Still life with lemons

I have a lemon tree and it is bearing fruit. This is the source of more satisfaction than a bald sentence might suggest. When we moved into our house there was no lemon tree, which seemed a mysterious absence given that the yards around my suburb still bear the traces of more productive times, when a veggie garden and some fruit trees were expected; the old and shapeless trees, dripping fruit and dropping it to the ground, glimpsed through back fences, are the most spectacular, juicy evidence of this past. Tantalising evidence too, with all the lemony deliciousness just out of reach and largely ignored and unloved, or at the very least unused by those who don't seem to know their luck.

I'm not sure why our own yard was missing this mainstay of suburban productivity. We live on what was the rich side of the street; maybe those posh folks didn't want to suggest they were peasants in their planting. It might be it was sacrificed to one previous owner's preference for straggling and inappropriately large natives. Possibly the people before us, whom we suspect have family ties to the big names in the state's forestry industry, chopped it down and pulped it. Whatever the reason, we had none of the easy abundance that a lemon tree offers a home.

I planted a tree - a Meyer - in the courtyard at the beginning of last year and have plucked off the blossoms with great self-discipline, in the knowledge that this leads to more impressive yields later on. Further, I manured, watered and trained Lucy to wee on the tree whenever she felt the need for some alfresco relief. And now that she'll only pee on flowers I've been known to stroll out after dark, perch precariously on the raised bed and offer up a little goodness. It's a very peaceful thing, squatting there and staring out over the lights of the suburb, and not without a charge of danger now that we have cut down the trees that once shielded us from the very tidy neighbours' view. All this care is working well: the tree is still small but it's hung with fruit that is bright and gold.

I need a lot of lemons in my life. Not so much for lemonade, which has never really thrilled me. When life sends me lemons I'm more likely to make lemon butter, to eat neat at the open fridge door so as not to dilute the sharp-sweetness (and so as not to share). But I'm more of a person who demands lemons; I don't wait for life to send them to me. I need them to eat with avocado and salt and pepper on toast, with steak, over salads, stirred into spinach with butter and salt, on chips, in icing for biscuits and no nonsense cakes. In my cooking, lemons are as much a seasoning as salt and pepper; anything that tastes really, really good is almost always finished with a lemon.

There are two iconic lemon moments in my cooking, repeated over and over again. The first: making wholewheat pancakes by myself on days of mizzle and drizzle, standing at the stove and looking out at the grey and the wind, eating each one with sugar and lemon as the next one cooks. The second is as yet repeated only in my head and draws from some grim New Zealand family drama, all marital dissolution and pedophilia on a bay in a small beach house a little like this. Before each evening's debauchery, the parents sit in deck chairs on the lawn, next to an enormous lemon tree, reaching out for fruit to squeeze into their gin. Seasonal eating at it's very best, I think, and the driving force behind my own small tree out the back. It's winter now, but the deck chairs are ready.

Food culture

I must admit, I have a little bit of a literary crush on Michael Pollan - that wry voice, the honesty, his eyes (well, not totally literary) ... and mainly the ways he pulls everyday life apart and puts it back together again. The Omnivore's Dilemma was a staunch and intelligent book, but I've enjoyed In Defense of Food a little more. It's looser, less confronting - more of a chat than a charming lecture. Pollan's argument is that we have lost sight of food, focusing instead on its discrete elements as they are defined (and misunderstood) by scientists and nutritionists; in uncovering the mysteries of food, science has mystified our eating. Under the sway of nutritionism we rely on labels and experts, unable to trust our nose, our taste or our bellies. It's a broad brushstroke kind of an argument, and I do feel it lacks nuance and in particular doesn't adequately acknowledge key structures like class, gender, and movements like slow food and organics (which are also classed and gendered), but I think nutritionism, with its intended and unintended consequences, is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary, Western food culture. Underpinning Pollan's solutions is the reclamation of our traditional food cultures.

