15 December 2009
Comfort Food - as published in Sunday Star Times Oct 4 2009
Our house would be cleaned until everything sparkled, the silver polished, rooms filled with glorious arrangements of flowers from the garden, lawns mowed and hedges clipped neatly, and the fireplace set and ready to light as my mother began her preparations days ahead of her dinners.
As a child I eagerly anticipated these dinner parties my parents arranged. The highlights for me were always the yeasty aromas wafting from the kitchen as Mum made her soft little dinner rolls and the buttery smell of the thin fingers of bread baked until they became crisp golden crunchy toasts to accompany her velvety first-course soups. As a dutiful daughter I’d help by setting the table but my real motivation was to sneak a toast or two from the dish of neatly stacked piles she’d place at each end of the table, and to pop a roll or two into my pocket to eat out in the garden where no-one could see me. She knew of course, but turned a blind eye.
When I think about my early years, it’s not the books I read, the games I played or the school lessons I remember. It’s the delicious meals and snacks that we ate as kids, growing up in a house where generosity and great food were paramount. My mother was a great cook. (She still is at 86; ask the bridge ladies or the ‘Ravers’, a gourmet group that still enjoy lovely home cooked food when they gather at her house.)
There was never a problem getting workmen to come to our house. All the sparkies, builders, plumbers and painters around knew that they’d stop mid-morning for a cuppa and a pile of still warm cheesy scones or light-as-air fruity muffins that Mum insisted on baking for them every day. As children we accompanied our parents to their tennis club every Saturday and Sunday summer afternoon. We would pile into the car and Dad would get anxious and often impatient to get going as we waited for Mum to put the finishing touches to the plate of baked goodies, or ice the cake she was taking along for afternoon tea at the club.
When we arrived back from school, hungry from our day’s activities and the long walk home, there was always a special treat waiting. Mum baked cakes, buns, biscuits and slices to fill the tins. Ginger gems, jam slices, melting moments, apple turnovers, Eccles cakes, cheese cakes with their hidden surprise of raspberry jam and the little twisted knot of puff pastry atop, cinnamon oysters and gooey iced chocolate cakes. I loved them all.
She would also spoil us in hot weather with special drinks like chocolate milk- shakes. I remember my favourite; Mum would ladle large scoops of vanilla ice cream into tall glasses and then pour over fizzy drink to make ‘spider drinks’ for us. The glorious froth on the top was devoured and I loved scooping out the last drops with the long spoons she provided for the occasion. Mum made her own ice cream too. There were two aluminium trays that she would use to freeze a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, sugar, vanilla and cream and then she’d froth this up in the electric beater before returning the icy mixture to freeze again. It was heavenly!
Like many keen cooks more than fifty years ago, much of the food Mum served was supplemented by fresh vegetables straight from the garden. I lived in three houses as I grew up, and each had a great vegie garden that both Mum and my father tended. Our first house, the modest suburban brick and tile home built when they married, had a backyard that was Dad’s pride and joy. Neat rows of lettuces, tomatoes, beans, beetroot, corn, potatoes and peas fed us throughout the summer, garnished with the only herbs we knew back then, mint and parsley - the triple curled variety of course. Surplus tomatoes were bottled or made into a home-style tomato sauce that Mum still makes for her church’s fair every year.
I remember when our parents’ best friends, a farmer and market gardener in Mangere started growing a new almost revolutionary crop, broccoli. We children hated this new vegetable. Years later I learned to love it but not quite as much as Mozart, my own children’s cat, who had such a passion for broccoli he would jump on the bench as I served up our dinner, and steal a sprig or two from the plates.
The second house we lived in, a fairy tale double-story house in Mt Eden, had more than half-acre of grounds. This garden provided plenty of space for large gardens where vegetables and fruits flourished, and an ancient walnut tree towered over everything providing a crop of creamy walnuts every year. The nuts were delicious but a real nuisance to me as I was sent out to rake up the fallen nuts before Dad could mow the lawns.
A previous owner of the house had built a fully enclosed dog run and this was put to good use one year when my mother offered to look after her sister’s chooks while my aunt took the one and only holiday she had in her life. Mum relished the opportunity to gather a basket of freshly laid eggs for her baking each day, but I remember the chooks flying around and escaping into the garden. A true city girl, I was terrified by their flapping wings and sharp beaks and still run for cover if a bird comes near me.
Then we moved again and I’m sure it was the well organised garden that drew my parents to that house. Espaliered Golden Delicious apples, a large persimmon tree, lemons, oranges and weenie grapefruit surrounded the vegie plots, and my parents seemed to enjoy the many hours they spent on the garden there.
This was the home where I learned to cook. I recall making chocolate fudge and helping in the kitchen with all sorts of baking. Mum was very tolerant and I made spaghetti Bolognese as a surprise for her dinner one night. She has a remarkable palate, as a good cook should, and tactfully suggested it needed to be much tastier. It’s probably at this moment that I developed my need for plenty of salt in everything. I’m always surprised when I read through the collection of baking recipes she has saved over the years at just how many sweet baked goodies and cakes specify a pinch of salt in the ingredient list.
The more sophisticated cuisine that arrived with the late sixties probably underpins some of the best food we continue to eat this century. I have vivid memories of Mum spooning the flesh of an avocado into her mouth, which to us kids looked decidedly dodgy. “But it tastes like butter,” she’d say. We had a coffee grinder too, and brewed proper coffee in an age when everyone else drank Nescafe or Gregg’s instant coffee. We ate chicken livers for lunch on Saturdays and on Sunday night my mother invited friends over and would serve up macaroni cheese, lasagne or some other glorious baked dish with a lovely tossed salad. This at a time when everyone else was making layered salad and accompanying it with the so- called ‘mayonnaise’ made from Highlander condensed milk.
And nothing can still compare to the original recipe for bacon and egg pie, my father’s all time favourite meal that Mum baked for every picnic, Sunday night tea and on plenty of other occasions.
Being the good mother she was, Mum encouraged me to cook and together we went to Cordon Bleu classes at the local community night school. We both developed a love for the rich and complex dishes we prepared and took home for our dinner. The seeds of my cookery career were sown at this point, for several years later I sailed away from Auckland on the Iberia on an overseas adventure, already enrolled at the famous Cordon Bleu School in London.
I had learned to bake at my mother’s side. My cheese scones turn out exactly like hers. My meringues are identical too, and when I shared her “Patricia’s Pavlova” recipe in Cuisine last Christmas, it was rewarding to receive letters from readers who recognised it as my mother’s recipe.
Cordon Bleu, however introduced me to a completely new world of baking. French style patisserie. We spent one day a week baking and a whole wealth of fine cakes, petit fours and desserts were added to my repertoire. I learned to garnish and decorate my baking with a far more professional touch than I ever remember my mother doing. The art of piping cream, making glossy icing that was smooth as a sheet of cardboard and neatly setting out food in rows as straight as soldiers on parade gave an edge to my baking that was far cry from the traditional Kiwi baking that had its roots in the clubs and churches of the Antipodes.
But today, when my family wants something really that is satisfying and tasty, and yet easy to make, I turn to Mum’s old recipes and bake her traditional treats. We have a real heritage of baking in New Zealand, along with gardening, and it’s satisfying to see so many people who are rejoicing in the resurgence and popularity of these neglected but not forgotten skills.