LIFE RECIPE.

Boarding School Fare - a snail in the spinach

   

Cooking seems to be a very popular subject on television right now.  Women's magazines have always included recipe sections and now there are shows like Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and numerous others.

I've been cooking since my mother decided I should help out in the kitchen.  She didn't know how to cook when she married but she soon learned how to with a vengeance.  In my years at home I never saw a sausage or mashed potato grace our dinner table.  She bought meat weekly from the butcher and ordered exactly the cuts she wanted.

Our steaks always came from scotch fillets and she would roast whole ones as well.  Chicken could  be roasts or so many different casseroles it would make a hen's breast puff with pride.  I grew up in Sydney and my mother made things that I later discovered hadn't been heard of in some other states until thirty years later.  Brisbane was particularly backward cuisine wise and had not heard of cheesecake until the 1970's I believe.  When I arrived there in 1991 I couldn't find brown bread anywhere.  It was like landing in a time warp.

Part of the reason for my mother's success was that my father grew up next door to a French family.  One of the daughters of the household, who was my father's age, became my Godmother.  Her mother, who was always referred to as Madame, shared her French recipes with the younger generation.  My mother's recipe book is full of typed pages in a ring binder.  She gives credit for every recipe in it.  'Madame' is listed under many of the desserts.

No matter how hard I try I can never compete with my mother's cooking.  Some people have 'the gift' and she did.  My ex-husband, blast his hide, also has 'the gift'.  His second wife was double-blessed with it.  When we were still married my husband was an absolute boon when we gave a dinner party.  He would also get all the credit even though I did all the preparation.  For some reason I have always been commended on my salads and, oddly, sandwiches.  I mean any idiot can make these.  Perhaps it is my gift.

There was one little problem, however, with my husband's technique.  While my mother washed every pan after she used it, my husband used every pan in the kitchen and let them pile up in the sink to skyscraper level.  In the open plan kitchen-dining rooms of today guests can see the gargantuan mess so I had to clean the lot up before they arrived.  I would end up a mass of perspiration and just have time to put on my make-up which slid immediately off my face.

I remember a Christmas we spent at my parents' place.  My husband insisted on glazing a ham.  My mother did not like anyone in her kitchen at all.  The trouble with kitchens is that everyone loves to congregate in them.  In the home in which I grew up, the kitchen had a door to the outside and one to our hallway.  It was small to say the least and a thoroughfare into the bargain.

These days kitchens are open plan and attached to a family room.  That solves this age old problem but no kitchen on earth would have been big enough for my mother.  My parents had moved to another state and a house with a much bigger kitchen by the time we celebrated the Christmas in question.

Even so I watched as my mother succumbed to one of her mini nervous breakdowns as my husband entered the kitchen every twenty minutes to glaze the ham.  Mother had these breakdowns on a regular basis.  I'm sure the reason I was turfed off to boarding school at the age of ten was because my mother couldn't cope with her only child, who did everything to please her, taking up space in the house.

Perhaps I should be grateful but at boarding school I suffered through eight years of the most appalling food imaginable.  At school it was possible to leave a fork in the bowl in which the sausages had arrived at a refectory table, pick it up when the fat had set and the bowl come with it.  The delights of afternoon tea were enjoyed all over again when their leftovers from the four previous days turned up in green jelly and opaque pink custard as a trifle for dessert.

At a previous school there was also the mashed pumpkin that was watery mush and had pieces of pumpkin skin left in it.  We named these bits Sister Katherine's fingernails after the woman who prepared it.  It made us gag.  Another treat was the added protein of tiny snails that remained in the spinach and had clung stubbornly on during the washing of the leaves.

I came home from school on Friday nights.  I would have looked forward to this but instead dreaded the meal.  This was because my dear father was a devout Catholic.  My mother was Church of England in name only and not religious in any sense, but she would cook Friday meals according to the Catholic directive of the time.

She would rub this in as she picked me up on Friday afternoon.

"We're having your favourite tonight," she would say.  This was either delusion or downright mean.  "Smoked fish mornay."

I hated that dish.  I repeatedly told her so and I don't know if she kept forgetting or it was dad's favourite and she got us mixed up.  I hate fish period, but smoked, orange skinned fish in a cheese sauce was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and go back to school.

The real treat was her Sour Cherry Pie.  She refused to write the recipe down and when I asked for it years later she had forgotten how she did it.  I said I'd try to make it and she gave me a vague guide.  I never tried to follow her instructions.  I just wasn't going to ruin perfection.

Mum was an innovative cook as well.  She would prepare well ahead and freeze meals so she could always cater for visitors.  On weekends our house was often full of friends and family.  On one of these occasions I must have been out with my future husband and came home to a house full of people.  Everyone was in our very large living room eating fork food from a plate.  It turned out it was a Spinach Pie.

