As I turned the pages, memories
of those sauce-making Saturday afternoons so long ago now, when I worked
in the kitchen with my mother, came pouring into my consciousness. I
found myself almost able to smell the spicy aroma, feel the heat and
the see red juice running down my arm as I halved and stoned the plums.
In 1946, when my father was discharged
from the Australian Army, he and my mother built a small grocery store
in Murray Bridge, a river town in South Australia. Family activity therefore
revolved around work in our busy little corner shop, and also took place
in the shop. In between customers Mother managed to prepare large pots
of "slow food" to nourish our family of six, and for some
time at least, she also managed to continue the family tradition of
making her own jam, sauce and preserves, though this was done at home
on a Saturday. I have a clear picture of myself being precariously perched
on sacks of sugar or flour in the back room eating my evening meal from
a dish, whilst mother served customers in the shop and my dad delivered
the last of the day's grocery orders.
Obtaining fruit for processing was
a cooperative, community thing. I remember my mother saying, more than
once, "Mrs. So-and-so mentioned that she has Satsuma plums or quinces
to spare. We'll pick them after the shop closes."
Our next-door neighbours generously
shared the bounty of a huge fig tree which draped itself over our fence,
as well as from the monster mulberry tree beside their home, which also
provided mulberry leaves for we children in silk-worm season. Of necessity,
fruit picking was a family activity; Mother, Dad, my two younger brothers
and me, plus my baby sister in her stroller. The demands of the shop
dictated that Saturday afternoon was the only spare time Mother had
for cooking, and being the eldest child, and female, I was chief sauce-making
assistant.
My father had long ago used his
handyman initiative to shorten the blade on an old bone handled knife,
and honed it into a sharp little beastie. This was my mother's favourite
vegetable knife. He was great at inventing useful implements from everyday
things to make her work easier. Dad once removed the centre two prongs
from an old fork to make a useful sausage pricker, vegetable tester
and meat turner. I can't tell you how many hours I sat with that little
knife in my hand, running with the crimson juice of pounds and pounds
of Satsuma plums or tomatoes, hoping that my blood wasn't going to get
into the sauce.
Mother's old balance scale with
1 pound, 8, 4, 2 & 1 ounce weights was used to measure all of the
ingredients. "Bring grandma's jam pan from the pantry," I
can hear her saying, "and wash it well, ready for the sauce."
She was a precise and methodical cook in the extreme. The cut fruit
plus some water went into the pan first, and when the deliciously blood-red
juice was running, and the fruit beginning to pulp, mother added a ginger
and vinegar paste. I have vivid memories of swirls of spicy ginger rising
in the steam and finding their way to my appreciative nose.
As cooks in training beside our
mothers, not only do we learn to handle food, we learn to appreciate
it with all of our senses. The eye is trained to recognise the optimum
colour of food, fresh and cooked. Hands are trained to test the firmness
of the flesh and the feel of the outer skin. Noses, to recognise the
most desirable of smells, and our tongues to appreciate the flavours
of sharp, sweet, sour, spicy, coarse and smooth food. Such are the gifts
of mothers to daughters!
When the fruit finally cooked down
to a pulp it was my task to usethe Moulinex Mill - a wonderful device
with a blade turning in the bowl by means of a handle. The blade pushed
the fruit pulp through the sieve into a container below. Mother returned
the finely sieved fruit to the pan for the final addition of sugar and
Ezy-sauce. Little muslin bags of pickling spices hanging from the handle
of the jam pan during the cooking process were eliminated at the arrival
of Ezy-sauce (an acetic acid and spice mixture) on our grocery shelves
in the 1950's.
