The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  The land we grazed Maggie on was probably one of the many former farms that fed into the jam factories. When I bought the place, however, there wasn’t a sign of any small-fruit bushes. One south-facing cleared patch had already started to be taken over by wattles, a pioneer species that quickly seeds in dormant paddocks, the hill pockmarked with wild blackberries.

  On a few occasions we fed Maggie on the side of the road, where the long grass still grew. Holding on to her halter as if we had any control over where she would decide to go, as Sadie found out one day when Maggie took off at a sprint for some greener grass on a further verge. Sadie, then eight months pregnant and in gumboots, took off after her, her large pregnant belly swaying in time with Maggie’s. Both with hips swinging, bellies wobbling. A neighbour, when she stopped laughing, rescued them both.

  So at times Maggie would have to go and dine on other people’s grass. Once she spent a few weeks with a friend’s bull, on his place, so she could get ‘in calf’ (pregnant) again. Another time she was agisted, as they call it when your animal eats at someone else’s place, nearby. Shortly before she was due to give birth, we dried Maggie off, to give her a rest from the milking. (Coco was already, ahem, in the freezer by that time.)

  During Maggie’s nine-month gestation we’d been warned about calving, how some cows could get into strife, and need a little help getting the calf out. I’d seen enough of James Herriot on telly when I was a boy to know that sometimes calving involved arm-length rubber gloves, a rope and a strong pull. That certainly wasn’t my idea of how I wanted a calf to be born.

  In readiness we had a retired dairy farmer stay with us when Maggie gave birth (in the end, mercifully, unassisted) to a strapping Jersey/Hereford cross. Trevor gave her the thumbs-up and went on his way. The worst, it seemed, we’d avoided. Trevor dropped by again, three days later, to give Maggie the once-over. Nothing amiss, nothing new.

  I rose early the next morning and went to the Saturday market. When I came home at about 5 pm, Maggie was down. A cow down is a cow in big trouble. If they can’t walk, or move much, it’s a sign of great, life-threatening illness.

  Cows, like all ruminants, always need to have their heads above their guts when they’re not grazing. That way they can burp out the gas that’s created as they convert grass into fuel for their bodies. Check out cows next time you see some in the paddocks: they’re either standing, or if they lie down, they have their backbones still facing the sky, and sit with their heads above their backs. If they don’t, the gas build-up causes them to bloat. Bloat causes a horrible, nasty death that you do anything to avoid.

  Maggie didn’t have her tummy above her mouth, but she did stagger when she finally got to her feet as I approached. I rang the local dairy farmer, who came straight over, suspecting milk fever, a fast killer of some dairy cattle as they suddenly find themselves calcium deficient after they give birth, udders flooding with milk. Milk fever can take a cow down in hours. It wasn’t milk fever, however, which is quickly fixed with a glucose and calcium injection. It was mastitis.

  Now, I know a lot more about mastitis than I once did. I know that the toxins from an inflamed mammary gland can rattle the brain and poison the blood of any species that gets it. I know it can be caused by all kinds of bacteria, and the exact reason some cows get it, and others don’t, is uncertain. I know that broad-spectrum antibiotics aren’t as good as specific antibiotics, that a cow can show signs and go down within 24 hours of it hitting her. And I now know that more than 16 per cent of dairy cattle that die on farms in Australia die of mastitis. It’s a cause of death second only to injury.

  I called the vet. She diagnosed gangrenous mastitis. Black mastitis, it’s called, colloquially. Gangrene, that mediaeval-sounding ailment, and one with dark connotations. The prognosis was, well, inconclusive: Maggie could lose that quarter (cows have four teats that lead from four mammary glands, each one called a quarter). She could get better. She could, possibly, die.

  We injected antibiotics and pain relief. We tried to milk out the udder, a gruesome, painful process that produced pus and blood from the infected teat. We got milk from a local dairy to bottle feed the calf to take the pressure off Maggie. I tried to give Maggie feed and water, going so far as to use a teat on a beer bottle to slurp water flavoured with molasses into the corner of her mouth as she lay, puffing and ill. And five days later, having nursed her day and night, she went down again, but this time on a slope with her head downhill. We couldn’t budge her. And her body was bloating fast. I had to get someone with a high-powered gun. It was then, and remains now, the hardest call to make on the farm.

