My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  Heritage vegetables represent the choice of varieties of fruit and vegetables that were available to growers prior to the rationalisation of agriculture that started after World War I and gathered pace after World War II. These were vegetables that were bred to grow in certain climates. So, a bean bred to ripen in upstate New York might not set seed in the hot, dry summer of Central Victoria. But when they do find conditions to be agreeable, heritage vegetables grow in such a way that they produce complex aromas and depth of flavour.

  To prove the point, Wood offered me a piece of carrot. It was sweet. And incredibly ‘carroty’ would be the only way to describe it. The vegetables he offered were all likewise intensely flavoured. ‘What we have today is a dearth of flavour in the vegetables most people buy on a day-to-day basis. Here, in front of you, these vegetables are grown for one thing and one thing only, and that is flavour,’ he said with a passionate rising intonation. ‘The vegetables grown for the supermarket are grown for one thing. And that is shareholder profit. They have to look good for the longest time possible while being handled by pickers, packers, shelf stackers and customers,’ he went on. ‘They are not grown for flavour.’

  Flavour is essential to health. The scientific links have been established for over a decade. An article in Science magazine published in February 2006 stated that, as they grow, plants produce many different compounds, only some of which can be sensed by humans. ‘Volatile profiles are defining elements of the distinct flavours of individual foods,’ the article stated. ‘Flavour volatiles are derived from an array of nutrients including amino acids, fatty acids and carotenoids.’ The article mentioned that in tomatoes, for example, ‘almost all of the important flavour related volatiles are derived from essential nutrients. The predominance of volatiles derived from essential nutrients and health promoting compounds suggest that these volatiles provide important information about the nutritional makeup of food.’

  So while our tongue is hardwired to detect the presence of protein, salt, energy and danger, our olfactory system—our ability to smell—is hardwired to detect compounds that we find attractive that are beneficial to us. It is no wonder that we can detect carotenoids—these are the compounds that give yellow and orange colour to vegetables. They are also incredibly good for us. The more agreeable flavour and aroma fresh food has, the better it is for us.

  I spent the rest of the morning wandering the market. There were baby beetroots that smelled of raspberries, apples that smelled like honey, plums that reminded me of roses, lettuce that tasted milky. In my mind I was back in my childhood vegetable garden.

  I returned to Andrew Wood and Jill McCalman. They were refilling their display boxes with fresh vegetables from their ute. They now sell to a handful of enlightened chefs in Melbourne, like Matt Wilkinson, who share their philosophy and understand why humans react so positively to quality flavours. Those restaurateurs are some of the most successful in the business and are happy to pay the premium Wood and McCalman ask for their vegetables.

  It is interesting to note that, compared with our sense of taste, which is hardwired to our brain stem, our sense of smell goes through a completely different channel. Chemical compounds activate sensors in our nose that relay information to the brain. Those aromas are laid down in a format similar to the way we remember vision. Not the exact aroma but a representation of it. Those aroma images are stored in the same part of the brain in which we experience emotion. It is no wonder, then, that when one smells an old-fashioned rose, or a fragrant tomato, one is reminded of one’s grandmother, with a particular yearning for the past.

  9

  Summer Bounty

  The end of summer came so quickly. Our few tomato plants in our pocket-handkerchief-sized backyard had set good fruit but not enough to make tomato sauce. Every year for the past several decades we made sugo, or passata. When we bought our house, our first, a Victorian terrace, we decided to follow the examples of our Italian and Greek neighbours and plant a ‘wog’ garden. We felt we had to. The week after we signed the mortgage papers, the Lehman Brothers collapse signalled the official beginning of the GFC.

  It was explained to me when I first arrived in the city from the country, way back in the mid-1980s, that ‘wogs’ owned their houses faster than ‘skips’ because they could feed themselves from the backyard. ‘Wog’ was originally a derogatory name for post-World War II migrants, but was appropriated by the community and by the late eighties was worn as a badge of pride. At the same time, the term ‘skip’ was coined, the cultural Yin to the wog Yang. ‘Skip’ is the pejorative term given to Anglos by ‘wogs’, the term an abbreviation of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. This was a television show about a treacherous national park on the outskirts of Sydney, in which each episode a guest character or one of the central cast would find themselves on the edge of a dangerous precipice, bitten by a snake or unexpectedly lost. They could only be saved by the intervention of a sentient kangaroo called Skippy, who could communicate by clicking and pointing. It was the Game of Thrones of its day.