So I'm thinking about my own food cultures, and what Al and I are passing on to our kids. Food-wise, we don't come from sophisticated stock. The German side of my family has given me a real love for sauerkraut, wurst and obst-torte. The Irish has been lost - my grandmother was a 1950s hostess with the mostest, all devils on horseback and cream of mushroom soup. In our own childhoods, neither Al nor I knew asparagus, mushrooms or beetroot could be had fresh (aah, the tinned champignon). I have no memory of ever ingesting a vegetable as a child. And yet we've both emerged relatively bonny and eating widely and well; indeed, we both love food. I don't know how this happened to Al (he was allowed to eat as much ice cream as he wanted, for heaven's sake) but - and this will surprise my long-suffering mother, who for years has put up with our 'jokes' about her cooking - I attribute my own excellent eating habits to my parents.

Food as fuel is important, of course, but culture comes from the meanings and practices attached to what we eat and in this, my parents excelled. It's the fodder for dinner party humour now (fodder - food; geddit?) but the food rules and practices I remember gave us a sense that food was something to be shared. It wasn't mysterious and it wasn't external to our family; it was part of the common everyday. We didn't pick this up as kids, and my parents might not have deliberately created that message (Mum, Dad, comments?) but that is what I've taken from my own family's food culture, and it's what I'm now giving the girls.

I still worry about the lack of cosmopolitan fare (although not as much as I did a year ago) but here's the thing: my kids like to cook, they know that food is eaten at the table, together (albeit often sullenly, reluctantly, whiningly), and they know where food comes from and how to make it. Food's not mysterious, it's not good or bad, and it's defined by taste and colour, not lists on a packet. When I grit my teeth as the girls break the shell in with the egg when they help me make a cake, when I pull on the gumboots and step through the dusk and drizzle to grab some greens, when we sit down together at the table, when I take a moment to be truly thankful for what I have received, we are showing the girls that some of our most precious knowledge lies in the mundane.

This is what I tell myself to steel my nerves as the girls yet again sniff the smells in the kitchen and declare them to be delicious, look at the food and declare it to be delicious, and then eat two grains of rice and a pea.

The pointy end

This morning I picked the blackberries that grow in the old convict cemetary just over the way. (It's worth living here, just to write that sentence.) When I stand there plucking the fruit from the thorns I have visions of brambles growing through the bones interred 150 years ago - it's not such a grim vision when you taste the sweetness while stopping in the sunshine.

I had thought to pick enough to make some jam but that was a plan doomed to failure. The whole process is so fiddly, the thorns so spikey, the labradoodle so greedy and sly (snuffling up the fruit from the basket while I was deep in the thicket), the kids so demanding (there's no explaining why these particular berries are destined for jam and not their bellies), that it would take me hours to gather enough. And, as much as I like blackberry jam, which is especially lovely eaten with cream on white bread, it's always going to be a distant second to eating the berries alone, outside in a field, glad of the sun that's warming up the first cold morning of the year. I'm not a peasant and I don't need to protect myself from scurvy and starvation in the long winter ahead so I'll gather and gobble them while I may and then enjoy the anticipation of next February.

And then I fell into the brambles. They really hurt. In an old book from my own and my mother's childhood, called At School with the Stanhopes (complete with boarding school, japes and sexually non-threatening but crush-worthy older brothers and teachers' husbands) there's a incident where they whole school takes off from conjugating French verbs and studying Georgian history to go blackberrying, so that they can learn the worthy art of jam making. The uppity girl is pushed into the brambles, which is presented as a bit of harmless fun. The way those thorns bite, more like serious assault, I think.

Still talking about zucchinis

Quite possibly the perfect pasta sauce, and the reason I plant more zucchinis than I'd ever really need:

Take a few cloves of garlic and soften in oil with three rashes of bacon, if you're the kind who likes their meat (otherwise, leave them out). Very finely slice three of four young zucchinis - if they're a mix of colours then so much the better. Stir in with the garlic and bacon until everything is cooked but not at all brown. Now is a good time to stir in some pesto if you have any (but here I would specify homemade as it tends to lack the harshness of the stuff you buy in bottles; I think the pine nuts might matter here) and regardless, bind the whole with a little cream, season and leave to bubble. Then toss in any flowers that came in with the fruit, ladle over pasta and offer to an appreciative audience with some parmesan on the side.

We eat this with two yelling kids, one who'll only have the green stuff and the other who'll eat the pasta. There's usually some wining on the topic of "I don't like conversation", food thrown to the floor, milk sloshed on shirts by a 13 months child who refuses to acknowledge she needs to work on her hand-eye coordination, and a few shouts at the dogs to get out of the dining room. But I am working towards a more fabulous context:

Serve outside under the grapevine, with perhaps a cold riesling (though really, I wouldn't know), a salad from the garden, good friends who appreciate the six months taken to produce the meal, and Bach playing through the open windows of the house.

