Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  May 6

  Peach leaves droop before they change colour and most don’t colour much at all, though some varieties are more spectacular than others – although even then ‘spectacular’ is probably flattering them. Most of the leaves are dirty rust, and lying limp against their twigs, as though crushed by the weight of autumn shadows. They are much prettier on the ground, splayed around the tree, looking richer and redder against the dark soil.

  Peaches Poached with Vanilla, Ginger and Chilli

  12 fresh peaches

  a bit of vanilla bean

  1/2 a dried red chilli (see note)

  thinly peeled rind of a lemon

  6 thin slices root ginger

  1 cup sugar

  3 cups water

  Preheat the oven to 150°C.

  Pour boiling water over the peaches for 5 seconds, till their skins wrinkle. Rub off the skins.

  Place the peaches in a casserole dish with the vanilla bean, chilli, lemon rind and ginger.

  Make a syrup with the sugar and water, simmer for 10 minutes, then pour over the peaches. Bake in the oven for 2 hours, turning the peaches every so often if their heads are above the high-water line.

  Scoop out the vanilla bean (dry it – it can be used again), and the chilli, lemon zest and ginger (which can go to the chooks).

  Serve hot with cream, or good-quality ice cream, which goes even better with the heat and tang.

  Note: If you haven’t got dried or fresh red chilli, fresh lemon rind, fresh root ginger and so on, don’t substitute – vanilla essence, chilli powder and powdered ginger won’t do.

  May 9

  Finished the last of the hoarded Golden Queens this morning. I had to force myself to eat it, as it won’t keep any longer – it was already shrivelled and suspiciously soft on one side – but it was beautiful. Simply beautiful – a sharpness and meatiness to savour and remember for another ten months until I taste another.

  May 17

  This is the magic time, the shadow and light time, the hills deep purple and the sky a high clear blue, as though free of the weight of summer’s sun. Even the trees are at their most beautiful, the sodden dull leaves dropped off and the bright red new wood glowing against the sky.

  Most of this will be pruned off soon – in fact the lower orchards have already been pruned. With so many to get through, pruning starts very early.

  Peaches fruit on last year’s wood and this supple red wood is the growth from last season that will bear fruit next summer; but if all of it is left to bear, there’ll be masses of tiny peaches – mostly unsaleable to consumers who like great fat soccer balls of fruit – and because of this great harvest, there’ll be little new wood the following year. So to even up the fruit supply, about two-thirds – and often more – of this new red wood is pruned off and the trees are left as harsh skeletons throughout the winter.

  The red wood more than makes up for the lack of autumn leaves, though you only realise how spectacular it is en masse. The wood of a single red-flushed peach tree in your back garden probably stays unnoticed. You need thousands of trees for the true beauty, the delicate tracery of thin wood, complex and complexing, like ordered spider webs. The more rows there are behind, the brighter they look. Perhaps you need this clear blue sky as well and the soft light of the sun low on the horizon. A valley light, as well as autumn light, the brightness reflected off the trees and cliffs and changed in doing so.

  Basil and Olive Mezze

  I keep picking my basil before the frost gets it – great fat leaves, the sort of succulence you only get in autumn. This recipe is one thing to do with the almost-last-of the basil. It keeps for months. In fact it’s all the better if you do keep it for months, makes an excellent present when you’ve forgotten Aunt Delilah’s birthday, or to impress not-quite friends who arrive without warning at lunchtime expecting something home grown, home cooked and looking like it was burped out of Vogue. (You never mean to invite people like that to lunch, but they ooze their way in anyway – then demand a tour of the garden for three hours and a photo with their dog. Grandma trained me all to well to always offer hospitality.

  chunks of cheese (feta, mozzarella or any firm cheese)

  lots of chopped basil

  black olives

  raw capsicum strips

  a little lemon rind

  whole black peppercorns

  a little chopped onion

  a chilli or two, if you like chillies

  Combine all the ingredients in a jar and serve as an appetiser.

  It should keep for at least three weeks in the fridge, but throw it out if it smells odd or grows wildlife or turns cloudy. (All preserved food is liable to grow interesting bacteria – eat at your own risk.)