  So, having been labelled a skip by my wog mates, I felt it was only natural that the first garden I owned (with my partner and the bank) would be a wog garden. This meant squeezing an olive, lemon and bay tree into the frontyard and growing herbs between them. We planted over thirty food trees on our tiny block of land, underplanting them with perennial herbs and self-seeding bitter greens. The north-facing strip of concrete was covered in planters and filled with annual herbs, corn, beans, zucchini and tomatoes. The one factor I hadn’t taken into account was the possums. They love tomatoes.

  Determined to still make our passata and sugo, I drove up to the hills to my mates’ place—Meagan Bertram and Steve Briggs at Yarra Valley Gourmet Greenhouse, who grow the most amazing tomatoes for restaurants. Many are heritage-breed tomatoes and as much as I love them, they are temperamental compared with modern hybrids. Which means there are always a lot of seconds. This was good for me as I was able to get several boxes to make my sauces. The downside was that they were not all red tomatoes. In fact, most were yellow- and orange-coloured tomatoes.

  Back home we washed the tomatoes, and ran them through our 1-horsepower Tre Spade tomato mill. I own it together with my neighbour. In autumn it makes passata and in winter we used it to make sausages. We crushed the tomatoes and poured the juice into big wide pots and cooked the juice down to reduce it by half. We poured the passata into Fowlers Vacola jars. These are Australian-made jars with wide mouths used for preserving fruit My Italian neighbours use old beer bottles and crown seals for their passata. I like the mix of Anglo and Italian, of the Fowlers Vacola and sugo. It’s that hybrid bastardry of Australian culture that I love. We come from everywhere and we can be whoever we want to be. I am a self-appointed skippy wog. A ‘skog’. Or is that ‘wippy’? Restaurateur Guy Grossi coined a magnificent phrase that describes the wog culture in Victoria. He calls himself and his like ‘Melbournese’, as in Milanese.

  Here are some notes from our garden and kitchen over that first summer and autumn.

  MAKING THE MOST OF SUMMER PRODUCE

  Beans

  We made bean rockets out of some 2-metre-long tea-tree sticks a neighbour had thrown out in hard rubbish. We planted three of these in small plots of turned-over soil and joined them up like the skeleton of a teepee. We planted climbing beans at the base of the poles and watched them wind their way up. The beans bloomed with cascades of glorious red flowers, which were soon swarming with bees. The flowers quickly withered to reveal tiny beans. Tiny beans taste like large ones but are more intense. Beans ripen in flush, creating a sudden glut. It is a good idea to pick some beans earlier than others, to slow down this bounty. Beans sliced very fine, either lengthways or on the bias, can be served in a piled salad with small pieces of ricotta, mint and parsley, dressed with a vinaigrette and dusted with ground nuts and cumin. Steamed beans are delicious with a handful of sourdough breadcrumbs that have been fried in a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil an
d a few cloves of crushed garlic. Fresh beans cooked with tomato passata and onions, and served with loads of fresh parsley, pass muster with kids.

  Carrots

  I am one of those old-fashioned (mean) fathers who doesn’t buy my children anything other than clothes and books as presents, and when we go shopping only allows them to buy a treat at the greengrocer. By the age of seven, my youngest could read the nutrition panel on food. She pointed out that Nutri-Grain has just on 30 grams of sugar per 100 grams. My oldest daughter said that makes Nutri-Grain 32 per cent sugar. My daughters are also allowed to buy whatever seeds they like. My youngest, unbeknownst to me, planted carrots all around the garden in early spring. Come summer I was weeding out baby carrots. No bigger than your thumb, after careful washing these tiny carrots can be added whole to a salad. Fresh, small carrots only need warming in butter. Just prior to serving, fold through a few tablespoons of finely chopped dill, mint or parsley. A simple vegetable peeler, taken to a carrot, creates lots of shreds of carrots that can be folded with crushed roasted nuts, feta cheese and chopped parsley. Grated carrot can give some sweetness and richness to pasta sauce. Grated carrot, when sautéed gently in butter or oil, can also be added to grain and pulse dishes.

