When it comes to eating pests there’s a wide range to choose from. Some are better than others.
Scale and red spider mites actually taste sweet and good – but you’d have to be pretty desperate to scrape off enough to make a meal (don’t try them if the leaf they’re on is toxic). Lerps taste acceptable – a bit like maple syrup. Lerps are those tiny waxy casings over psyllids, one of the main pests on gum leaves. The psyllids suck the sweet sap – that’s why they’re so sugary.
If you’re really into bush tucker you can scrape off a cup of lerps, cover them with water, then leave them in the sun. They’ll ferment into a sort of lerp beer – it’s, well, interesting. Don’t try it in a bad season – it could be deadly.
One of the most evident edible pests at the moment are the grasshoppers – not plague locusts yet, thank goodness, but little sticky things that lurk on the backs of leaves. There’s a Middle Eastern delicacy called locust bread that’s made with grasshoppers, not honey-locust seeds, every nine years when the locust plagues are due. I’ve never made it…or eaten it (not knowingly at any rate).
Grasshoppers taste okay, at least when they’re cooked. I admit I’ve never eaten them raw (except a small one accidentally that flew in while I was puffing up a hill, but that didn’t count).
You don’t eat the whole grasshopper – at least not on purpose – just the abdomen with the prickly bits removed. The Romans had a popular dish of grasshoppers fried in butter. You had to make sure that they were browned to a pale gold colour. If you fried them too long you apparently spoiled the flavour. I’ve also come across a recipe for chocolate-flavoured grasshoppers. Again the abdomen is fried, then dipped in chocolate. I haven’t tried them either.
The best recipe I know involves wrapping them in bacon, then egg and breadcrumbs and deep-frying them. You can omit the bacon if you don’t know a source of free-range pig. If anyone wants to know what they’re eating tell them it’s fried brains. In fact if you can get over the initial shock, grasshoppers are really good deep-fried on their own.
(NB: Make sure the grasshoppers haven’t been eating anything toxic to humans – keep them penned for a week to make sure.)
Probably the best way to eat grasshoppers though is via a mob of chooks or turkeys. Let the poultry feed on the grasshoppers – then eat the chooks.
One of the most commonly eaten pests are snails. Eating snails is a virtue. Most are feral pests; and I’ve known even fervent vegans to scatter snail bait. So why not eat them, and use the protein? (It’s also an excellent excuse for garlic butter.)
I remember going to the meat markets in Athens years ago. Amid the fly-encrusted lamb carcasses were half a dozen giant barrels filled with snails – and they were crawling out all over the place and heading down into the gutters. Unappetising, even for a snail lover.
I adore snails – in garlic butter, not among the seedlings. But even people who love snails in restaurants get a bit twitchy if the snails don’t come out of cans – and they’d never think of harvesting them themselves. Snails are easy to catch and easy to prepare.
The Edible Snail
You have to be careful with snails – and grasshoppers and other pests too – in case they’ve been feeding on something poisonous. First of all you have to either let them starve for a month or feed them on lettuce leaves or vine leaves. After that either feed them on flour for a couple of days, or be prepared to gut them. I’m not into gutting snails, so I put them in a box with a lot of flour at the bottom. The Romans fed them wine-soaked wheat to fatten them.
After you’ve starved them, throw them into a pan of boiling water, shells and all, then add a little wood ash. Boil them for 20 minutes, then toss them into cold water. They’ll have shrunk from their shells and you can pull them out with a toothpick.
Now you simmer them in white wine and water with a bit of garlic and some herbs till they’re tender. This can take up to 3 hours, depending on the sort of snail. You can either thicken their sauce with a few egg yolks or toss them in garlic butter or homemade tomato sauce or garlic mayonnaise or anything else with a strong flavour, because by now the snails haven’t any.
If you want to disguise them, mince them and fry them in butter and garlic, as snail patties, and call them (small) game rissoles. And you may never think of snails as pests again.
