Sunflower roots can be used in the same recipe, though of course the taste is quite different. (And unless it was coincidence, they are also extraordinarily gas-producing.)
celery root, washed, peeled and grated (see note)
chicken stock or water
cream
1 egg yolk
a sprinkle of nutmeg
Simmer the grated root in stock or water till tender. Thicken with cream and the yolk of an egg too if the chooks are still laying. Serve hot in small dishes with a sprinkle of nutmeg.
Note: If you can’t bear to dig up the root, you can make the dish with celery stalks – but it won’t have the deep pungency and nuttiness of the root.
How to Boil a Potato
Scrub your potatoes – don’t peel them. The peel will rub off when they are cooked and keeping it on helps keep the potato firm. New potatoes should be plunged into boiling water. For old potatoes, just cover with cold water and bring to the boil very slowly. Add a little lemon juice or peel to old potatoes to keep them white.
When they are almost done (about 15 minutes of boiling) drain off the water and put the lid on. This way the potatoes finish cooking in steam, not water, and won’t explode.
Spuds taste best in winter – dunno why. Maybe we just need all that carbohydrate to keep us warm. They’re usually fresh in winter – autumn spuds start to break down in warmer weather.
Root Bread
This is lighter and stores better than ordinary bread – it used to be a great favourite in colonial days.
1 teaspoon dried yeast
4 cups plain flour – wholemeal or white (but wholemeal makes this loaf very heavy)
1 cup very dry mashed spuds or carrots or pumpkin (yes, I know it isn’t a root) or even parsnip, which tastes surprisingly excellent – don’t add water or butter, and drain very well
1 tablespoon olive oil
OPTIONAL
1/2 cup of very finely grated raw peeled beetroot, if you want a very fancy loaf (the effect is interesting)
Preheat the oven to 220°C.
Place the yeast in warm water with a little flour. Leave till it bubbles. Now combine the flour and mashed spuds (and beetroot if using), add the yeast, oil and enough water to make it bind. Knead for at least 20 minutes. Leave to rise in a warm place – I cover it with a tea towel and put it near the stove or on the windowsill.
Punch it down, let it rise again to double its bulk.
Bake in the oven till the top is brown and springs back when you press it. The sides of the loaf will have shrunk back.
July 19
‘Remember when those were just sticks in the ground?’ asks E. On our way down to the bus this morning, the car was rippled white with frost. The mild winter has vanished under frozen grass and ice-dipped spider webs. ‘I was only three when those were planted, wasn’t I?’
Now the trunks are thick, the main branches gnarled and the peach blossom edging along each stem. In a year or two they’ll probably be bulldozed out to make way for new varieties.
We pass the oldest orchards just breaking into pink bud, and four-year-old orchards thick with flowers and then the new ground, razed level with tractor and bulldozer, where before there were only erosion gullies and mullock heaps, the sad reminders of last century’s gold mining.
Further down are more new orchards, but these are replacing old ones. The Wisbeys’ orchards of course never turn into wonderful old licheny tangles. They’re too well managed, and are pulled out before the wood turns brittle and starts getting interesting hollows.
We’ve still got a few trees like that. They don’t produce much – but their fruit is more beloved than the peaches from the tidy trees.
July 20
They’re one of the delights of winter – frozen spider webs between barbed wire. Usually barbed wire is hideous but now it’s magic, silvered and dropletted and garlanded, even the casuarinas are dripping silver. Every day is different as we drive down to the bus; I don’t think I could ever get sick of it.
Down in the valley the fog sits like a sleepy cat, too lazy to move till the day warms up. We’re lucky up here – the cold drops into the heart of the valley, while the cold air on the Tableland above us sandwiches in the remaining warm air that’s drifted up here, so we have a slice of warmth (relatively) amidst the cold.
July 23
Left the sprinklers on the young grevilleas last night. (I can’t remember when I last had to water like this in winter. Yes I can – the last bad drought.) And this morning the grevilleas were drowned in icicles – magic till they began to thaw and the poor things collapsed; so we hurriedly staked them up and I think they have survived.
