There also needs to be the smell of pine needles. Pine needles and sap. We grew up on a farm where there were shelter belts of pine trees—rows of pine trees to create windbreaks for the sheep and cattle. The open woodland that had covered the country had been cut down and the stumps blasted sky high with TNT to create great swathes of green pasture. The seeds of the pine had blown into the remnant bush and lined the roadsides populating the stringybarks with sapling pine trees. We would eye them off in November, hoping no one from the neighbouring farms would have the same idea. The young tree, probably 2 metres tall, would have its lower limbs removed, its trunk shoved into a terracotta pipe, and would be stuck into a bucket that once contained some agricultural chemical but was now filled with water, and moved into the living room. The whole front of that weatherboard farmhouse would be filled with the clean, fresh aroma of pine tree.
Getting closer to the day, the excitement builds as the shortbread goes in the oven. Butter and flour in the hot oven create, with the risk of sounding synesthetic, a rich golden smell.
The aroma of roasting bird. When I wrote about Mum and Aunty Sue getting together to pluck chooks under the fragrant shade of the virgilia tree on Christmas Eve, there was something I didn’t mention: a freshly killed chicken has the sweet smell of wet feathers, and when eviscerated, a pleasing rich smell. It’s only when the chook is stuffed with breadcrumbs laced with onion fried in butter, lemon rind and fresh thyme leaves, then trussed up like a courtesan in a corset and sent into the scorching hot oven that the transubstantiation from backyard chook to Roast Chicken takes place. A Christmas miracle. There’s an aroma released by chicken that is an olfactory clarion call to stop what you are doing, come inside, wash your hands, hover around the kitchen expectantly, be told off for picking at the pope’s nose as the bird is being carved, sit hungrily at the table staring at the roast potatoes and wait for someone old to ask for grace to be said. That is the essential aroma of Christmas for me.
The table laden with meaty bounty is so much part of the Christmas tradition. Each meat speaks of a history of poverty and fast days. So when there was an excuse for a feast, meats proved you could afford to put bacon on the table. There needs to be ham from the pig fattened over autumn. As much red meat as one can muster and at least one type of poultry. In the Northern Hemisphere, goose is the most festive, as it is native and fattens naturally over autumn. Turkeys are relative newcomers, being only 400 years on the menu in Europe. Chicken, only becoming a cheap meat in the last generation, still holds cachet on the Christmas table.
A new baby in my partner’s family saw us head to the country. For the past twenty years we had spent most Christmases with her great-grandmother. She was in her seventies when my partner and I first met, and a string of medical conditions meant that each Christmas could be her last. She loved ham and it was my job to get ham. One can’t just buy some slices of ham from the deli and put them on the table. It has to be a ham. With the incredibly low cost of industrially raised pork and the way a ham can be mass-produced, that big celebratory Christmas item can be as low as $6.99 a kilo. You can put a decent-sized ham on the table to feed a cook’s dozen and still get change out of $35. A ham that has been made from pork with all the ecological, ethical and human inputs considered will set you back $39 a kilo or about $200.
My partner’s grandma lasted another twenty-two years. That’s over $4000 worth of ham. It’s not something that I like that much of, and find it very difficult to make leftover ham-based dishes. When she died, she did it with grace. ‘I learned so many things in my life and now I am learning to die,’ she said a few days before she passed away. I miss her.
But the second Christmas without her saw a new baby in the family. A beautiful second cousin called Audrey. Her parents are vegetarian and dinner was at their mother’s house in the country.
It was one of those Victorian summer days when the clouds are like wool bales in the sky, and the grass not cut for hay is deep gold with a tinge of green about the bottom of the stem. It was slightly humid with the hint of a threat from the low pressure and the tops of some clouds going rampant, heading towards the stratosphere. Added to this was the tang of crushed eucalyptus leaves hanging in the air.
With the rugs spread under the poplar trees, the cicadas started their midday chorus. It is so much easier to prepare a Christmas lunch when you don’t have to worry about roasting meat and vegetables for a dozen people in an oven designed to feed a nuclear family. It was also fun.