December 10
Suddenly the whole valley is peaches – the scent of peaches; the plop of peaches in the night; pickers’ cars scooting round the corner in the early morning as we dash down for the school bus; pickers already sweating by eight o’clock filling buckets; trays of peaches on overladen utes crawling down to the packing shed; tractors pulling trailer loads of peaches, and semi-trailers of peaches; peaches lying red and bruised below the trees; peaches red and furry in the green leaves, weighing down branches or nestled next to the trunk; the smell of peaches everywhere, almost too sweet but mitigated by the scent of hot dry soil.
You can buy peaches now all along the valley, not just at the Wisbeys’ and the Harrisons’ sheds but from smaller growers like Ray Spriggs (he’s built half of Araluen and now they call the mid-valley Spriggsville, and if there’s any justice in the world the name will stick) and at another half dozen road stalls. The varieties vary from grower to grower; so of course the knowledgeable know exactly when to come down to the valley to get their favourite, and who to buy them from.
I picked our first peach this morning. (Well actually the bowerbirds got the first half dozen.) I’ve just remembered why I stopped growing peaches commercially – the peach fuzz makes me itch. And itch. And itch.
As soon as I’ve written this I’m heading down to the creek to swim it off. (Peaches nowadays are defurred before you buy them.)
Chocolate wombat was drinking from the fountain this morning, with a satisfied look on his face as though to say: I don’t know how this pool got here, but it’s convenient.
Fresh Peach Melba
This is not the stuff you get in most restaurants – commercial white-as-anything ice cream with a few tinned peaches and raspberry (but not really) topping.
The essence of Peach Melba is the marrying of hot peaches and tongue-burning sauce with cold ice cream – so that Madame Melba, who loved ice cream, could eat it without her throat freezing (or so the story goes).
I adore Peach Melba, and hardly ever have it – mostly because it’s fiddly to make – and I don’t dare order it in restaurants as I have never found one that does it right, and then I get annoyed and start hectoring the waiters, which is not an ingredient for an agreeable night out.
2 cups frozen or fresh raspberries
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1 teaspoon arrowroot mixed with 1 tablespoon water
8 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced (or even better, gently poached in half white wine and half water, sweetened if necessary with caster sugar)
good vanilla ice cream
Heat and stir the raspberries gently till the juice starts to run. Mash roughly with the back of a spoon. Add the sugar and arrowroot. Stir till thickened.
Place the warm or cold peaches on the ice cream and cover with the hot raspberries. Eat at once.
December 11
‘Hallo there,’ announced Jeremy, darting out from behind the baked beans. ‘How are you then? Did you hear about old Joe last week? How much rain did you get? What’s been happening down the valley?’
When Jeremy asks you that, it means he really wants to know. I mean really wants to know. It’s Jeremy’s right to know everything that happens in the district – from who’s said what to whom, to the environmental risks of the new garbage site – and as he owns the grocery store where just about everyone goes at least once a week (unless they go to the ‘top shop’ instead), he is in an excellent position to find out. He also owns the bottle shop.
Some friends of ours arrived from New Zealand a while ago, and booked into the Doncaster, the guesthouse up in town, then ambled down to the bottle shop for a bottle of something for d
inner.
‘And then this great tall man sort of jumped on us from behind the counter,’ said Alice, still in shock twelve hours later, ‘and he knew where we came from and where we were staying and that we were going to visit you today – and we’d only been in town half an hour – and he wanted to know where we were going next and did we know such and such…I felt like I should give him my birth certificate and passport and three references.’
Jeremy is married to Helen, whose paintings move me more than most art I’ve ever seen, though I don’t know enough to understand why…they’re not the literal works I usually love.
Jeremy writes verse, to be recited publicly, preferably after three bottles of something extremely good; his greatest is perhaps ‘The Man Who Brought Mascarpone from Leichhardt to Braidwood’.