  Corn

  I planted the corn in patches. Squares of corn surrounded by lawn. I watched the little spikes of green emerge from the earth in spring and unfurl their leaves, setting their cobs and flower head on top. Growing corn reminds me of the M.A.S.H. episode in which Father Mulcahy plants a vegetable garden. Over the season, tragedies come and go but throughout, he tends carefully to that garden of corn. Come summer he harvests the corn and gives the cobs to the cook, Igor. The cast talks eagerly of chewing corn kernels right off the cob, dreaming of melted butter oozing down their chins. When Igor reveals he has cooked the fresh cobs into gluggy army-style creamed corn, Father Mulcahy loses his priestly cool.

  Fresh corn, picked young, needs very little done to it, as the skin on the kernels is quite fine and the inside quite creamy. Steaming for a few minutes is good. I prefer grilling by laying the cobs, husk on, over a very low flame or coals. When corn gets older, the skin on the kernel toughens and the interior becomes harder and more starchy. Older cobs need a little more cooking. With older cobs I gently peel down the outer leaves one by one to reveal the kernels. These are given a good rub with garlic-infused extra virgin olive oil, or butter, and a little salt; then the leaves of the husk are replaced and tied in place with ‘string’ made from torn strips of husk. After this the cobs are grilled as per usual. Corn kernels sautéed in butter with softened onions until hot and folded through a warm wild rice salad with parsley are delicious. Remember: corn loves butter.

  Cucumbers

  A freshly harvested cucumber is crisp and crunchy like an apple. A little dish we learned from a bistro in Hong Kong was roughly sliced pieces of cucumber with a dressing of lemon juice, sesame oil and soy sauce, and topped with toasted sesame seeds. Long strips or juliennes of cucumber can be served like vegetable spaghetti, with a little salt and finely crushed garlic, finished with a simple splash of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Julienned cucumber mixed through coleslaw makes it lighter to eat. Cucumber, dill and yoghurt goes with almost everything.

  Potatoes

  We grew our potatoes in a hessian sack. We bought the sack at a stockfeed store in the inner suburbs that once sold chaff and hay to pre-automobile horses. Started in 1888, Murphy Brothers in Hawthorn sold stockfeed mainly to horses but also to milk-producing cows and goats. In the days before refrigeration, milking cows and nanny goats were commonplace in large suburban gardens. The billy, or male, goats were often harnessed to small jinker-like carts and used for children’s entertainment and also transport. Hence the term ‘billycart’. The things you learn from people in feedstores.

  We tightly packed the hessian sack with straw, then laid down a thick layer of compost, some sprouting potatoes, more compost and more straw. It was basically a sack full of leaves until the end of summer, when the potatoes started flowering. There is a technique for harvesting potatoes without pulling out the entire plant, called ‘bandicooting’. This entails running your hands into the straw or soil under the dripline of the plant, or where the rain drips onto the ground on the outside edge of the plant. Here one can find immature potatoes that can be twisted away from the roots without damaging the plant or affecting the other potatoes. This means one can harvest tiny little potatoes. Which are delicious deep-fried and served with aioli. Young potatoes are brilliant for potato salad. I still love adding a mix of finely chopped white onions, olive oil, vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper and a stock cube to a bowl of very hot, freshly boiled baby potatoes and letting the dressing soak in. This was a recipe taught to me by an old German couple when I was growing up. Another tasty way of serving potato salad is with quark, finely chopped mint and parsley, a little sherry vinegar and a pinch of salt. Mashed potato pureed with loads of butter and cheese, using a stick blender, becomes a rich, sticky mate to ratatouille. Chickpeas and potatoes make a great soup, and an excellent stew, and when cooked chickpeas and potatoes are fried with onions they are incredibly delicious. Grated potato, after being squeezed in a tea towel to remove juice, mixed with egg and parmesan, makes great galettes on which yummy things such as eggs or avocado can be served.