  The death of Maggie nearly broke us. It broke my heart then, and it breaks it still. We followed medical advice. We rang local dairy farmers. We spent as much time and money as we could to make sure Maggie was well cared for.

  And yet, death came. We sometimes choose the time of death of our stock. And sometimes nature chooses it for us.

  In the end, we had to call a local with a digger. Some farmers, perhaps with bigger properties, may leave their animals to rot. We decided to bury Maggie deep.

  Dave did the job as gently as could be expected; his deftly handled machine trying to gingerly and respectfully shift half a tonne of beast into the enormous hole the digger had mined. Dazed, shocked and grieving, Sadie and I felt abject failures at farming. This animal was our responsibility. We’d botched our duty to care for her. Despite our enthusiasm for farming, for trying to ensure Maggie’s nutrition and health were always well managed, her death broke our wills.

  After the soil was smoothed over, and no visible sign of Maggie remained above ground, Dave dropped by for a chat. Sensing our grief, he thought no harm in going off-topic, of explaining a bit about the history of Puggle Farm. To take our minds off Maggie, no doubt.

  ‘This place is known as one of the best small-fruit farms in the valley,’ he told us in his laconic local accent.

  ‘Really?’ I said, mildly surprised that the farm could have actually been so productive in living memory. Very surprised, really, because all I could see from the house was too much regrowth bush and brambles creeping over the south-facing hill.

  ‘Yep,’ Dave explained, his sun-weathered face as impassive then as when he arrived. ‘Your place grows more blackberries than anyone.’

  Raspberry and golden syrup ice-cream without a machine

  Serves 8–10

  This is a variation on a recipe I published in The Real Food Companion, which I love because it doesn’t use an ice-cream machine.

  100 g (3½ oz/¾ cup) raspberries

  100 g (3½ oz/½ cup) sugar

  6 eggs, separated

  125 g (4½ oz/about 1/3 cup) golden syrup (light treacle)

  600 ml (21 fl oz) pouring cream, lightly whipped

  100 g (3½ oz/about 4 tablespoons) glucose syrup, sometimes called corn syrup

  pinch of salt

  Heat the raspberries with the sugar in a saucepan over a modest heat and stir well until the sugar dissolves. Leave to one side to cool.

  Whisk the egg yolks and golden syrup in a bowl until pale and light. Stir into the cream, then mix until evenly textured.

  In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites with the glucose and salt until soft peaks form. Gently fold a quarter of the egg white mix into the golden syrup and egg yolk mix until nearly combined, then fold this lightened mixture into the remaining egg whites until an even consistency. Fold through the raspberry mix at the last minute so it has a ripple effect. Put into an ice-cream container and freeze for at least 3–4 hours.

  Water

  I felt like the boy with a hole in the dyke. Sure, the grass was long near the water tank. And yes, I was a bit close with the brush-cutter. But I couldn’t have been that close. Could I?

  The thing is, when you have 4000 litres of water in a corrugated iron water tank—the only source of water for your pigs, for sprouting barley and all those other outdoor, essential chores—you feel mightily dumb when two w
ater spouts appear, within centimetres of the bottom of the tank, after meandering past with the brush-cutter. To be honest, I wasn’t even using a blade. Just a plastic bit called a ‘weed whacker’ that does a brilliant job of keeping the bracken and thistles down, but not something capable of carving through metal, or so I thought.

  In that instant I knew I was in danger of losing all the water in the tank. I pressed my finger to the largest hole. And it got bigger. I tried to dry the outside of the tank so I could put some gaffer tape over the hole (please, those who understand these things, don’t laugh), and another hole appeared further along.