Jeremy too understands food, though in a different way from the valley; and Helen treats it with as much discipline as her art.
December 12
The golden skinks are sunbaking on the stone wall around the herb garden. They really are golden – if they could be snap frozen and keep their glow they’d be jewellery you could wear scattered around your neck. Though you’d never get that pulsing aliveness with a jewellery lizard, and the joy of these are that you never quite know where you’ll see one next.
A new wombat has moved into Gabby’s hole, and shovelled out her bones. I haven’t shown them to E. He’d demand a grave, or retribution. There is something very right about the bones in the heap of wombat-trodden soil, as though Gabby has finally achieved wombathood.
I still feel guilty, thinking of her – not because there was anything else we could have done for her, but because she suffered…through human sentimentality? Lack of knowledge? She should never have been returned to the wild. I know having wild ‘pets’ is against the WIRES philosophy; but I think that’s what she was.
December 13
Roos pounding away into the night when I came out on the verandah for a pee last night. The roos only come down when it’s dry. Which it is. Concrete dry. If you hit the earth too hard it shatters.
Uncooked Raspberry Jam
This jam has one of the strongest and best flavours and colours of any jam I know. Sunlight doesn’t have just one taste – it has millions, and this is one way of capturing it.
Choose a stinking hot day (which today was). Go down to the end of the garden and see if the wallabies have left any raspberries. If they have, pick an ice cream container full. Carefully pick out all beetles.
Now take a plate of raspberries and a plate of caster sugar – the same weight – and take out into the sun. Leave for 4 hours – they should both be very hot. Mash them together, spread in the sun and leave another hour. Bottle and seal.
This ‘jam’ is of course likely to ferment after a few weeks. It should be eaten fresh.
December 14
I tried to dig a hole for a new grevillea this morning – two centimetres of dust then concrete. There’ve been showers; enough to keep a green flush on the grass, not enough to wet the soil.
The river has stopped above the bridge and Noel hasn’t any river water at all for the trees. He’s been digging the dams out again, but every time he digs it gets too muddy to pump and it’s days until it clears.
We’ve still got water here – a thin silver trickle greening gently between the rocks – but Rod’s orchards drink it before it gets down to Noel. At least the swimming holes stay full of water, no matter how dry it gets – they just get thicker, green and full of duck shit and a thousand ducks…
Ten thousand flies are sheltering from the heat against our windows, giving themselves concussion as they bump against the glass, and waking with a confused buzz as we walk out the door.
The fly traps are also buzzing, and the back door is littered with flies’ wings from the nest of swallows above. (Swallows don’t eat wings – just the juicy bodies – and they do make a terrible litter with the wings.)
December 15
The sky’s a hard deep blue, so dry you could knock it and it would flake before it would seep. All the sky gives us at the moment are beetles, hard brown-backed things that don’t come inside till you turn off the light. Then they crawl underneath your pillow and tickle your cheeks – we must have had half a dozen last night, the light semaphoring on and off as we tried to find the beetles in our hair (and other more intimate places).
The ground smells dry, and the trees have that particular scent that dry gums get, as though they are niggardly with any moisture they release. (It’s true – the oil in gum trees does change consistency with weather and with pests.)
The butterflies are waltzing in thin air as though they can only dance when it is dry. Too much sunlight, unchecked light, so you are always imagining someone out of the corner of your eye, and turning and catching shadows flittering round the garlic flowers or in between the gladioli.
The rosellas are suddenly bright between the leaves, having lost their camouflage – they are so much more vivid than the heat-stricken leaves.
Birds love peach season. The rosellas have grown canny – swooping through the grass like low-flying aircraft, hoping for invisibility, settling among the fallen peaches or grasping the lower peaches in their claws and eating swiftly, silently, till they hear the noise of the tractor or the ute (me they don’t respect at all: I’m no threat). But no matter how canny, they rarely last the season. There is always a peach grower more silent than they are, waiting among the greenery with a shotgun.
