A cricketing legend

Great excitement in my house.  The Mittagong Under 11s – aka the Australian cricket team – have managed to win a Twenty20 match and two fifty-over matches.  Three in a row!  This has thrilled Erstwhile, because every time South Africa B – sorry, England – beat the Aussies, cricketing experts crawl out from cubicles and from behind phones to tell him exactly what went wrong with the Australians.  We don’t need telling.  They just weren’t that good.

They have my sympathy.  My cricket career was just as illustrious.  It comprised one school term.  It sounded good, though.  After all, if you represent your school at sport, then logically you must have some ability.  My ability, undeniably necessary, was that I was perfectly willing to make up the numbers, which made up for my lack of height and co-ordination.   All those sporty people who would have missed out if it hadn’t been for me – whole sporting careers that would never have been because for a relay team, you need four people.

Most of the time, I spectated.  I was there as filler, really – and because someone had to watch the oranges, sausage rolls, Chelsea buns and Fanta as it all dried out in the sun, and to maintain the supply of baby oil.  The cricket wasn’t all about the cricket for most of the team.  It was about getting out in the sun and getting the darkest tan possible.  I became expert at rubbing baby oil into those difficult-to-reach places on teenage girls’ bodies.   In those three halcyon months in which I represented my school at cricket, I only took the crease once. 

It had to come. We only had three girls who could play cricket well, so more often than not, our team failed to make the runs required to win.  I was so far down the list that the page had to be turned over to find my name.  But one day, we didn’t have sufficient bodies to prevent me from having to bat. 

I padded up.  I swung the bat a few times to get the feel of the willow.  I walked out to the crease and gave a look to the bowler that suggested that I meant business. 

The bowler sized me up.  She bowled the gentlest bouncer in history.

Over my head it sailed.  Took the bails right off.

Cross my heart, I swung at it.  No contact.  Not surprising.  The bat I was wielding and the pads I was wearing were almost as big as I was.  And I had spent most of the afternoon applying copious amounts of baby oil to body parts.

We were all out.  I was supposed to save the day.  I didn’t even save face.

After that, I found I was better at cooking than batting (swimming, catching, hitting something with a racquet).  Which is good, in my opinion.   When sportspeople win, they get all the glory.  When I cook, then everybody gets the good stuff.  Sausage rolls, Chelsea buns, Fanta.  Winners all round.     

White christmas (recipe)

This recipe is easy.  Just finding copha is the difficult part.  Kremelta from New Zealand, Végétaline froma France, and Palmin from Germany can be used in place of the copha.

Number:         24

Utensils:        greased slab pan, approx. 20x30 cm

Ingredients:    1 cup powdered milk

                        1 cup dessicated coconut

                        1 cup mixed fruit  (chopped jellied sweets can be substituted)

                        1 cup rice bubbles  (rice krispies)

                        1 cup icing sugar

                        1 cup (250g) copha

Method:          Collect the ingredients.  Blend all the ingredients except the copha.  Melt the copha slowly over a low heat, then pour over the dry mixture, blending well.  Press the mixture into the pan.  Cool and allow to set.  Cut into fingers or squares.

There goes Santa Claus...with my waistline

Over at last.  The great Christmas overindulgence.  Why do we sigh with relief when Christmas is done?  Is it the end of fevered shopping for family we barely know?  The nerve-rending round of goodwill to all men?  The 361^st repeat of ‘Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer’?  Personally, I’m over the feast – the hunting, the gathering, the gorging, the disgorging.  By New Year, I’ve eaten the entire cast of ‘Twelve days of Christmas’ (pick your own version) and the feast of Stephen.  Plus one or two giant Toblerones.

It’s a time of tradition, right?  So traditionally I make little chocolates in place of cards, because nothing says I’m thinking about you more than putting a few hundred calories onto your hips.  I bake two batches of Erstwhile’s mother’s Christmas cake; one to eat at Christmas between bites of leaping lord and chocolate, one made into smaller cakes to be discovered in June in some dark cupboard recess.  There’s four boiled puddings, because the quantities feed an Edwardian family of 13, not three.  And, as family tradition dictates – and there’s no more tyrannical tradition – I hunt a ham about mid-December. This is so that everybody is traditionally tired of ham well before Christmas Day.  This year, hunting the ham involved learning to drive very carefully through snowy countryside.