  The reason for the problem, a three-hole problem by that stage, was the tank had rusted through. Once some of the grass was cut from around the base I could see the telltale orange spots. If I looked closely, I could see water seeping from some of them. If I hadn’t hit the tank with the end of the brush-cutter, a mere bump or touch or any external pressure would have caused the thing to leak.

  Which didn’t make it any better. A new tank would take nearly two months to arrive. It had to be made to size in order to fit under the barn roof. In the meantime, I had to extend the water pipe from the pump on the dam across the creek, or continue lugging a few hundred litres a day from the tank near the carport.

  That’s the thing about water.

  Everything on the farm needs it. The chooks. The sheep. The pigs, for both drinking and wallows. And I need it to water the vegies and sprout the barley for pig feed.

  That’s why there’s a pump to get the water from the dam on the far hill on the house side of the creek. And if I could just extend the pipe, I could still get water to the pigs relatively easily. Thing was, the pump was blowing smoke, so I thought I’d change the oil. So then, not only had I put three holes in the water tank, but the pump, by some force of nature (or, more likely, because I tried to change the oil and I’m not very good with things mechanical), also went kaput. It no longer shot out dark smoke. It no longer chugged away earnestly to bring water to the animals. It sat idle, and quiet, the result of a novice trying to do something useful.

  On the first day post my ‘repair’, I lugged a couple of hundred litres of water. The second day was hotter still, and it took 300 litres of water to create the wallows and keep all the troughs full. Without a pump, it’s hard, fruitless labour.

  Bill at the servo gave the old Honda pump the once-over. It wouldn’t go for him. But a day later the young bloke who worked there tinkered with it and somehow, nobody knew how, got it putting along. Bill thought it a very temporary fix and didn’t want to take any money for it. I hooked it up and after fifteen minutes of pumping it conked out again, proving he was right. The responsibility for a lot of lives was in my hands, and I didn’t like the idea of going out for the day and leaving animals thirsty.

  I took the pump to town to get another man to look at it. He reckoned it was twenty years old and should’ve carked it long ago. So did the bloke at the rural store, who looked at it like it was an antique. ‘Yeah, it’s fixable,’ he reckoned. ‘But you wouldn’t waste your money on it.’

  It was summer, of course. The worst time to have issues with water. Warm, sunny days filled the horizon, and with them came the prospect of endless hours of carting water.

  The solution was easy. A new pump. I gave it to Sadie for Christmas. Several hundred dollars later and a swank new Subaru motor was doing a much calmer, quieter job than its predecessor. It used far less petrol, there was no smudge of acrid smoke billowing from the motor and I could fill wallows and drinking troughs aplenty. Even the vegies were again well watered, meaning we shouldn’t go wanting, either.

  The water tank wasn’t the only thing that leaked that summer. So did the septic. And a leaky septic tank, in some ways, particularly olfactory ways, is much worse. Luckily it didn’t take long for Mal’s Pumping Service to arrive, with an attitude not that different to Kenny’s in the movie. Painted on the side of his truck were the slogans: ‘Yesterday’s meals on wheels,’ ‘Your business is our business’ and ‘Your number twos are our number one priority’. The numberplate poked fun at the gruesome task he had to undertake at every single call-out: POO 003.

  Pumping out a septic tank is something that has to be done on occasion. Too much lamb fat down the drain, or too many ‘solids’, the quicker it needs to be emptied, though once every five years is usual. I’ve become extraordinarily conscious of what I put down the drain since I moved to Puggle Farm. That’s because everything ends up in my paddocks. I’ve always been careful with chemicals and oil (they say 1 litre of oil can pollute 100 000 litres of water) and had avoided putting them down the sink even when I lived in the city. But living on the land, where all your drinking water flows from your gutters, and all your liquid waste ends up a few metres from the house, you gain a far higher appreciation—and understand the immediate effect—of your actions.

  Mal told me to close all the windows and stay inside while they gave the tray that led to the septic a stir then pumped out the tank.

  You don’t have to tell me something like that twice.

