The Dressmaker's Daughter (6 page)

Once, one of my brothers caught one of the ducklings in the backyard and ran with it, its neck hanging from his hands, shouting, ‘Look what I’ve got, Granny!’ Three months old and not quite ready to eat, it was dead by the time he reached the back step.

Granny Shemmeld’s house was immaculately clean, with polished brass light-switches and shining linoleum. The feather beds were high, white and fluffy. I remember climbing into one in the room that had been my
mother’s, wearing a white nightdress and having to make an effort to climb so high. There was a spare elegance to the house with a smell of floor polish and the yeast from the German cake she made when we came to visit. She also had the scent of yeast on her skin, which came, perhaps, from brandy and the cake. That smell never left her skin, even when she was ninety and lying in bed on our property at Gawler, with my mother crying in the kitchen, not able to care for her properly. ‘It is a terrible thing to be old when your children don’t care,’ Granny said to her one day. My mother, distraught, ran and got a handful of new chickens. She put them into her mother’s hands and said, ‘Mum! It’s me – Tommy. Don’t you remember me? See, here are my chickens!’

My mother’s sister Nora came and took Granny to Angaston Hospital, where she died. She was buried in the local cemetery.

O
ne day my mother’s schoolmaster called her ‘a flatfooted, little German’. Her brother Otto was fighting for Australia in Flanders at the time, and Granny Shemmeld, hearing of what the schoolmaster had said, said she would pull his ear off.

Because our mother’s mother was German, we were reared on a mixture of German and local Australian – mainly British – food. In her woodstove, Granny baked her German yeast cake on a tray so big that it filled the oven. When she brought the cake out and it had cooled a little, she gave slices to us four children and her youngest daughter, Tommy, our mother (whom my father nicknamed ‘Muttee’), with glasses of rainwater or a cup of tea. It was the scale of the cake and the warm yeasty taste that I was impressed by. Bubbling yeast and warming dough in a basin by the woodstove, covered with a tea-towel, were often there in Granny’s kitchen and often in our own.

When my mother was growing up, Granny Shemmeld charged her boarders one pound a week for food, lodging and laundering. With only one exception, the boarders were men. There was one woman who dyed her hair black and who stained the starched white linen cover laid across her wash-basin table. My mother called her Lady (but Granny didn’t like her) and she says in her autobiography that Lady was very refined and would not eat rabbit.

Before the first of Granny’s two sons, Otto, went off to the First World War, he had greyhound dogs and a rifle. He often brought home rabbits and hares he had shot for Granny to cook.

To make a ‘chicken’ pie from a rabbit, so she could entice Lady to eat it, Granny would cut out the lower backbone from the rabbit, soak it in brine overnight to whiten it, and then cut it into portions. These she boiled with chopped bacon, thyme and parsley. When the meat was tender, some of the broth was taken out and mixed with cornflour and a little milk. Then it was returned to the meat and boiled a minute or two to thicken it. Finely sliced potatoes were then placed on top or it was covered with a piece of flaky pastry, and then it was baked until bubbling and brown. Lady was only served the whitest of the meat and when she said, ‘This chicken pie is delicious, Mrs Shemmeld, can I have a small return serve?’ Granny would give my mother a funny look and try not to laugh.

My father called rabbit ‘underground mutton’ and would not eat it, not even as a chicken pie. Sometimes, though, we had jugged hare when either one of my mother’s favourite sisters, Nora and Edna, who were good shots, came to stay at Tumby Bay, or our father or a friend trapped a hare. Once Edna came tearing in, yelling that she had trapped a rabbit. She was holding it up by the legs and, when she went to skin it, she found a bullet in it. This was my father’s odd idea of a prank. He had shot the rabbit and placed it in her trap. There was much crying out of, ‘Oh, you devil, Brink!’

The way Granny Shemmeld jugged a hare was the German way. Here is how my mother describes it in her autobiography:

Mum would keep the hare for several days before cooking. [It was hung unskinned on a meat hook to mature for several days so that it softened and the flavour improved as is the practice with game.] She would then dissect it and fry it with a little chopped onion and then place it in a stone jar with water, salt and pepper, cloves and bay leaf. Then she stood the jug in a preserving pan of water and the jar was covered with a piece of greaseproof paper and a cloth tied around its neck. It was boiled for several hours and towards the end of cooking a cup of red wine was added. It was thickened with some of the liquid
from the jar mixed with cornflour. This mixture was poured back into the jar and it was returned to the boil until thickened. Everyone liked it and usually asked for a return serve.