It feels strange to have a cold Christmas.  On my last Christmas back in Oz, we had my brother and his family down from the coast on Christmas Eve.  We went swimming and ate by the pool. There was nothing - no carols, no videos from the Northern Hemishphere, no shivering voices from the other end of the phone - that prepared me for the darkness of a winter Christmas.  The lack of festive mingling at neighbourhood barbies, Christmas parties, Carols by Candlelight in the Domain.  Cricket after Christmas lunch.  That I would make my cakes and puddings not on a day sweltering in heat, but because the weather was so miserable and cooking made the house smell good.  And those little sausages in bacon?  It feels like I'm eating the Baby Jesus.

On Christmas Day, my sister rang.  After the snowfall of the previous couple of weeks, she asked me how I was enjoying a white Christmas.  I knew what she meant, but I thought about that other White Christmas that I don't get to enjoy.  Not Bing's, but a mixed fruit slice.  A simple thing to make, you would think.  It is; it's usually what I make kids do to keep them out of my hair while I panic about whether I've bought the right present for my mam.  Sadly, I haven't made it since I moved here.  Two of the ingredients are not to be found on the supermarket shelves - full-fat dried milk powder and Copha, a vegetable shortening made of hardened coconut oil.  I can source the milk powder, but Copha?  An Australian cultural food to me - and a heart attack in a 250g block to everybody else.

Rather than waste time and money risking the NHS at Christmas, I spent the cash on my family’s traditional breakfast of Froot Loops.

Why Froot Loops?  That’s another story.  Right now, I’m off to find another recipe with which to disguise ham...

A slice of heaven

A few days ago, I did what I had never done before - I made petit fours for forty guests at a wedding.  I wouldn't have called them such, but apparently that is the posh term for them.  I call them little bites of chocolate heaven.  But who am I to judge?  The grooms dithered, shyly (or is that slyly?) asked, and I was happy to do so.  At least that's what I said.  My wedding present to you.  That was before I made them.

It was supposed to be an easy job.  After all, I'd made them all before.  At least once.  Okay, one I hadn't made twice, and one I'd made often, a long time ago.  But they weren't hard.  All I needed were a few days, some easily-sourced ingredients, and a couple of coldish nights.  Simple.  That was before I made them.

I got off to a flying start.  Mars Bar slice and Posh Rocky Road?  Those I'd been making for Christmas for the last couple of years - and the filling of the Mars Bar slice is one of those things that I make when I'm feeling the need for something crunchy and chocolately - which is about once every couple of months.  So no problems with Mars Bar slice.

It would have been nice to say the same for the rocky road.  It started well: chop the turkish delight, the marshmallows, the macadamias.  Break up the Green & Black's white chocolate and melt.  Simple.  I had a 100 percent success rate in chocolate melting.  Not this time.  For the very first time in my life, I burnt chocolate.  This is not boasting.  This is luck.  There was a late evening rescue mission to Sainsbury's.  The next two batches worked better, because I melted the chocolate the old-fashioned way - in a bain marie.  Anyway, I was halfway there.  And I had four days to go before the wedding - well, you don't want to do these things too early, do you?

Rumballs were next.  No heat needed.  No melted chocolate.  Just a bunch of ingredients including crushed arrowroot biscuits.  Which weren't at the local Sainsbury's, so I sent the Erstwhile and the Son to Tesco.  They returned with my biscuits - and a television.  I put this minor distraction behind me.  Biscuits got crushed, rums got balled.  I washed my hands so often that I could have been mistaken for an obsessive-compulsive.  Still, here I was, Thursday night, and I had all day Friday and Saturday morning to go, and three of four were cooling nicely in the laundry.

Does anybody know just how many recipes exist for Cherry Ripe slice?  I don't, but I found out I had at least six in my cookbooks alone.  I discovered this when I couldn't find my copy of the recipe, which I had tucked away in a safe place after I had last cooked it, two and a half years
ago for an Australia Day barbeque - January in Berkshire being the perfect weather for a barbeque.  But now, when I needed it, I could not for the life of me remember where the safe place was.  All I knew was, each time I looked into one of cookery books or cooking magazines, it wasn't the right one.  I spent fruitless days looking for ground hazelnuts just in case I had to use another recipe.  There was a lot of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.  I had to get this one right.  My whole cooking reputation rested on it.

It was in the laundry.  In a box full of bits of paper that had stuff on it that I thought might interest me.