  A Basil Aphrodisiac

  Dunno if this works. If I tell Bryan I’ve just given him an aphrodisiac I’d like to test, he giggles.

  Take a bottle of good hock or chablis. Insert a bunch of basil. Leave it at room temperature for 24 hours, remove the basil and chill. Pour out a glass for the object of your desires…and remember aphrodisiacs are far more effective if you tell the person you’ve dosed that they have just drunk an aphrodisiac.

  May 20

  We ate massaged hare last night.

  It’s Giles who says they’re massaged. His daughter says they’re squashed. E says the last one they picked up was maggoty and even the cats didn’t want it, though the chooks ate it happily enough.

  Victoria is philosophical. If her husband wants to pick up flattened wildlife – sorry, massaged game – she’s prepared to eat them, provided that he cooks and cleans them, both of which he does extremely well. After all she says, in France, where Giles grew up, you never get a chance to pick up the game that you ran over. By the time you’ve stopped, the car behind will have grabbed it first.

  Wild food in France is a delicacy, whether it’s trapped, shot or…massaged. And besides, she says, it’s easy to judge the freshness of a roadside corpse. Just avoid it if it’s maggoty.

  Giles’s speciality is hare, though rabbit is still welcome, and if I ever run into a deer, wild pig or feral goat I’ve promised to wrap it in a blanket and deliver it to him pronto. The hare was one I ran over last week and it’s been marinating ever since. I didn’t mean to run it over; I swerved, and it swerved too. And then the bump that means it didn’t make it. The guilt stays with you for days…though I wouldn’t have felt guilty if I’d killed it deliberately. Maybe it’s just that cars are such dull, brutish implements and killing should be a conscious act, with the consequences weighed and accepted.

  It was early morning; the mist still shivered over Jembaicumbene. I was on my way to the ABC. So I carried the corpse to Giles and Victoria’s. (Giles feeding the chooks in gumboots, jumper and nothing else.)

  Giles’s hare casserole is delicious, incredibly rich, so you only need a few tablespoons for every mound of golfball-like new potatoes grubbed out of the garden ten minutes before they are cooked. Giles’s massaged hare evokes some trace memory of the real taste of meat. The succulence stays with you for years afterwards.

  Nowadays we like to keep our food at a distance, so it’s sanitised as ‘ingredients’, preferably shiny or on trays, bought by the kilo or in 200 gram portions so it fits neatly into recipes.

  No one in their right mind would buy the sort of foods I’ve gathered in the last few days – sodden lettuces with rotting outside leaves, tasting of the rain, spotty silverbeet, cracked tomatoes oozing juice so you have to cut off at least one side, pears with two small bird pecks at either end.

  This year’s peaches were smaller and tasted of hot soil and sun. The apples had the dark red blush of drought. In these supermarket days only wine has vintages. Only those who grow their own remember the cherries of 1982, not many but sun perfect, the leeks of 1988, fat and sweet…

  Like Giles’s massaged hare, even broccoli going to seed or soggy lettuces are good – if you know how to cook them. Turn the lettuce into soup (purée with roos
ter stock and just a little cream), peel the broccoli stalks and stir-fry them with young garlic bulbs – just like an onion before they grow the paper between the cloves, only sweeter and milder, but you must use lots of olive oil…

  Besides, I think I like the taste of blemishes. Like my wrinkles, each blemish tells me where it’s been – the late frost that dimpled the peaches, the stink-bug plague that sucked pale patches on the limes. Shop-bought food is grudging, because that’s all you get. There’s a world of memories in every blotchy leaf out of the garden.

  Sometimes I feel that this fetish to tidy up the world is just a neurotic response – as our air, water, forests, resources are fouled and exhausted, we’re fanatically sanitising the few bits left under our control – like a kid who believes the exam will come out right if every pencil is sharpened and lined up beforehand. But this ‘tidy up’ moves us even further away from the non-human world.