The bowerbirds are eating the calamondins (I only noticed because they dropped a half-eaten one on the doormat and I trod on it this morning). So I’ve picked a bagful before they’re gone. Bower birds prefer sour fruit. They feast on calamondins – small sour fruit most people think are cumquats, which are sweet and not as prolific. If birds have calamondins to eat, they’ll leave your oranges alone.
Stewed Cumquats
This is bitter, but it’s an interesting bitterness, and doesn’t taste like marmalade (I’m not fond of marmalade).
cumquats or calamondins
sugar
a little brandy or rum or water
butter for frying
thick cream
Slice the cumquats thinly. Cover well with sugar and a little brandy. Leave for 3 hours.
Heat some butter in a pan, drain the cumquats into a bowl and fry them till soft. Remove the cumquats.
Pour the sugary liquid from the bowl into the pan and bubble till thick, add the cumquat slices again, then take off the flame at once.
Serve with very thick cream – like King Island double cream – you’ll need it to mitigate the bitterness. Forget about the calories for once.
July 24
A grey day; mist seeping through the peach trees, and clouds higher up. It’s not cold exactly, just a sort of dismalness that seeps into your bones.
I’ve been baking all day, which is the best way to cope with dismalness. The heat of the oven and the smell of food seeps through the house. (I suppose in all of us there’s some deep racial fear of starving in the cold grey times.)
There are never enough of us to eat all I bake. Not that I really want more people here – just larger appetites.
Bryan likes biscuits (I think he’d pine if he had to eat bought ones), but E doesn’t much, and neither do I; and when friends call in, they don’t eat enough either…damn it, it’s a friend’s duty to keep eating till the biscuit plate is empty.
I come from a long line of food-loving females. One of our great joys is stuffing sustenance into other people.
My great-great-grandmother – her maiden name had been Anne Lamb, I don’t know her Christian name – spent her afternoons on their property near Bigga in NSW watching for any traveller she could lure inside to feed. Her kitchen was separate from the house, and so was the storeroom – a damp stone cave filled with barrels and the smell of rotting jam and always honeycomb suspended above a bucket and the steady slurp of sweetness. It was paradise in there, said Grandma. [NOTE FROM 2010: The house was then an inn.]
Anne’s grand-daughter Emily fed the birds as well as travellers. Emily set a special place for the birds at the ornate dining-room table set to the standard of her headmaster husband. She’d fallen in love with him when he was the local schoolmaster and she was fifteen with dark plaits down to her waist, and she peered at him through the window of the school.
It wasn’t a happy marriage. He later wrote a book on letter etiquette (…and I remain Sir, Yours most sincerely…) while Emily fed the birds, her friends and her descendants.
Her daughter was my grandmother. Grandma’s life revolved around food – buying it, preparing it, eating it and taking it on picnics.
‘Chocolate isn’t fattening, pet,’ my grandmother told me many years ago. ‘Nothing’s fattening if it
’s a present from someone else.’
It was Grandma who taught me that two chocolate biscuit halves have fewer calories than one whole one; that no food is fattening if it’s also eaten by someone thinner than yourself; and that it is your duty to eat as much as possible at Easter, Christmas, birthdays, afternoon teas and all Sunday dinners prepared by one’s relations.
Grandma took entertaining seriously. There were always peanuts for the men, in silver dishes (with felt bottoms, so they wouldn’t scratch the table) when I was young, but later in carved wooden dishes from Bali – Grandma liked to keep up with the times – and crisps and jubes for the children. And chocolates. Always a dish of chocolates.
Grandma ate chocolate for eighty-eight years, as well as stuffed shoulder of lamb, apple teacake, Nice biscuits and lamb sandwiches with yellow mustard. The sandwiches were wrapped in damp damask napkins and kept in reserve in the boot whenever Grandma drove further than the corner shops. Grandma grew up in the days when cars were infinitely unreliable. She grew nervous if she didn’t have a bootful of provisions.