This recipe is called
Hasenpfeffer,
a name my mother did not know, because she was not allowed to know any German for the fear of having a German accent. But my grandmother would have known that name.

Neither my mother nor any of my aunts married a man of German descent and that may have been chance, but when Granny told them to ‘marry up’, it subtly implied, I think, what they could see all around them: that to be German was difficult. While they were proud of being German at home, they must have understood, especially later during the war, that some people of German background were interned and names were changed and Germany was despised.

When the Second World War came around, I remember my parents being upset because Aunty Ruby said that she thought that we did not have a hope of defeating Germany; the Germans simply worked harder than us and they would beat us in the end. Nothing more was said of this, but Ruby was thought of as a traitor by her sisters. And she was proved wrong. But it was a close thing.

I have the second recipe book my mother made, which is written into a 1968 Wywurry Hatchery Diary. These diaries were sent to customers of the hatchery, but she used hers to hurriedly write out recipes dictated by Doll, Beryl, Gertrude, Win, Edna, Norn (her sister Nora), Mona B, Dot, Ruby or Audrey. Many of these recipes are untitled and they have no method given. Just a hasty list of ingredients.

My mother’s original recipe book is the one I wish that I had because she started it when she was first married and into this she wrote, in a clearer hand than the hurried writing in her second book, the recipes given to her by neighbours and friends. It was a long, thin book and it fell apart when a child brought it back from his mother who had borrowed it, holding it with one hand and letting it hang open. The spine broke and the pages gradually fell out. But even so, I would love to have it. Loose pages and all.

Aunty Ruby lived at Tanunda, surrounded by vineyards in the Barossa Valley, and gave my mother a recipe for pickled onions. It is written in the second recipe book and has no quantities recorded, which I find exhilaratingly liberating.

Peel onions. Wash three times. Soak ten minutes. Wash again thrice and drain. Cover with cold brine made of four ounces of salt to one pint of water. Make
sure it is covered. Stand three days. Drain. Wash twice in cold water. Drain and dry. Pack into jars and cover with sweet spiced vinegar. (Seppelt’s.) It can be made by boiling sugar to taste into brown wine vinegar.

Of course, the onions that should be used are small pickling onions, not normal onions. Much was understood and taken for granted in these recipes. Things were not always spelt out.

My mother used cream in the German way, to dress salads and to make gravies, or to simply pour over hot vegetables such as boiled cauliflower. Her lettuce salad was made by finely slicing an iceberg lettuce, placing it in a large cut-glass bowl and pouring over it a mayonnaise made of two hard-boiled eggs mashed with salt and pepper into a cup of cream with a dash of vinegar.

Five or six days a week while the breakfast dishes were being washed by my mother and dried by my father, the Mixmaster would be whirring on the pink Laminex table, whipping up a sponge for morning tea. This cake was filled with homemade apricot jam and whipped cream and taken out to whoever happened to be visiting or working on the farm. My parents sat on boxes under a cedar tree and everyone came and joined in. Sometimes it was just my brothers and them and sometimes there were three or four
others. The sponge, which was made in two tins, was almost finished by the time the tray was brought back into the kitchen. The rest was used for afternoon tea with biscuits made in long sausage-shaped lines on trays. The mixture for these (which had chicken dripping fat in it in lieu of butter because it was cheaper) was forced through a silver extruder that made a star shape of them. There was a lot of vanilla essence in these elegant, crisp little biscuits and they were kept in a big tin, which was filled every week.

When I think of my father’s heart disease and calculate the cholesterol in just the morning and afternoon teas he ate for many years, it isn’t surprising he died at sixty. But nobody knew anything then about the effects of animal fat or, if they did, it had not reached my mother, who would have done anything at all to save her husband. We lived with animals and we used their produce daily. If only we had been market gardeners! But my mother was German, not Chinese, and it was animals that she and my brothers liked. (Although my father’s only brother, Doug, and he were found, when they were about ten and twelve, hawking fruit they had gathered from neighbours in a wheelbarrow around the streets. This was firmly stopped by their mother, who laughingly told the story to me years later. But something must have stuck, because Doug ended up with a fruit shop and his son Rob still owns it.)

My mother’s attitude to food was, I think, inherited from Granny. In our house, food mattered; but not so much to
our father, who, my mother said, was reared mainly on jelly. In fact, it is hard to imagine Nanna Brinkworth cooking anything at all except toast and eggs. The food we had – its quality, its quantity, its taste, its lavishness, its availability, its use for hospitality, its economy, its freshness and its ability to nourish and comfort – was important to the five of us. My brothers are cooks. They have pantries full of preserves that they have made. Tucker has a room-sized freezer. To enter it, you must step over a frozen shark. The walls are lined with shelves of wild duck and there are kilos of venison, beef and other unnamed things.