Sauce-making became simpler, if
a little more commercial. Now I should explain here that I am writing
from Australia, and am not familiar with what similar products may be
available in other parts of the world. The aroma of heavy, sweet allspice,
cloves, ginger and plums rose into the kitchen air as the sauce came
to a rolling boil, whilst Mum and I collected clean bottles from the
cupboard in her pantry to sterilize them. Then sparkling clean they
stood on the kitchen table ready for filling. Finally, there it was,
rich, thick, spicy and brightly-coloured Plum Sauce. Our kitchen smelled
marvelous for weeks, and the entire family relished the taste of Plum
Sauce with grilled pork fillet and sausages or lamb chops for many months.
There is nothing so tasty as a hot or cold meat and vegetable pasty
with plum sauce, (see the recipe for Pasty)
or so satisfying to see in the pantry, after having spent hours with
the knife, wooden spoon, pan and stove.
Making Apricot Jam
Apricot season, coming hot on the
heels of Christmas meant sauce and jam cooking at the hottest, most
uncomfortable time of the year in Australia. Mother threw open our kitchen
window in summer, to invite any little breeze to cool the air, as we
sweated over cutting and stoning those boxes of apricots. Being a very
soft fruit apricots don’t keep for long in the hot weather. Quick
processing for optimum quality of the finished product is essential,
whether sauce, preserves or jam. With my mother’s trusty, modified
vegetable knife, once again I cut and stoned the fruit, trying to avoid
cutting my hand between the thumb and the palm. Experience had taught
me that this is a painful injury, especially as the cut is constantly
bathed in acidic fruit juice during the cutting process.
I had spent two weeks during one
summer holidays, working for a local gruit grower, cutting apricots
and placing them on wooden trays ready to be dried. The pain in my cut
hands was excruciating, but the money was great and made up for all
the discomfort. Best of all was the camaraderie in the group of seasonal
workers, all putting in their best efforts each day in very hot conditions,
and the more experienced members of the group often ready to make a
joke, but in a kindly way, at the expense of raw recruits like me.
The aroma rising from apricot jam
and sauce during cooking is wonderful; slightly sharper than plums,
but when cooked sweet and light. Processing is basically the same as
for plum sauce, and similarly the secret is to cook the fruit until
it is soft and mushy whilst not allowing it to catch on the bottom of
the pan. The only way for this to be achieved is by constant stirring,
and I mean constant, with a heavy wooden spoon. It is my bitter experience
that having to scrub burned fruit from the bottom of the jam pan is
a heinous job, and to be avoided at all costs. Not that I’ve always
managed to avoid it.
I have nightmarish recollections
of hot and sweaty Saturday afternoons, after the shop had closed for
the day, spent in the kitchen stirring sauce over the primus stove burner,
while my mother is busy in the laundry. What follows is my recollection
of a serious interruption to my jam stirring. I’m halfway through
the cooking time, and suddenly the flame under the jam pan sputters
out. The bottle in the pantry, that should hold kerosene, is empty.
Of course it is my responsibility to see that a full bottle of this
valuable fuel is kept in the pantry at all times. The only place where
I can obtain kerosene is our shop, located fifty metres down the street.
This requires me to take the keys, walk to the shop, unlock the front
door and lock it again from the inside to prevent some passer-by from
wandering in thinking that the shop is open. I have learned to securely
lock the door rather than be delayed by opportunist customers who, “just
saw the door open, and thought I would pop in for a packet of ciggies”.
The kerosene is in a big tin in the storeroom and has a stirrup-pump
standing in it. I must hold the bottle under the opening of the stirrup
pump whilst pumping up and down on the handle, and at the same time
control the amount of fuel that runs out to prevent an overflow; a real
trap for one so young. Walking carefully, so as not to spill any of
the precious liquid or even worse to drop and smash the bottle, I hurry
home with the fuel for the stove. Then, the stove filled, primed and
lit once more, the cooking and stirring continues.