Maybe next summer

The human condition

A friend called me yesterday.

"Hi. How are you?" (tone: chipper)
"Oh, good. I'm making chutney." (tone: resigned)
"Zucchinis?" (tone: sympathetic)
"Oh yes." (tone: sad and beaten down)

We're separated by thousands of kilometres, we haven't met up for three years, but when you're friends with a gardener, they always know what you're going through. And like all really good friends, there's no judgment of me letting those zukes grow to horrifying proportions, no "I told you sos" over the number of plants encouraged, and a confession of a basket of zukes sitting balefully in her own kitchen.

For all those who suffer under the yoke of productivity, here's a useful place to go: Jackie French might just re-invigorate your enthusiasm for the marrows. Maybe.

Farm fresh

I really like words, always have. My grammar can be a little idiosyncratic and numbers are just kind of a confusing blur to me but words, well they're an endless source of fascination and delight. Big ones (phosphorescence, obnubilated), little ones (zo, la), old ones (wimple), new ones (though not so much), the romantic (desire, fable), the prosaic (bum - say it aloud, bum) and words that sound like I've got it wrong (scumble, grabble, ruddle) - they're a joy in my life.

I grew up in a household of words: four kids talking, shouting, teasing; a father who is ruthless in Scrabble; a mother whose constant refrain was - is - "just wait till I've finished the chapter"; a grandmother who offered me up the joys of Georgette Heyer when I was ten ("La sir, that you would be so bold!"). So I admit, I can be a little precious, sometimes pedantic, and oh so slightly judgmental when it comes to which word is used where and for what purpose. Woe to those who are thoughtless in their use of a thesaurus (does that sound like something from Gilbert and Sullivan?), who replace one word for another with no regard for nuance or rhythm.

So it is perhaps not so very surprising that I was a little pissed off the other day when I bought some carrots from the little farmers' market down the road. It's a source of confusion and disappointment to me that Tassie, with its foodie image, has no exciting food markets. You can buy kites and Born to Ride t-shirts from an trestle table outdoors on a Sunday but it's impossible to locate a baby beetroot. So I was excited when the local deli set up a market in their car park. It's tiny but it has a cake lady for Lu and Nell (who like bright blue icing and sprinkles resembling shards of glass on their cupcakes), an older woman selling jams that make me stop still when I taste them, and a purveyor of Lost Seeds and intriguing herbs. It also has a seller of farm fresh veggies and wanting to buy local, I picked up some carrots. Farm fresh carrots. Fresh from the farm. But which farm? Turns out, one outside Toowoomba, which is oh, thousands and thousands of miles from where I live. And judging by the taste, they weren't so much carrots as woody orange things in a rudely amusing shape.

Caveat emptor and all that, but surely there's just a leetle false advertising going on here? I think farmers' markets are becoming less and less about promoting and personalising a connection between the producer and consumer and more of a general claim to worthiness, like 'all natural', which doesn't really stand up to close inspection. As the rise of Big Organic reminds us, any attempt to subvert the system just gets assimilated right back in. That's the genius and the horror of advanced capitalism, even when practiced in a small carpark in a regional centre at 10am on a Sunday morning.

I'll check the labels in future, and won't go back to that stall. But really, I can't judge the man too harshly - 'farm fresh' is a much stronger selling point than 'I couldn't shift them by 2pm yesterday and they'll be on the decline by Monday'.

Having my cake and eating it too

We're still off the junk food. This is good for us in so many ways but I must now work harder to sate my sweet tooth. I was always more of a savoury lover, choosing cheese over chocolate for example, but pregnancy changed that. With both Lu and Nell I had an overwhelming craving for bleach, rubber boots and cuttlefish; only XXX peppermint lollies could temporarily assuage the need. All that sugar permanently re-built my tastebuds and I look for sweet things daily. In the absence of lollies and ice cream I've returned to baking cakes.