I normally make a terrine. This year I made a medieval gingerbread that is basically good-quality breadcrumbs, honey and dried ginger set in a tin. It has a meaty quality and is a perfect foil to goat’s cheese and blue cheese.
A little cold asparagus soup, followed by a cauliflower mousse drizzled with a little salsa verde, and then a cheese and potato dish in homage to Jacques Reymond. (Finely slicing potatoes is never fun and is best done with a very sharp kitchen mandolin.) This dish was delicate enough to handle the verdelho but had enough oomph to work with the sparkling shiraz—something I love on Christmas Day.
You can blow off turkey, forget about ham, stuff your bloody chickens, but it is not Christmas without pudding. It was my intention prior to living through this Christmas to make it a vegan one. I wanted to call the chapter ‘My Big Fat Vegan Christmas’. Christmas pudding is made with butter or suet (kidney fat) but there was no way I was going to go without pudding. It is the only day of the year you can put dried fruit, brandy, cream, custard and a sauce made with more brandy, and an emulsion of butter, sugar and more brandy, together on a plate with an old coin secreted somewhere in the dish for good luck. Bugger going vegan for Christmas.
15
Little Miracles
At the start of the following year, with very little warning, I found myself in Bali. An editor of a lifestyle magazine I work for had organised for me to interview a chef in Ubud. This is a town of 30 000 or so people in the foothills of the Balinese highlands. The entire town and its surrounding villages feel as if they have been carved from volcanic rock. Rock that has weathered under the tropical sun and torrential rain. Every house has a carved stone temple. Statues of the Hindu gods Ganesh, the elephant-headed god associated with new beginnings, and Hanuman, the monkey god, line the narrow, two-abreast-wide laneways that interlace the town and the surrounding villages.
Chef Nengah Suradnya met me with a professional handshake and enthusiastic smile. Born in Lombok he arrived in Sydney in the 1990s, just a week before the government clamped down on people applying for permanent residency. He found a job in the kitchen of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Canberra and worked his way up the restaurant kitchen brigade. Qualified and popular, he worked as a chef in other Canberra restaurants before buying his own bistro, which he named Element. He and his cooking were lauded by politicians and public servants, who appreciated his take on modern Australian cuisine. He left Australia in the early 2000s to explore his options across India and Indonesia, before settling in Penestanan, a beautiful village just south of Ubud.
Nengah’s restaurant is open to the street and has the feel of a modern café in Surry Hills, Sydney, but a menu one would find in a local Toorak bistro. Nengah serves incredibly well-finessed and presented Western classics, such as confit duck leg, pork belly with cabbage, and grilled fish and risotto. It is known as the place where wealthy expats come for their comfort food when they are bored with nasi goreng and gado gado. Not that one would need to be wealthy, as the prices are one third of those one would pay in an Australian city restaurant. But it was Nengah’s skill that really struck me. How did a boy from a Lombok village cook so well? When I asked him about his life journey as a chef, he also revealed why there is so much tension around the consumption of meat in our culture. After speaking with him it seemed bleedingly obvious, but the reason for this cultural dilemma had until then been hidden from me.
Nengah explained:
Men don’t do the cooking at home but we cook when we are out fish
ing or hunting. The first time I cooked was when I was a boy. I was fishing with my father and I caught a fish. My father said to me, “Now it is your turn to cook it”. I had seen him cook before. So I made a fire in the sand. Back then there was wild ginger and wild lemongrass growing in the forest next to the beach. I loved the elemental power of fire and the way it transforms the raw flesh into something completely different and delicious.
As a young man, Nengah went to work for his uncle, who had a small travel agency in Lombok in the 1980s. He guided Western tourists on treks 3000 metres up to the summit of Mount Rinjani. It was a long walk over several days in the tropical forest, and to keep food fresh, Nengah kept it alive.