Just as I remembered, it was a simple recipe of easily-sourced ingredients.  I just hadn't remembered the baking part.  No probs, I said to myself after a very large scotch, I have time.  I made one batch on the Thursday night.  That would be cooled by Friday morning, I'd do the second batch Friday, so by Friday evening the petit fours could be all cut and bagged, to be delivered to the blushing grooms on Saturday morning.

'Can we pick up the party favours Friday afternoon?'  Such an innocent text.  Such a mad scrabble.  The second batch of slice cooled while three men - Erstwhile, Son and groom - carefully packed the other slices into little cellophane bags, standing at the ironing board in my living room.

But they got done.

And did the petit fours go down well?  They looked great, and tasted better.  The grooms thanked me, I got all teary, and there's a lovely bottle of wine waiting for me - after the Christmas party, when I can come off my fitting-into-the-tight-dress-for-the-Christmas-party diet.  Oh, and some rumballs.  Some very expensive rumballs.

And some have cooking thrust upon them

There is an iconic image in cooking.  An older woman - gentle-faced, flour up to her elbows - smiles beatifically at a young child (sex indeterminate) as the child is introduced to the magic of cooking.  Initiate and novice, together; passing on the knowledge of how to turn flour, sugar and eggs into pretty cupcakes with butterflies on top.

I was not introduced to cooking like this.
 
My mother cooked.  I watched her - in much the same way as a wild animal prowls around the outside of a fire.  She didn't do it because she loved it.  She did it because she loved us, and my dad could only cook steak and bacon and eggs.  She didn't want us to die of cholesterol poisoning.  I suspect that she wanted to be a bit more hands-on about our demises.  I know that my brother was top of her hitlist.

As for Grandma, I can remember just two dishes she cooked: tripe and onions - Grandad's favourite, but an acquired taste; and an interesting fruitcake that involved shoving a bunch of ingredients into the sink, turning on the tap for a while, then squishing the resultant mess into something resembling a cake.  It was called sinker.  Based on the way it sat in my stomach, it was probably the reason the Titanic sank so fast.

Nanna?  She wasn't much for cooking.  We used to eat a lot of take-away when we visited her.  Kentucky Fried Chicken.  We liked visiting Nanna.

I did Home Economics at school.  All the girls did.  Boys were forced to do all the good stuff like woodwork and sheetmetal and tech drawing, while we looked on in envy.  It was obvious that the boys were going to do real-world stuff involving machinery and jobs, while we girls would discover, all over again, that the way to a pay packet was through a man's stomach.  We were supervised, however.  A necessity, as we were in charge of knives, hot stoves and not many brain cells.  Fairly simple cooking, in fact.  Our Home Ec teacher preferred needlework.

The first time I cooked unsupervised, I wasn't supposed to.  Mam had promised to watch me (loose translation:  fix up whatever went wrong or got damaged) while I made spaghetti bolognaise for dinner.  But only after her nap.  The time for her to get up came and went.  I got bored.  There was a recipe.  I was good at following instructions.  By the time she eventually came downstairs, apologising for oversleeping and expecting raw ingredients and a disappeared child, I was a cook.

It was a done deal. 

I didn't cook often in Malaysia - we had a cook/amah, but once we arrived back in Australia, Mam went out to work.  Now I was thirteen and cooking for a family of six.  There were conditions - if dinner was hot on the table at half-past five, I got fifty cents.  If it was hot on the table at five thirty-five, I got nothing but thanks.  Luckily for my mother, I was punctual - the money she paid me for cooking the evening meal, she frequently had to borrow from me later.

Make no mistake,  While being a cook was never my intention, I actually enjoy it.  My problem is, after so many years feeding people, that it would be nice if the people I am feeding have some inkling of what they might like for dinner.  I'm not asking for much.  Once a week would be enough. Once a month?  A year?  Hello?  Are you lot listening?  I'm asking you for the 11264th time - what do you want for dinner?

A pound by any other name is a whole different animal

Valentine's Day 1966.  Some got flowers.  Some, luckier, got a lovely dinner.  One country got taught how to count to ten.

The introduction of decimal currency was just the start.  With the Australian ability to count to ten while our hands were full of beer and pies - thank you thongs - the government came over all metric.  It took years.