I've got a few posh, glossy cookbooks but I'm most often guided by the Kenmore State School Cookbook. I'm not sure when exactly it was published but the Brisbane phone numbers are only six digits so it's getting old now. Other telling signs: the recipe titles are capitalised and maraschino cherries make regular appearances. A far better indicator of its age, this is the book I used as a child - turning the pages pulls me back to Saturday afternoons in rural Victoria: Bran Loaf, Chocolate Sponge Cake (always served with whipped cream) and Simplicity Chocolate Cake, made up by my mother in double quantities, baked in a large rectangular tin and served with chocolate icing on very special occasions.

It's the relative frugality of these cakes that strikes me most. Contemporary treats suggest chocolate with 70% cocoa solids, lots of nuts and lashings of cream. Those cooking in Kenmore circa 1970 worked variations of the basic theme of eggs, S.R. flour, sugar and butter. Many recipes don't even require creaming the butter and the sugar, my great failing as a cook. Using this book is a return to those times when cakes were a no nonsense way of filling bellies, when they were not 'sinful', 'indulgent', 'decadent', and made no obvious moral judgements. Standing at the bench, I feel I should be wearing a pinny and sensible shoes, and that's a feeling I'm quite comfortable with.

In this book, between Energy Cake and Pudding Cake lies Peach Blossom Cake, one of the minor disappointment of my childhood. When I baked this for the first and only time, I expected magic, wonder and beauty but it's just a tea cake with some pink colouring mixed in. The bubble of excitement deflated on the very first nibble. I couldn't have been more than nine, and I've never eaten it again. To this day I remember its stale, dull taste.

I'm not sure how a peach blossom cake should taste, but I know it should smell of daphne. Each day as I walk to the bus I pass a bush with its modest flowers and remarkable scent, almost overly sweet but with a tang that shifts it back from cloying. Daphne has been one of the surprises of my life down south. I had been excited about raspberries, daffodils and roses but had never really thought much about this plant. Now everyday it pushes itself into my senses. In one of those odd associations, my first sniff, the day after I had dragged out the Kenmore book, pulled the peach blossom cake into my head and I thought, 'This is what it should have been'. I am so very pleased that a little of that childhood expectation is restored to my life each morning. To keep me happy, I clipped a little bit of the daphne (really, there's plenty on the bush) and popped it into a jar to sit on my desk and sniff when the anxiety started to gather in my chest.



Yesterday was blustery, cold, sometimes sleeting and never welcoming; a very good day to sit inside and eat cake. Which is what I did, in my office, with a cup of green tea. I had packed the All in Together Cake in my lunchbox, the same cake Lu spat in (but surely 40 minutes in a moderate oven solves those sort of issues?); the crumbly slices, together with the flowers, made a little bubble of calm in an otherwise overwhelming day.

So here I'd like to record my thanks to the person who placed the daphne so close to the path, so that we can all share in that remarkable scent: Madam/sir, you made my day.

Inelegant sufficiency

On the nights when we aren't too tired to talk, Al and I cover the same four or five topics of conversation: 'why our girls are just so great'; 'how tired are you?'; 'we've got to stop eating so many chips'; and 'we have to save more money' (this last topic, which admittedly grows out of the third, often evolves into our fifth all time favourite thing to talk about: how do people on the mainland do it? So the following thoughts should be read in the knowledge that I have some inkling about how lucky I really am). After humming and umming aahing, we come to conclusion that we must stop spending so much on groceries. But a lot of grocery items are non-negotiable in our household: vast quantities of milk, nappies (we've tried and failed at cloth); dog and cat food, Red Hen for the chooks. There's not a lot of money left for actual food. Currently, we are very much in the mode of buying the basics and cutting the costs, in time honoured tradition of young families. Organic is out, expensive is out, diversity is out. When it comes to the question of food, this makes me feel like I'm less of a mother than I could and should be.

Since I went back to work I do most of the family cooking on a Saturday. After we come home from the weekly shopping I set up the ingredients on the bench and food process like a Fury. No more leisurely chopping of the garlic, no more meditations on what meal best balances our diet and suits my mood tonight. I get out the Big Oskar and blend up onions, then carrots, then zucchini and then mix them up into various big meals that are varied only in the spices I use to flavour them and the amount of powdered stock I add: chilli, pasta, soup. They're bagged and frozen and they save on washing up, time, and general stress of trying to cook during the witching hour with two little people demanding to be held. Very efficient and not at all inspiring.