Ooh, I had chickens and baby goat that we would take up with us. I would cut off the chicken’s head and pluck and gut the chicken, and then light a fire and cook the rice and the chicken. Many of the Westerners had never seen an animal being killed before. When it came time to kill the baby goat there were people who pleaded with me not to kill it. They felt sorry for the animal. They would actually go hungry instead of letting me kill a young goat. But if I went away and killed the animals and cooked them, then they didn’t feel sorry for the animal, so they would eat them. Even though they knew what I was doing. They pretended the slaughter wasn’t happening. I learned a big lesson about Western people. Almost all of you have never seen an animal die. Fewer of you have ever killed one.
He poured me a powerful ginger martini and the discussion moved on.
With work done, I had most of the day to myself before the midnight flight back home. I was told that the first cremation in four years was being held in the village across the river. In the intervening four years the dead had been buried in a cemetery nearby and would be exhumed prior to their cremation. A concrete path snaked past villas, terraced rice paddies and warungs, through the forest and over the river to the main street. Stray brindle dogs nosed each other and hawker women insisted I buy a sarong as a mark of respect for the dead. There were twenty or so red-and-white life-size papier-mâché buffalo, known to the locals as lembu, standing on bamboo platforms lining the road. A small plaque on the front of each lembu denoted a deceased village person, many bearing the popular names Made and Kekut. They had been disinterred, dressed in fresh clothing, wrapped in fresh palm matting and laid out in the buffalo, as if they were sleeping.
It was late morning, the sun was hot and the village men were huddled in the shade. It wasn’t a sad occasion. It was more like a small-town Easter parade where every person was taking part. Dressed in sarongs and commemorative T-shirts designating which local organisation they belonged to, they waited for the announcement over the village speakers. There was a call to action; they took their places and prepared to lift the buffalo with their loved ones inside onto their shoulders. Some of the buffalo were made with demonic spikes on their necks, virile and priapic. Others were more demure, with long eyelashes like the cow on La Vache Qui Rit French cheese packet. Drawings on cardboard on one side were filled with iconography of disembodied eyes, and what looked like a demon trying to turn a naked lady into a spit roast, using a rake handle. Not the type of decoration one would see at a Methodist send-off. The normal smell of rank water, clove cigarettes and durian was eclipsed by another, more decadent aroma. The smell of decaying people.
As part of the occasion, some small children climbed onto one of the platforms and the twenty or so papier-mâché buffalo were raised onto the men’s shoulders and marched down to the site by the temple, where they were to be cremated. The children waved to the crowd. The drum band followed on, with twenty young men belting a rhythm on cymbals, sono-rous bells and gongs. The procession meandered down the main street and the buffalo were lined up in rows. Offerings were made. More music was played. People looked to the sky for the auspices of the sun at its zenith. It was time to say goodbye. A solemnity overcame the crowd. The buffalo were lit by the families and the papier-mâché and fine wood quickly took the flames. Smoky at first, the breeze picked up the flames and within minutes they were ablaze. At one stage, a buffalo was completely engulfed in orange and black flames with only its head and strange bulging eyes emerging from the blaze. The heat was quite intense and the smoke circled around the square as the wind blew in up the valley. There was the aroma of wood smoke and charring flesh. The inferno was like Hieronymous Bosch had done some acid at Kuta before painting a quite hellish scene. The crowd watched. Some were praying. Some were wearing face masks and turning their heads away from the smoke and flames. The small children stood, looked and pointed. There was a flare-up and the belly of one of the lembus burned away to reveal a blackened bundle the size of what looked like a diminutive Balinese grandmother suspended within the framework of her burning sarcophagus. The fibres holding her in burned through and she dropped to the fiery platform headfirst. The legs of the fiery sarcophagus started to give way and very quietly the wooden buffalo twisted and folded down, collapsing in and around the body. The Balinese don’t cry at these ceremonies. They are at this moment, however, allowed to shed a tear, to help their loved one on their journey to the next life. The children still looked on. They would see, hear and smell many more of these cremations in their lifetime.
Back in my hotel room I showered.
It was a wellbeing hotel, where the day started with yoga, coconut water and spirulina shakes. It was one of the few in Indonesia and possibly South-East Asia, that doesn’t allow smoking. The menu was completely raw food.