The stuffed shoulder of lamb was difficult. You can’t buy shoulders for stuffing any more. They’re boned and rolled and they shouldn’t be lamb anyway, said Grandma. The best lamb is really hogget, the sheep equivalent of a teenager.
Grandma spent a decade or two trying to maintain her supply of unboned shoulders in a world where she had to increasingly depend on others to shop for her, and then turned to leg of lamb instead. But it wasn’t the same.
Grandma’s day started with buttered Saos and a cup of tea at 6.30, then continued into breakfast – stewed fruit for a first course, then porridge, followed by mutton chops with gravy and fried tomato, a toasted scone perhaps, leftover from last night’s supper, with marmalade or jam, and finally fresh fruit with yet another cup of tea – enough to last you, reckoned Grandma, till the apple teacake (fresh) at eleven after a morning shopping for provisions.
When I was a child, the apple teacake sustained Grandma and me until our picnic lunch – cold meat and tinned beetroot, grated carrot, shredded lettuce (always cut it with a silver knife, said Grandma, but she didn’t tell me why) and sliced tomato all dressed with a mix of condensed milk, vinegar and dry yellow mustard, which isn’t as bad as it sounds.
Grandma was suspicious of olive oil. Oils were strictly medicinal. Overconsumption led to appendicitis.
Grandma’s days were crowded. Buying food (she bought fresh veg and fruit most days), cooking food, setting the table, washing up, packing and unpacking the picnic basket. My boyfriends were startled to find that instead of necking in the doorway they were expected to come inside and dine on tomato sandwiches, fresh scones, pikelets with jam and butter…
(I still cover my scones with a tea towel as soon as they come out of the oven, just like Grandma showed me. It’s the only way to get that lovely doughy richness; and, like Grandma, I feel uneasy with a naked cup of tea.)
Grandma spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. Other people took their relatives out to lunch. We went there to eat, hungry or not. Our children – her greatgrandchildren – were ordered to eat at least two slices of lamington cake, and don’t forget to take a scone when Great-Grandma offers you one.
The table would be set with the embroidered linen cloth hardly faded by sixty years of washing and ironing (I use it now). The special lemonade glasses (a sort of faded-beer colour, brown with yellow stripes, the same ones she’d had since I was young), sat next to the tea cups, the china plates, the dish of butter, the cake forks. It was our duty to eat, and we knew it. Bare plates – or, much worse, crumbless ones – were forbidden at Grandma’s.
The gene for stuffing people with apple teacake missed my mother, who prefers reforming the world to mixing homemade biscuits. I learnt my cooking from Grandma.
Like most of my maternal forebears I feel naked without food around me…nineteen bottles of blackberry and apple jelly in the larder, a few left of plum, eleven bottles of apricot, two bottles of strawberry, seven assorted chutneys, one green-walnut pickle, five bottles of varied herbal liqueurs, sun-dried tomatoes, apricots, capsicum and eggplant strips in oil, a fresh ‘green’ cheese dripping sludge in the shower recess…enough shelves of spaghetti, olive oil and canned salmon to last through a nuclear winter, and a vegetable garden sufficient to see us through the next two depressions…
When I was small I used to pretend to be the early NSW colony’s quartermaster dealing out the stores, sitting in the sandpit doling out the flour and salt pork in my plastic bucket with the sea-shells on the rim. Later I dreamt of medieval sieges. My reaction to any news of strikes, nuclear catastrophe, nearby meteors or the imminent breakdown of civilisation is to go and buy another fifty-seven packets of seeds, a carton of dried pasta, a sack of flour or rice…
Sometimes I suspect I only live in the country as an excuse to feed the visitors with homemade biscuits and preferably a meal. After all, they’ve had a tiring journey, as Grandma would say as she filled the milk jug and rubbed butter into another batch of scones…
When a car pulls up on the flat below the house and the geese start honking ‘guests’ it’s Grandma’s voice that whispers: ‘Don’t forget the scones…wrap them in a napkin when you take them out so the steam will make them moist…remember, put out at least two sorts of jam…’
Grandma’s Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb
Find a butcher who sells half sides of lamb. Explain carefully that you don’t want the shoulder boned. Take it home, find a long sharp knife and gently slit across the base of the shoulder on both sides, making a long deep pocket. (Yes, I know this sounds vague but once you get the knife in one hand and the meat in the other you’ll see what I mean.)