My height changed in fifth grade, when I was ten.  We were all lined up against one of those new-fangled metre rulers, to see how tall we were in metric.  Inches to centimetres - fantastic.  We were suddenly double our height and then some.  But feet to metres?  Bad enough to become shorter when I was already the shortest in the class (the year, possibly the school), suddenly I was the spokesbody for the new measurement system.  How tall was a metre, sir?  Jenny, can you just go stand beside that boy?  Got it?  Or, Sir, how long is two metres?  Jenny, just lie here.  See, two jennies is equal to two metres.  Understand?  Yes, sir, I've got it now.  If only I'd known about deed poll in 1972.  I could have changed my name to Exactly One Metre Tall Heward.  Saved a lot of bother.  Or One Metre is Equal to 39.37 Inches Heward.  I envied babies.  They were - still are - measured in imperial as well as metric.  Sort of bi-measured.  Easily translated.  How ever else can one grandmother go boasting to another grandmother about how strapping the new grandchild is?

And how about our weight?  We became enormous. I went from three stone to nineteen kilograms.  Metrication made us all either really tall and fat, or very short and fat.  And as for criminals?  For years when the police were on the lookout for a 68 kg 175cm male, I, for one - I know of others - would look for an incredibly big man.  I'm surprised criminals didn't make the most of it.

But, in the manner of children, we got more fluent in metric.  We became bi-measuring.

Cooking was where we came up against the hidden pockets of imperial measurement resistance.  For most of us, cooking was done by our mothers (not my mother), and our mothers' cooking language was old-fashioned.  And old-fashioned - imperial ounces and pounds and pints - didn't add up neatly when translated into metric.  A pound cake was a 454g cake.  Thank goodness someone out there was thinking and updated a classic.  With Cookery the Australian way (revised metric edition), we only had to look at page 26 and we were done.  After all, it's cooking, not applied mathematics, we were doing.  And it worked for anything in old-fashioned:  ovens, stoves, temperatures, fluids, those family recipe books.

There is one problem.  It's not the one where we end up with a bit more food, going from imperial to metric.  No, there's nothing wrong with having a bit extra.  It's those other measurements that are so pesky.  A pinch.  A smidge.  A dash.  A glug.  All those measurements of taste, a flick of the wrist, a twist of the fingers.  If only they'd been more precise. 

There must be a conversion chart somewhere...

Mel made me do it

This blog may occaisonally stray into cooking.  It may often stray into reminiscence.  It may often just stray...

I was asked recently what I would save if my house was on fire.  I thought about it keenly.  I could save all those documents that prove who I am, those kindergarten pictures that have some kind of pasta stuck to them that I've hauled halfway across the world, the first edition Barbara Cartlands.  I could save my wedding photographs or the Erstwhile's music collection.  In the end, there really was no contest.  What I would save first would be my Cookery the Australian way.

It is not the most attractive of books.  It is the antithesis of the Donna Hay, Nigella Lawson, Women's Weekly, or Jamie Oliver cookbooks that crowd other shelves in my kitchen with their gorgeous staged photos and a recipe or two per page.  It no longer has a spine per se - that was lost somewhere between one move or another - but you can see it has been put together the old fashioned way, with linen tape and bound sections, like battle wounds, spiked with that glue that hardened like lacquer.  Its cover is not so much buff-coloured as bruised.  The pages fall open at well-worn places, leaving others untouched.  Inside there are very few pictures, not in colour - which is lucky, because the pictures tend to be the dismembered corpses of meat.  It has all the essentials of a book that should be discarded.

But it won't be.  Not this one. 

What it holds is household management, invalid cookery, the first metric cooking measurements I ever encountered, the D I got helping a young Yugoslav girl understand schnitzel, cold afternoons with fresh scones and home-made blackberry jam, earning money to buy new clothes, school days, young motherhood, cream puffs, breakfast, lunch and Christmas.

It is scruffy - yes.  Its pages threaten to abandon the cookbook - yes.  Its most exotic recipe is beef stroganoff (Russia).  But in the great tradition of those notebooks that mothers and grandmothers left to their children, this cookbook - Cookery the Australian way 2nd revised metric edition - this book will be mine to pass on.  I haven't decided who to will it to yet, mainly because I haven't met the child I'd trust with it.  But in those reveries that happen while waiting for the potatoes to boil, I imagine a grandchild of mine will fondly remove it from a bottom drawer to show my great-grandchildren Grandma's favourite recipes.  And my great-grandchildren, as they gaze at the stains and damage and the dried-out pastry in the spine will, in traditional fashion, go "Urgh!  How did anybody ever eat that?  Can we have pizza for tea?"