Given my memory of spinach from school I point blank refused to try it even though everyone exhorted me to do so.  It was delicious they said.  After ten minutes I gave in and said I'd try a bite.

I never looked back and the recipe has become one of my favourites.  It is called French Onion Tart of all things.  The French Onion part comes from the addition of a packet of dry French Onion soup to the ingredients.  The actual pie is packed to the gunnels with chopped spinach, three eggs, ham, cheddar and some cream, to which I'm usually allergic, but it's cooked to the point that it doesn't upset me.

Once I would buy spinach leaves, wash and finely chop these in a blender then drain the liquid.  Now it's available, I just buy the finely chopped frozen kind making the dish so much easier.  It's placed in a shortcrust pie crust, which I also used to make, but now just buy, then sprinkled with more cheese and baked in a Pyrex pie dish.

On one occasion I spent a good part of the day making this dish for a couple who were coming to dinner.  All went fine and it was cooked to perfection.  I don't know what I had previously cooked on a hot plate but I forgot it was still hot.  I took the pie out of the oven and gently placed it on the hotplate that I thought was cool.  A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion.  Pie and Pyrex went everywhere.

We bought Kentucky Fried and cleaned up the kitchen.  I have never put anything on a hotplate since before checking the temperature.  It also isn't wise to put a hot Pyrex dish in the sink and run water over it.  I tend to think Pyrex can handle anything but it doesn't tolerate fools.

One of my mother's other great recipes is Madame's Chocolate Mousse.  Real French Chocolate Mousse has no cream in it.  The cream is added, whipped, as a side dish.  Only cheats put cream in a true Chocolate Mousse.  I should admit that I am lactose intolerant and the only cream I can tolerate has been cooked to a temperature where it has broken down such as in the Spinach Pie.

My mother also made beautiful lamb stews but pork was never her favourite.  Pork was once the most expensive meat to buy in Australia but she also found it too dry to casserole although we did occasionally have pork roasts.

My mother kept her appetite for food for her lifetime and was still enjoying food when she lived in a nursing home.  I am sadly losing my appetite.  I am still young but can eat only a little.  I must have a very slow metabolism.  In fact it is probably very efficient but dulls my interest in food.  It simply isn't worth going to a restaurant now.  The most I can consume is an entrée and that's it.

This year I went to my son's place for Christmas.  I was invited for an early dinner.  In the late afternoon the table was spread with dips and snacks.  Everyone ate with gay abandon except me.  I didn't eat, saving for dinner which came three hours later.  I told my son to only invite me for one meal at any time.

I remember a delightful, birdlike, old lady at my mother's nursing home looking at her Christmas lunch.  She said: "I don't even want to eat anymore."  It is tragic to run out of appetite before you die.  In old age, if there is nothing left to you, no sex, no travel, no independence, at least there is food.  It is the final affront not to be able to enjoy what is so life giving.

There are people in the world without enough to eat and sadly there are people who, with food available to them, simply can't eat anymore.  Food is one of life's great pleasures as well as vital to sustain life.  It is wonderful to think that something so necessary can also give such pleasure.

I am also impressed by the fact that humans have turned food into an art form.  It began with subsistence and, when we found a way to store food and have plenty, it became a source of creativity.  We humans are an interesting lot in that we apply art to what is necessary and basic.

Imagine if we had to thresh the wheat, milk a cow to make butter, grow sugar cane and reduce it to sugar grains, raise hens for eggs, just to make a cake.  Cooking shows how far we have come in the sense of how we gather and store foodstuffs.  It is not trivial.  It is a tribute to human ingenuity.

You know how it feels when the electricity goes off and we are plunged into darkness?  We are lost for anything to do.   There are no woodstoves to cook on.  People used to read by candlelight or go to bed.  Life revolved around the sun and fire.  Growing and gathering the ingredients to cook a meal is no mean feat.  A simple recipe requires ingredients from an extraordinary number of sources.

When man was in his infancy he hunted for meat, killed it and ate it raw.  He may have supplemented this with the fruit and berries.  Wheat was a long time coming.  So was sugar; thousands of years in fact.

Next time you make a recipe, consider where the ingredients come from and wonder at how far the human being has come in gathering food for survival.  For something this vital to be raised to an art form is tribute to how well humans have not only adapted to survival but stated in no uncertain terms: we can go one better.  We have enough to make food flavoursome and interesting.

Wouldn't it be a shame if recipes became a sign of the lack of foresight of the human condition?  If, when the world's population reached the level where there is mass starvation, the idea of a recipe may become tribute to the lack of thought about sustaining the future?  As if it was the equivalent of: "Let them eat cake".

I like to see the human race as having the common sense to ensure its survival.  This is going to require a recipe with a whole different set of ingredients but I'm sure we're up to it.  We just need to harvest a few more of our brain cells and add them to the mix and then survival will be assured.

END