  Besides, scabbed apples do taste sweeter, birds peck the ripest strawberry. If botrytis is ‘the noble rot’ on grapes, so is brown rot on apricots, which only attacks the richest ones of all – just scrape off the bad bit on the side.

  One day I’ll even find the courage to cook a massaged hare.

  Giles’s Massaged Hare

  If you don’t have a hare – massaged or otherwise – this recipe is good with a hunk of wild pig, a leg of goat, pork leg chops at a pinch, or even chicken, which is what I usually use (yes, even a frozen chook if you must, but it’ll be stringy and not as succulent). You need meat that tastes of something for this dish to be really good – say a youngish rooster, introduced to the axe just as he starts to crow at maybe twelve weeks. (If you think I’m hardhearted, remember that even Giles’s massaged hares have a better life and death than any meat you buy at any butcher’s. Those who eat meat need to shoulder the responsibility…and anyone who keeps chooks knows you can’t keep all the roosters, they fight amongst themselves and terrorise the hens…)

  1 hare, massaged, skinned and gutted, or other meat as above (if you are using a fresh animal, save the blood and liver)

  good red wine (no, not a gurgle from a cask – use the stuff leftover from that decent bottle last night – the point of this recipe is that all the ingredients are good)

  shallots

  a few sprigs of fresh thyme (see notes)

  a couple of fresh or dried bay leaves

  olive oil

  2 tablespoons chopped fatty bacon

  12–20 garlic cloves, roughly chopped, not crushed (see notes)

  1 large onion, chopped

  12 tiny onions (optional) – if you’re ruthless, haul them immature from the garden; if you’re lucky, you’ll find pickling onions for sale somewhere

  flour

  mushrooms (optional) – either field mushrooms (they’re sprouting up all over as I write, product of a lovely drizzly autumn), which will give you flavour and a dark black juice, or commercially grown butter mushrooms, which at least will add to the texture

  pepper

  Joint the hare. Roll the meat in flour. Place in a casserole dish. Cover with red wine. Add the shallots, thyme and bay leaves and a tablespoon of olive oil. Leave covered overnight or for up to three days in the fridge. (In my fridgeless days I once kept a leg of pork for three weeks in a marinade. It was the best I’ve ever tasted but I haven’t dared repeat it since.)

  Place a little olive oil in a pan, brown the bacon, then sauté the chopped garlic and onion as well as the tiny onions till the chopped onion is transparent. Take off the heat.

  Drain the meat (reserving the marinade) and pat it dry.

  Fry the meat in olive oil till browned. Take out the meat and add 3 tablespoons of flour to the pan. Stir over a low heat till the mixture in the pan browns. Add the meat again, the marinade, and the sautéed bacon, garlic and onion. Simmer for 45 to 60 minutes or till just tender, with the lid off so the sauce reduces to rich sludge. Add more red wine if necessary.

  Take off the heat. At this stage you can bung the whole lot in the fridge and finish it tomorrow or the next day. If you’ve got the time and energy, continue now.

  Add sliced mushrooms. Cover the pot, place in the oven and cook at 150°C for an hour. Don’t be tempted to add more wine at this stage – the mushrooms will yield up their juices to the sauce, and the wine will taste too raw if you add it now.

  A few minutes before serving, add the pepper (it’ll turn the sauce bitter if you add it too soon) plus the finely chopped liver and reserved blood (if using) to enrich the sauce.

  Serve with a mound of tiny new potatoes, fast boiled with parsley and butter added at the end (take them off the heat when they’re not quite cooked and cover with the lid so they steam the last few minutes and don’t burst); or thick chunks of toasted or fresh French loaf for mopping up the juice. Nothing else.

  Serve a salad afterwards: either a mixture of green leaves, some sweet and just a couple bitter (what the French call mesclun), or the harvest of the garden – lettuce hearts made pungent with a little dandelion (the newest palest leaves and yellow dandelion flowers), tiny sow-thistle buds, sheep sorrel from the cracks in the brick wall (the sweetest and most succulent of weeds), with just a drizzle of good oil. What else would you serve with massaged hare?