I wish that I could say that all
those Saturdays in the kitchen making sauce and jam in the summertime
brought my mother and me closer. Somehow it didn’t. The idea of
spending a Saturday afternoon cutting and stoning two cases of fruit
was not my idea of fun. I was more interested in reading a book whilst
stirring the sauce or jam. Poor Mum would be downstairs in the laundry
doing the weekly washing, and often run upstairs to check that the chief
assistant was doing her job. One good thing however, did come out of
those days of sauce-making together. I was, much later, able to turn
my experience into a successful commercial venture, and Mum did offer
to come and help me. By then I didn’t have the heart to subject
an elderly lady in her late 80’s to the rigours of a commercial
kitchen, but she enjoyed sharing the products. Little jars of jam and
bottles of sauce always found their way into gift baskets for Mum.
Making Tomato Sauces
Italian tomato salsa, made by pressing
the flesh and juice from tomatoes and preserving by means of a boiling
water bath, is widely used as a pasta and pizza sauce. The Australian
version of tomato sauce however, was a spicier version than the original
Italian one and incorporated garlic, onion, spices, vinegar, salt and
sugar as preservatives. There is a special piece of earth reserved in
most Australian backyards for the cultivation of tomatoes. Tall wooden
stakes support tall, lush green tomato bushes, laden in summertime with
huge ripening meaty tomatoes, such as Gross Lisse or Mighty Red.
Imagine sitting round the kitchen
table. All hands on deck; and leaning over a huge enamel bowl of boiling
water in which float bobbing, slippery, bright red tomatoes, all waiting
to have their outer skins slipped off. With the skin removed the flesh
is chopped and added to the waiting pan. "Make sure you dice the
tomato neatly, not too large." I can hear my mother say. The same
process was used to prepare the onions -the brown papery skins slipped
off, topped and tailed, and they were also chopped and added to the
pan. Here's a sample of what took place between my mother and I: "Where
are you going to?" Mum asks, seeing me leaving the kitchen, and
afraid I am about to make my escape from the vegetable chopping. "Just
going to get a hanky," I reply, sobbing, "The onions are making
me cry."
"Just get a wet face washer
and hold it over your eyes. It will soon stop." Not much consolation
for one whose eyes are stinging so badly I'm afraid. I can hear our
voices as though they are speaking today.
Our kitchen was a truly pungent
place at sauce making time. What a beautiful sight to see those rows
of crimson bottles, and how rich we felt when these amazingly colourful
gifts of nature were finally stored on our pantry shelves.
Making Preserves
Rows of preserved yellow clingstone
peaches, apples, sweet apricots, bottles of golden apricot jam, gingered
fig jam, and bottles of rich tomato and plum sauce provided tasty additions
to our meals all year; row upon row, shelf upon shelf of preserved summer's
harvest. It was a sad summer when my mother, who together with my father
ran our small grocery store, was finally too busy to pursue her annual
preserving tradition. A new type of tomato sauce then appeared at our
table; a bright red bottle of manufactured tomato sauce. Then followed
tinned apricot jam, horrible stuff that my mother said was mostly made
from pumpkin. The final insult to our pantry shelf was a tin of factory
processed fruit taking the place of those lovingly packed jars of apricots
and peaches.
This could be a sad story, but I
am pleased to say that, eventually I inherited the rectangular preserving
outfit and some jars and lids, together with the jam pan which had belonged
to my maternal grandmother.
Although I had deeply resented my
Saturday afternoons stoning fruit, peeling and chopping tomatoes &
onions, and all that stirring as a teenager, as a young married woman
I carried on the preserving tradition as a matter of course. With tips
from a generous neighbour who came from a German food tradition, and
had a long history of laying down preserved beans, sauerkraut, beets
and other good things, my own little family began to reap the rewards
of the summer and autumn harvest.
The ancient galvanised rectangular
preserving outfit has long gone, but my grandmother's jam pan still
has pride of place on top of my kitchen cupboard, a reminder of those
years of tradition in preserving seasonal food for the family to enjoy
all year round. The dishes I've created have often rescued me from a
jam, and added some saucy flavours to family meals, picnics and outdoor
BBQ's. I am proud of my family heritage of making preserves, and so
privileged to share it with my friends sitting around the table in Mama's
Kitchen swapping recipes.
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