This routine has been the cause of some soul searching. The way we eat is in part political and we are frustrated and disappointed by our failure to live by the ethical standards we hold in the abstract. But that's another story for another time. At this stage in our lives I have a more immediate concern.

Once, when Al was shopping in an inner city Coles, we heard a mother coo to her child, 'Baby want baba ghanoush?'. The way he tells the story, that baby will someday morph into a precious little princess who won't sleep on the pea not because it is uncomfortable but because it is frozen and Savings brand and not produced by some salt of the earth fifth generation farmer who is rugged in a picturesque (and not pre-cancerous) way. But the other day, as Lu dropped a tantrum in the deli, screaming 'I want a latte', I realised I was that mother. And it's not (only) because I am some painful, image oriented, conspicuous consumption driven yuppy. There is a personal and emotional significance in what we are eating, and more specifically, what we are feeding Lu (at seven months, Nell remains loyal to my breasts). When I make a meal I am making a statement about family, love, the kind of memories I want to offer my child, and the kind of person I want her to be. My aim is healthy and beautiful food, diverse and challenging tastes, and a shared and sensual joy over what sustains us. I am achieving somewhat less than this. And in my failures - and I do see them as failures - I feel I am cheating my kids of a wonderful dimension of life.

A friend of mine tells me I am simply caught up in the consumption myths and snobbery attached to food. It's all very well to educate your child's palate but it's hardly an essential component of a good citizen or healthy body. The pastoral images of organic foods don't quite match the realities of what Michael Pollan terms Big Organic. In truth, I like it when my girl eats persian feta or ligurian olives because I think those tastes reflect something about me: my attention to detail as a mother, my income level, my own cosmopolitan worldview - all bases upon which people in my social networks are judged.

But now I am thinking back to my own childhood. Both Al and I come from families where mushrooms and asparagus were dredged out of tins. I grew up in a place and time when Chinese recipe books suggested the substitution of sherry for soy sauce. My meals were governed by food rules: jam on Sundays only; a cream and plain only from the Assorted Creams box; two scoops of ice cream for dessert, drawing across all three of the Neopolitan colours; ten cents worth of mixed lollies on Saturdays; a third of a cup of watered down pineapple juice from the great big Golden Circle tins. Never once did I think I was not loved, and it never occurred to me that my horizons were too narrow in their failure to incorporate anything but the most pedestrian of foods at meal times and in between times.

Indeed, my memories of childhood are scattered with moments of food bliss. I remember a working bee on a cold and drizzly weekend day, the men from the parish setting up an iron plate across bricks, over a fire, and slapping together hamburger patties (they would surely have been plain brand), white bread, Kraft singles and a splodge of tomato sauce: the cheese melted into the meat and all that processed protein was squished together into something so satisfactory and sensual I remember it, and not the first time I ate a properly aged cheddar or a good cut of steak, blue. I remember the chocolate sponges I would make in a heart shaped tin - sophisticated! Dad's fried rice with gherkins, served out at the table with each child counting how many of those tiny tinned prawns were on the others' plate. My first smoked eel, caught by one of the local farmers. The bacon slaughtered and smoked by my Dad. Picking at the left overs of Mum's standby flash dinner party fare: tomato and crab soup (with cream and tabasco sauce), lasagne with lots of white sauce, and some kind of dessert made of cream, instant coffee and milk arrowroot biscuits. Every birthday cake from age seven, all made from the Woman's Weekly Birthday cookbook (except that one year Mum turned a four litre tub of vanilla ice cream out on a plate and stuck some candles and jelly babies on it - the shame!). This is my own, idiosyncratic list, and it might make others shudder - indeed, it's not stuff I'd ever touch now, except for the eel - but by golly I loved food. Each morning I would walk out to the breakfast table and ask what was for dinner. My mother, who hated cooking, never once threw the porridge at me for this - a mark of her loving and forbearing nature.

I guess it doesn't really matter to Lucy if the bolognese sauce hasn't simmered for five hours. Really, she'd be perfectly content eating plain spaghetti, gherkins and chocolate ice cream. I have to remember that what she really likes, more than any particular food, is spending time with her mum in the kitchen, tasting each component of the recipe, begging butter as a 'special treat' and sneaking her finger in the salt. If that's as far as her horizons stretch, well that's just fine. I guess.