  Notes: Don’t use DRIED thyme – if you haven’t any growing, mooch down to the nearest garden centre and buy a pot (it’ll cost almost the same as a packet of green dust); you can pick up a bay tree when you buy your thyme. Secondly, 12–20 cloves GARLIC isn’t a typo. I do mean 20 cloves, and the final result won’t smell of garlic either – but don’t even let a metal garlic crusher near this recipe or you’ll be burping stale garlic for the next two weeks (a Teflon-coated crusher is probably acceptable). Chopped sautéed garlic isn’t acrid, and it thickens the sauce as well. Crushed garlic put straight into liquid smells (and probably tastes) like a Marseilles navvy’s armpit.

  May 22

  Pudge has discovered the vegetable garden. Heaven preserve us from intelligent wombats. The carrots have been replaced by large brown holes, and all the tops of the parsnips have been eaten (she couldn’t be bothered digging deep enough to get to the rest).

  Bryan spent this morning fencing off the veggie garden with reinforcing mesh – a case of after the wombat has eaten, as there’s no point planting any more carrots and parsnips till next spring (they’d just go to seed without producing bottoms).

  At least that answers the question of how many carrots Pudge could eat at a sitting: at least two square metres worth, and probably more. And she still turned up on the doormat wanting her oats this morning.

  Sandra from down the valley called in to pick up someone’s jumper this morning (it’s been sitting on the chair by the door for the past month waiting to go home) and left a bucket of milk.

  One of my dreams when I first came here was to have a cow. I then realised that while I love cows – they smell nice and are very cuddly first thing in the morning – and I quite enjoy milking, I really don’t like milk much (or even cheese for that matter) and five-odd gallons of milk every day was enough to turn anyone off Devonshire cream and butter.

  So I gave up the cow idea though I’ll happily share if someone else is doing the tending – fresh milk actually tastes of something, instead of that vague dairy taste that just reminds me of drink-that-milk-girl school days, when the tiny bottles coagulated in the sun till ‘little lunch’ at recess.

  Sandra’s milk had at least three fingers of cream on the top, almost solid so we had to use a spoon to scoop it off. Bryan is having it on his porridge tomorrow, and if there are any raspberries I’ll make a fool. But even though Bryan loves milk (drinks a glassful every afternoon with two pieces of Lindt chocolate before he starts to tidy the chooks back to their roosts and put away the tools), we can’t cope with a bucketful.

  Fresh Cheeses

  These aren’t cottage cheeses, they aren’t cream cheeses – they’re simply fresh cheeses. They are one of the few cheeses I really like –
probably because they’re not particularly cheese-like.

  Fill a bowl with milk, leave for two days at room temperature (this assumes your room is comfortable – if it’s stinking hot, keep the bowl in a cool cupboard). The milk should thicken slightly without going bad. You can hasten thickening by adding a junket tablet, but there’s no need if you have patience (though a junket tablet might be an idea if you’re using homogenised milk). Pour into a cloth – I use a clean tea towel, doubled over – and hang in a cool place, like over the bath (if you don’t mind the temporary but odd yellowish streak), till the liquid has run out and the cheese is firm.

  Serve with fresh fruit, fresh fruit purée, cream or sugar.

  Variations

  If you wish, you can flavour your fresh cheese before it is placed in its cloth.

  For a savoury cheese: add pepper (black or green), chopped herbs, garlic, chopped olives, chopped capsicum, chopped chillies in whatever combination you want.

  For a sweet cheese: add sugar, chopped candied fruit, vanilla, cinnamon-sugar, etc. My favourite cheese has added grated orange zest and a little Cointreau, and it’s served with fresh cream and a raspberry purée (there’s no need to add sugar – the raspberries are sweet enough).

  Maturing

  Fresh cheeses can be kept to mature – rub them in wax and leave for up to six months, or keep in brine made with 3 cups of water and 3 cups of salt. They don’t have the same texture as a ‘proper’ matured cheese – but they’re very good. I like them best after about three weeks – firm, sliceable, slightly soapy, but still with a fine fresh flavour.