  The new water tank arrived, a shiny beast of a thing that would, I hoped, start to fill soon. The old one had been turned into a pig shelter with the aid of an angle grinder and two star pickets. I learnt a thing or two in the process.

  Firstly, I learnt that an angle grinder is a very dangerous, remarkably versatile tool that should cost a lot more than it does and come with a lot of safety equipment. Secondly, I learnt that an angle grinder spews out thousands of sparks and you’re probably best not to use one wearing shorts. Which I was wearing, of course, because it was very hot weather. And thirdly, which relates to the aforementioned sparks, you’re not allowed to use angle grinders outside on total fire ban days.

  So, anyway, I managed to put the fire out before it went anywhere and left the remainder of that job for another day. (I only write this so others won’t be so stupid. I didn’t know it was a total fire ban until the next day, but I should have checked and I shouldn’t have used an angle grinder where I did.)

  I did finally finish cutting the water tank into two hemispheres. Each half was held in place by two angled star pickets. You see tanks like this all over the Huon. Big ones with firewood stacked underneath them. Others to provide shelter for pigs or chooks or to keep the rain off feed. Not that it rained for a couple of months. Meaning my new water tank remained stoically empty.

  Acquacotta (a humble soup)

  Serves 4

  Acquacotta is one of the most unassuming soups—a filler for farm workers, which didn’t cost too much or need any meat or stock.

  4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

  2 medium red onions, diced

  1 small red chilli, finely sliced

  2 large extremely ripe tomatoes, about 400 g (14 oz) in total, diced (you could get away with tinned rather than unripe fresh tomatoes)

  about 1½ teaspoons salt

  1 litre (35 fl oz/4 cups) water

  freshly milled black pepper

  40 g (1½ oz/⅓ cup) grated parmesan or mild pecorino cheese; a good cheddar cheese could also work, but not as effortlessly

  4 free-range eggs

  4 thick slices peasant-style bread, such as sourdough

  1 garlic clove, peeled

  about 10 basil leaves, torn

  Heat half of the olive oil in a large saucepan over a low heat and fry the onion and chilli until the onion is nice and soft. This could take a while—allow about 10 minutes. Add the tomato, salt, water and pepper and cook for about 15 minutes.

  Whisk the grated cheese and eggs together and season a little with pepper and possibly more salt.

  Chargrill or toast the bread until it’s dark but not burnt, rub the garlic over it lightly to flavour, then pop the slices into the bottom of four large flat soup bowls. It’s best if you’re working quickly at this stage so the bread is warm when you do the next steps. You could even warm the soup bowls a little prior to assembling the acquaco
tta.

  Add the basil to the boiling soup, pour the egg mixture over the bread, and then ladle the soup over the top. It will cook the egg, melt the cheese a little and soak into the bread.

  You may need to serve the soup with a knife and fork if your bread is really resilient.

  Bacon

  ‘You know,’ said Emma one day, ‘it’s not every girl’s dream to marry a pig farmer.’

  Sadie agreed.

  And more to the point, in Emma’s case, it’s not every vegetarian girl’s dream to have to feed pigs, to help load them into a trailer ready for the abattoir, and to deal with the grim reality that is life on a farm full of oinkers. Emma is a vegetarian, not in a Nick ‘I’ll just try some prosciutto’ kind of way, but a very, very strict, ‘It’s got a central nervous system and I won’t ever eat it’ kind of way.

  To be fair, it was never Ross’s nor my intention to become pig breeders. The reality was, however, that when our free-range farmer rang us on a Friday to tell us he was being foreclosed on the Monday, and our supply of quality pork was about to dry up, both Ross and I became accidental pig farmers. And in the process, so did our wives.

  By this stage, Ross and I had two market stalls a week that were in dire need of some bacon. Call us philistines, but we realised that apart from rillettes, that French-style shredded pork paste, it was bacon and bangers that were paying the bills. Not ten bags of vegan-friendly felafels. Not seven pork pies or the calico bags of freshly stoneground flour. Not even the baked beans braised with bacon and treacle. No, it was a few rashers in a pack that were walking off the shelf.