This is a food movement. Eating raw food means that one mostly eats organic vegan food that has not been subjected to heat. One of the founding theories behind the movement is that heating food above 40 to 49 degrees Celsius destroys the enzymes that aid digestion. Adherents believe that raw food also contains microorganisms that aid the digestive tract by populating it with beneficial flora. Raw food advocates also maintain that cooking destroys nutrients in raw food. They also argue that cooked foods contain harmful toxins that can cause chronic disease. One of the major tenets of the movement is that raw food contains antioxidants that slow down ageing; it argues that processed food, tap water and air pollution are bad for you.
I sat down in the rooftop garden of the hotel, the late afternoon breeze picking up. I ordered a beer and a vegan raw-food tasting plate. As I waited I watched the scores of ragged fabric kites hovering in the breeze, tethered to playgrounds across Ubud. The fish, bird and fruit bat shapes were all edged in lots of loose cloth, making it look like we were under attack from a hundred colourful Dementors.
The food was very good. There was a ‘burger’ made with the folded inner leaves of an iceberg lettuce, cut to form crinkled cup shapes to represent buns. Inside were slices of tomato and onion and a thickened nut milk, flavoured with chilli. This came with grissini made with soaked grains and fine seeds that had been rolled into the grissini shape, dehydrated, and served with a paste made from crushed cashews and ripe, sweet red peppers.
It was really tasty food and I scribbled notes for some ideas for the home kitchen. In the back of my mind I couldn’t help think about the dogma behind the food; I had surprisingly good Internet connection and download speed. Time for some research to debunk the raw food movement.
I was surprised to discover there is much merit in the teachings of the raw food movement. Diets high in foods containing anthocyanins have been associated with lower risks of cancer. Anthocyanins are the red-coloured compounds in food that cause beetroots and red wine grapes to be red. Raw food recipes call for lots of brightly coloured vegetables that contain these ‘good for you’ compounds. There are compounds in processed foods, such as the preservatives used in cured meats, that not only interfere with gut bacteria but also increase the risk of colon cancer (identified in studies by the World Health Organization). Some beneficial enzymes found in foods are destroyed at temperatures just above 40 degrees Celsius. One of the other concerns relates to something they refer to as excitotoxins in cooked and processed food that causes brain damage.
The last piece of information came as a surprise, as I thought excitotoxins were a made-up concept, like morgellons. (Morgellons are little fibres from an alien source that cause people to itch and scratch. While under the microscope they look like common garment fibres, some poor people think they are from outer space, sent to cause their skin to feel like hell.) Excitotoxins, however, exist. They are found mostly in the foods we find most delicious, and they enter the brain, where they cause damage to neurotransmitters. Some notable excitotoxins are glutamates that occur naturally in food, and are added to it in the form of MSG and other flavour enhancers. They rapidly destroy brain nerve cells by hyperactivating them. Another type of excitotoxin is domoic acid that is caused by red algae. In recent years some elderly people in Canada were killed by eating blue mussels that had fed on the toxic algae. It also affects other animals. Researchers attribute to domoic acid a highway incident in the United States in 2006 when a crazed California brown pelican flew through the windscreen of a car on the Pacific Coast Highway. The takeaway is this—don’t feed your kids Twisties, or other junk food with MSG, and listen out for algae alerts.
So I would have to agree with most of what the raw foodatarians promote. There are swings and roundabouts when it comes to heating food. Some foods offer more nutrition when cooked. Mushrooms, for example, are more nutritious and offer more available potassium when cooked. Morels, a much-prized mushroom in Europe that can be found growing in the granite ranges of Victoria, are poisonous when raw but completely edible when cooked. The calcium, iron and magnesium in spinach are more available when cooked. Tomatoes contain a compound called lycopene, a carotenoid that has been identified as an antioxidant and is easier to absorb in cooked tomatoes. But in broccoli the myrosinase, the enzyme that helps break down compounds in the liver, is destroyed when heated.
My Year Without Meat Page 16