The last time I opened the door, the cool-room had a side of venison hanging on a hook. (Where was the other half?) There was a haunch of beef hanging, too. Who are these meat-eaters? His friends, that’s who, and the duck shooters who come by the hundreds in the shooting season. Meat-eaters, all.

Tucker is handy with a knife. One Sunday, when I was staying with him at home at Watervalley, near Kingston, two hours south of Adelaide, he quietly went out, killed a steer, skinned it, cut it up, and put it into the back of his ute. He drove it home and hung the pieces of it in the cool-room. When I told his wife, Patricia, I had seen him drive in with a lot of meat, she said, ‘You know, not one of the men on this place could do that alone. He is sixty and he goes out and does that, rather than ask somebody to go with him and help him. All because it is Sunday.’

I once went with Tucker to a wholesale butchers’ outfitter. He bought a few knives; one was a boning knife and, inspired, I bought one too, and very useful it is. He bought jars of spices and some powder I didn’t know about. (Another of his secret weapons, I suppose. It looked like blood-and-bone fertiliser. Maybe it was gravy thickener.) Naturally, for all this meat, he’s got a boning room full of knives and cleavers. Maybe he’s got a saw – I don’t remember.

One day recently, when Patricia was recovering from a small stroke, she was in bed, trying to read a thick book. Tucker walked in and saw her problem. He said, ‘Give the book to me.’ He took it to the kitchen and, with a carving knife, cut it through the spine into halves. Then he took it to her and said, ‘I often have to do this with my own books. It will make it easier for you. Just put the two bits back together when you’ve finished.’

Our youngest brother Peter’s pantry is full of dark blood-red plum jam, jars of fig jam by the dozen, and jars of pickled figs and bright orange apricot jam. He gathers much of this fruit from wild trees on roadsides and old farms. He knows where the trees are and when they fruit.

Bill, our middle brother, cooks for dozens of people when he takes them over deserts on safaris. He has been along the Canning Stock Route many times and over the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia; the Simpson Desert; Sturt Stony Desert; and to Maralinga and Emu,
the atomic bomb sites; and all over the rest of Len Beadell’s exploration tracks. On all of these trips he has cooked roasts, casseroles and stews, curries and fricassees, and to accompany these he has made steamed puddings and baked custards for dessert.

I’ve got a few jars of pickles and marmalades on the pantry shelves, too. Now, daily, I am moving a big jar of Madhur Jaffrey’s grandmother’s lime, garlic, chilli and ginger pickle around in the sun, where it must stand for a month to prove before it can be eaten.

In the cookbook
German Food,
there are many references to adding chutney, marmalade or sauce to gravy and my mother always used tomato sauce in her meat gravy for roasts. Now Sophia, my granddaughter who is eleven, knows to run to the pantry when she and I are making gravy and to slosh in a good slurp of tomato sauce. When we run out of sauce, as we sometimes do, we use my lemon chutney.

So where did this passion for preserving and for cooking come from? It can only have come from Granny and her inheritance from her family of the need to preserve food in those long German winters when things were scarce. Our passion certainly did not come from the English side of the family; if we had had their thin palate, we’d all be eating blancmange and junket along with our jelly. And we’d only have cream on it once a month, not twice a day.

My brothers and I are all brawn fanciers. It may take a heart of steel, but I have made pig’s-head brawn, which is delicious if you don’t have a closed mind, and which, when trying to live as a writer, has the bonus of being very cheap. It is the equivalent of the sheep’s-head stew that the Thirties novelist Warwick Deeping (whose books Graham Greene loathed) mentioned in a novel I read when I was about twelve. Tansy, the heroine, and the narrator, ate a lot of this stew and I was impressed and never forgot that lesson of the economics of being a writer.

There are aspects of a fairy tale in having two halves of a pig’s head in a large pot boiling on your stove. At any moment, a prince may appear. In my case, however, it was brawn that appeared, and in some ways it was more satisfactory than a prince may have been. I have had my fill of princes. Unreliable to a man, they have caused my children and me grief and I have squandered time that I could have used better. When I threw these men over, or they me, one of us was bitter. And there is nothing useful that can be made from bitterness, except bitter almonds – they make a very good cake called
Mandeltorte.