  Zucchini

  At the end of summer a joke is retold in the countryside in the southern states. Question: Why should you lock your car at night? Answer: So people don’t fill it full of zucchinis. It almost sounds like one of those jokes that has been translated from a foreign language and has lost something along the way. But head to the countryside, where people are growing their own vegetables, and at the end of summer and the first months of autumn, zucchinis go berserk. A friend with small children said his son left his plastic tricycle next to a large zucchini. He swears that while he was sitting down having a beer after working in the garden, he saw the zucchini push over the trike. There was a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise was threatened by a truly adorable species of furry creatures called Tribbles. They were cute in every way possible except they reproduced like rabbits—seemingly on a mixture of Viagra and speed. The spaceship was literally overrun with these creatures. Zucchinis are the Tribbles of the vegetable world. They are quite clever too. When you pick a young zucchini, with all its buttery nuttiness and tiny soft seeds, you’re sending an alarm signal to the plant. You have taken away its way of reproducing; therefore it needs to make more seed, so it flowers more and creates more zucchinis. You can extrapolate from here.

  A farmer I met recently in Campania, Italy, showed me the vegetables she was growing for the handmade sott’olio, which means preserved ‘under oil’. She grew varieties of zucchini not dissimilar to the common garden variety found in many Australian backyards. Instead of harvesting them when they were young, plump and thin-skinned, she let them grow on a little longer. She wanted the flesh that surrounds the seeds to swell and thicken. She wanted the skin to thicken a little as well, for when she went to process the zucchini she only took the flesh and skin. The seeds went to the pigs or to grow next year’s crop. As a result, the zucchini plant only grew a handful of large zucchini. To finish the sott’olio she would cut the zucchini in slices, salt them and allow them to dry for several days in the sun. Once this was done she would hand-pack them as tightly as she could in a jar and cover them with a blend of extra virgin olive and sunflower oils. This she would then simmer in water, just below boiling, for fifty minutes.

  Male zucchini flowers can be picked and placed on a corn tortilla with some mozzarella and a little truffle paste. The tortilla is folded and grilled on the flat grill or one at a time in a heavy-based frying pan. The Mexicans call these quesadillas con queso y flores de calabaza Normally they would use some huitlacoche, which is a corn fungus. You can buy huitlacoche tinned but truffle paste is better. Fine zucchini fritters can be made by grating zucchini and laying it out on a tea towel, then squeezing
out the water. Add feta, a little egg and mint, to form quite a wet mixture. Fry, drain and serve with yoghurt. Just when zucchini is ripe, so is eggplant and tomato—perfect to make ratatouille.

  There is something universally human about nursing a bounty of fruit and vegetables from the orchard or garden. A single arm nursing durable vegetables on the hip. Two arms folded, nestling softer offerings close to the chest. These are gentle and beautiful images often captured by artists. Loading your arms up with a cornucopia of home-grown plants makes you feel good, not only about yourself but being able to provide delicious and nourishing meals for your family. I believe that we all have a stronger relationship with the land, its furrows and ploughs and its rich moist earth than we have with guns and spears.

  10

  So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

  As a food writer I have always had a problem assessing the environmental and ethical issues surrounding commercial fishing. Most reporting about the fishing industry comes from second-hand information from global environmental bodies about how bad the world’s fisheries are. Horror stories of poisonous Mekong prawn farms, aquatic dead zones under salmon farms caused by their faeces, and Dutch supertrawlers that hoover every living thing into their bowels. I feel there is a lot of latent xenophobia woven into the texture of these stories and feel instinctively that the nature of them is too simplistic.

  Compared with land-based food production, it is difficult to witness what goes on in boats on the high seas. I had always been suspicious about the fishing industry after I witnessed some commercial fishermen take their catch to the processor, where the fresh flipping fish were quickly scaled, gutted and filleted. The fillets were packed in a box lined with plastic sheets. The box was closed, sealed and placed in the freezer. On the side of the box was printed ‘Fresh Fish’. The person who ran the small plant said to me, ‘We only freeze it for a few days. It’s “fresh frozen”. It’s not like it’s deep frozen.’