers as curiosities rather than a threat. Like any healthy society, there is disparate opinion and a range of lifestyles still, but I like to think that despite our ructions the old and new blend admirably in this little corner of the continent.
Post influx, many of those original farming families are still here. They may even appreciate some of what the hippies brought—there’s a thriving arts scene now, for instance. And the hippies? Well, some have grown up and become less radical. Many are still living the life they want, growing things, home-schooling and rearing their kids according to their beliefs, quietly, up the dead-end tracks that meander off the main roads. The region has probably seen more change than many rural parts of Tassie, that’s for sure, and in some ways is better for it. Though it’s still in a state of change, just as all vibrant working towns and regions are. The young, money-poor hippies can no longer afford to buy some of the land, as cashed-up city slickers like myself search for their own piece of paradise. There’s still plenty of opportunity around, of course; they just have to go further afield.
Today the Huon muddles along quite happily most of the time. The big industries are fish farming and orcharding. Timber is on the wane. Plenty of people run small-holdings, or work part-time and farm part-time. Cygnet itse
lf isn’t a museum town, or a dying town. It’s buoyant enough, with three pubs (well, one just burnt down, but I presume they’ll rebuild), two independent supermarkets, a greengrocer, two butchers, two service stations, a hardware store, three cafés, three schools and a few churches. Newcomers and old families live side by side, though there’s not the opportunity there probably once was for someone interested in farming. Not like there was when you could run a small orchard and make a living. Old-timers contribute a wealth of knowledge and expertise to newcomers’ farming endeavours, possibly lining their pockets along the way. Division is usually minor, and generosity in spirit abounds. This, in a region often split along very simple, very obvious environmental lines.
There’s a large proportion of the population who vote for The Greens in the Huon, and they’re a major political force in Tassie. And yet those of different political hues live alongside them. I have a mate who has ‘I Shoot Greens’ in a green triangle sticker on the back of his ute. Another, with a green utility, has the words ‘Don’t be fooled by the colour’ (though I suspect he mistrusts Forestry Tasmania as much as he does The Greens). Another hands out how-to-vote cards for The Greens at elections. Another has a bumper sticker ‘They shot the wrong Lennon’, in reference to a former state premier who sided often, and not transparently enough in their view, with forestry interests. There’s been bad blood on the issue, as you can imagine in a debate that involves people’s livelihoods and tradition. But mostly it is a minor quibble in a society that, generally, just gets along. Because society has to.
More worrying are the trends of the buying public, who have an enormous impact on regional Australia.
I’ve watched as my neighbours grub out apple trees, feeling brutalised by the way supermarkets will only pay them twice a year, at a price they tend to determine after delivery. Half the time it’s not worth the effort to grow and pick them. Gnarled trees, the romantic vase-shaped, classic, full-grown apple trees, are being replaced by less glamorous and far more sensible espaliers. With the new system, no longer does a picker have to spend a third of their day moving, climbing and descending ladders. Now they can just pick while standing on the ground. Gone are the small, hardwood apple boxes, or even the big hardwood apple crates with the removable end slats. Now it’s all pine boxes, loaded onto trucks, and apples kept in cold storage for months. You barely see a Cox’s Orange Pippin, a Sturmer, a Geeveston Fanny, a Lady in the Snow anymore. The latest craze is for Jazz, an apple that will have probably fallen out of favour by the time anybody around here grafts their existing trees over to it. As a nation we want apples that are crisp. Sweet. Bright in colour, keep well in storage and, as usual, can be shipped a long way. The reason so many apples are disappointing by the time you put them in your mouth and eat them is that they are supposed to be seasonal. They’re supposed to represent autumn in all its glory. But you want them all year. So they’ll be floury, or go brown within seconds of eating, or they’ll be simple and sweet and crunchy. But they won’t taste like the apples we get to eat here.
The Dirty Chef Page 7