1 cup breadcrumbs (made from last week’s white bread bashed mercilessly with a rolling pin in a brown paper bag; if you don’t have either rolling pin or good bread from last week, commercial breadcrumbs will do)
1 onion, finely chopped
1 dessertspoon fresh thyme – real thyme, not lemon thyme
a little finely grated lemon rind – no white attached (no, you don’t get the taste of both lemon and thyme from lemon thyme)
melted butter (no, I know this isn’t low cholesterol – none of Grandma’s diet was)
a sprig of rosemary
potatoes
carrots
pumpkin
peas
For the stuffing, mix together the breadcrumbs, chopped onion, thyme, lemon rind and butter. Stuff the meat. It doesn’t matter if it bulges out of its hole – the crisp edge of the stuffing is one of the delights of Grandma’s lamb.
Place the meat in a baking dish with the rosemary on top in a slow oven (150°C) to cook for at least 3 hours. Add dripping if you have it. (Nowadays I never do.)
Peel the spuds. Wash them, dry them, ditto carrots and pumpkin (you need both to make the gravy thick). Place peeled dried veg in with the meat as soon as there is enough hot fat at the bottom of the pan to coat them. (If the pan and dripping aren’t hot, the veg will turn soft, not crispy.) Turn every hour or so.
Wait. The house will fill with the smell of roast dinner. This will linger for at least the next three weeks, but unlike the scent of say cabbage or old omelette the perfume of last Sunday’s lamb just grows better as time goes by.
Boil the water for the peas.
When the meat is so tender it shreds rather than slices (the French would hate it – not a hint of pink) and the veg are black and caramelised at the sides (this is definitely how they should be) hoick the whole lot onto a plate to stay warm while you check the peas and make the gravy.
I’m not going to even try to explain how to make gravy – it’s something you have to watch, the delicate browning of the flour and the cooking cooking cooking till you get something other than brown glue. The water you add should come from cooking your peas (or other veg) – this adds yet another layer of flavour and the dissolved sugars from the vegetables helps colour the gravy. (You can only mak
e good gravy with long-cooked meat – you need the flavours from the bits stuck on the base of the roasting pan.) If you can’t make gravy already – and don’t have a grandma to show you how – skim off the fat, add some good red wine to the juices, boil severely for a few minutes, then use that instead.
Finish with rhubarb and apple pie, custard, a box of chocolates (if they are a gift they won’t fatten) and a nice strong cup of tea, and give a toast to Grandma.
July 28
Cold sunlight, grey trees against blue sky and the fire snickering in the kitchen as I came down this morning – Bryan always comes down first and lights it, which I think is one of the most wonderful things each day: to come down to warm flames and the kettle boiling and Bryan just finishing his porridge.
This was one of the perfect mornings: something by Bach on the FM and the lyrebirds carolling in counterpoint and the smell of good toast (Sue’s bread, she brought it down yesterday, she has another week at home before she goes off shearing again), and everything seemed to take on a particular pleasure. The bowerbirds eating the grass seed and the feel of the bone knife-handle and the smoothness of the mug in my hands and you realise that, even if these are simple pleasures, happiness doesn’t come any deeper.
There is no point leading grey days, hour after hour, just for some special event – a holiday, an evening out, the two hours of the day you really enjoy – because by then you’ve probably forgotten how to really enjoy anyway, you’re out of the habit.
Year in the Valley Page 24