Up here in the sanctuary of the gorge the birds are more open – larrikins holding onto the branch with one leg while the other grasps a peach. You can see them savouring it, the juice running down their feathers, they don’t hurry their eating up here, one bite and then survey the world and another bite and listen to the wind.
We are no threat at all – even if we try to scare them they just yell at us, angry at the disturbance to their meal. Birds are good judges of character; or at least those that survive a season or two are.
Once the rosellas and the parrots have bitten into the fruit – broken the ground as it were – the smaller birds move in, silvereyes and even spinebills and honeyeaters, sipping and poking delicately at juice as thick as nectar. And after them the bees, clustering among the beak-marked peach holes, so you see what you think is a perfect peach and find a dozen angry bees on the other side.
Birds are no fools – they always go for the best of the fruit and as they prefer wild fruit (sourer than our domesticated versions), they eat it just before we pick it. A rosella will make do with a peach of perfect ripeness, or even an overripe peach, only if there isn’t a slightly green one to hand.
Luckily we have a lot of wild fruit here too, nestled in water seeps among the rocks and cliffs, fecund along the creek: kurrajong fruit and wattle seeds and bursaria berries (tiny and purple but worth plucking along the track to the swimming hole) and pittosporum fruit which humans can’t eat and emu berries (long and purple orange green – some are quite good if you get one fully ripe, and some are like bitter cardboard) and wombat berry vines and Port Jackson figs and sandpaper figs, which can be wonderful.
There is a giant wild fig above the pool near the water slide (fifty metres of sloping smooth rock with an even smoother channel of water – irresistible but your bum gets red after a few slides).
The pool is almost a perfect round, incredibly smooth and deep and shimmering green. It is a darker green in winter when the light hardly penetrates the gorge, a silver green in summer when the rock below seems to reflect the light in crazy patterns through the water.
The pool is always cool, often freezing, like silk on your skin in midsummer when you edge into the water (each centimetre a shock to hot flesh) and slide through that line between creek and air. Half the pool is under the fig tree, so you have a choice of sun or shade – dappled at the edges, and deeper shade further in where the pool shallows to a ledge where you can sit and pluck the fruit and spit the seed up into the maidenhair abo
ve. The figs aren’t bad; not as large or succulent as domestic figs, but quite soft and sweet.
The lowest fruit are picked first. If you’re agile you can pick the fruit further out as well, but you have to be able to lunge and grasp like a merperson or a cormorant, at home in both water and air.
And the rosellas sit above us in the tree top and slurp at the fruit and laugh at us.
Mimosa
This can be wonderful but only if drunk in summer, when the smell of peaches drifts down on the wind with a hint of bushfire behind it.
Purée your peaches – they must be smooth and liquid. White peaches make perhaps the best-tasting Mimosa, but thick-fleshed yellow are more spectacular as they swirl through the champagne.
Pour half a glass of champagne – it is important that the champagne goes in first or you’ll just get peach and champagne cordial. Now pour in the peach purée in a neat swirl through the bubbles, so it winds and twirls and hangs there, supported by the effervescence. Sip it slowly, so you can watch the way it changes. This is the glory of Mimosa, this trail of peach and bubbles – a well-mixed drink of peach and champagne isn’t the same at all.
Dried Peaches
You need dry hot days for dried peaches. Apricots dry easily, as do tomatoes, but peaches can get furry and rot in high humidity.
Peel your peaches (peach fuzz is even worse dried), stone them and slice them thickly. Wipe them with lemon juice so they don’t go brown (because the brown bit in dried peaches is rotten, soft and sticky; brown, dried apricots are sticky, hard and good). Lay them out on netting trays in the sunlight; or just on aluminium foil. On netting you can leave them out all day; on foil they get hot quickly and you have to turn them every hour or so or they cook before they dry. Netting over foil might be even better, but I haven’t tried it.
Year in the Valley Page 9