Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Mutton wasn’t just eaten because it was cheap and easily available but because in the years of large families and wood ovens it fed a lot of people with relatively little work. When we began to run sheep on our farm in 1978, suddenly, after years of student brown rice casseroles and stir-fried veg from the garden, I was back to Grandma’s recipes, the ones she learnt from her mother and her own grandmother: great roasts in the wood stove oven (the slow dry heat tenderises and brings out every scrap of flavour, and melts the fat so the meat is moist but never greasy) plus enormous amounts of baked veg from the garden, with a stewed or baked fruit something for dessert from the orchards.

  We ate like that because it was cheap or, rather, free – the meat, veg, fruit, eggs and the wood to run the stove were all homegrown. And they were big meals, too, feeding not just us but the wwoofers (volunteer workers who laboured in the orchards or the veg gardens), so suddenly I found myself cooking as my great-grandmothers had done, for a table full of males who’d been digging, fencing, pruning, dipping sheep – and had the appetites that go with it.

  It wasn’t just the cheapness. It was the ease of cooking, too. Stir-frying is fuel-efficient but time-expensive, all that chopping and slicing before you cook. Like Australian women for 60,000 years, I had no shortage of fuel, not in a land where trees drop branches almost annually. I had more firewood than time. A leg or forequarter or rolled stuffed rib roast of mutton takes a long time to cook but needs less preparation and attention than almost any other meal. It cooks and bastes itself, and the accompanying veg too, with its own melting fat.

  And then you pile the meat onto a platter for the most dextrous male to carve. Even better, you still have the leftovers for next day – roast veg to fry up with fresh cabbage and an egg or two to make bubble and squeak for breakfast, cold meat for tomorrow’s lunch with salad and fruit chutney.

  The glorious Aussie pumpkin

  Pumpkin was what you ate with your roast mutton – or instead of if the meat had run out or the goanna had run off with it. To make good gravy you need the little bits of caramelised pumpkin at the bottom of the roasting pan.

  Pumpkin eating is as truly Aussie as damper, though it too has evolved with Australian eating habits – we are more likely to have pumpkin gnocchi or Thai pumpkin curry these days than we are to have a squelchy pile of wet mashed pumpkin like my mum used to serve with our grilled mutton chops.

  From about 1840 to 1970 pumpkin was pretty much a daily event: roast pumpkin for Sunday lunch, pumpkin with the Christmas chook, pumpkin cake, pumpkin scones or pumpkin fritters. According to the late food writer Richard Beckett, one of the first recipes ever given in Australia for spaghetti bolognaise – from a ‘genuine Melbourne’ Italian café – included pumpkin in the sauce.

  Pumpkin is part of our folklore. ‘A pimple on a pumpkin’ is an old Australian saying meaning something very small on something very large: a bikini on a fat woman, or a small towelling hat on a very large bald head. According to the Oxford Concise Australian National Dictionary, a ‘pumpkin squatter’ was a small farmer with a swelled head. And of course, many parents refer to their kids affectionately as ‘pumpkin’.

  I grew up with Steele Rudd’s stories of Dad and Dave and Mother in their stringybark hut – how when the wolf was at the door, Mother refused to eat cold meat and just ate pumpkin, because if she’d had any meat someone else would have had to go without; how the pigs were hungry because all the pumpkins were kept for the family; how for Bartholomew’s christening party the family picked up all the pumpkins and ripe melons scattered round the yard to try to feed the expected horde and how, when even the pumpkins had given out, they played the accordion instead of eating.1

  I loved Miles Franklin’s images of the squatters’ homesteads, with their paddocks for potatoes and corn and pumpkins.2 Years after I’d read her books I was shown over a now-abandoned homestead by an elderly man who used to live there. ‘And that paddock’s where we grew the corn,’ he said, speaking of the family garden from 1890 to 1969, ‘and over there we grew the potatoes, and the flat down by the river was for pumpkins.’ If you had spuds and corn and pumpkins you’d manage, and your horses and cows and chooks would eat too.

  Pumpkins originated in the Americas. They were grown in Europe from the late 1600s, but primarily as cattle food: big stringy, watery things that didn’t keep well. Even now many people from America or Europe really don’t get the idea of eating pumpkin, unless it’s canned to be made into pumpkin pie.

  Understand the history of pumpkin and you go some way towards understanding the history of land settlement in Australia. Pumpkin would grow where no other familiar European vegetables survived, from the arid inland to the tropics (as long as you avoided growing them in the wet season) and down to Tasmania.

  Pumpkin was the perfect crop for a land without ovens (you could use a pumpkin instead) and for a land of droughts. The new Australian breeds of pumpkin with hard, thick skins and dry flesh would last not just until the next crop, but often for two years or more, if perfectly cured.

  Even better, pumpkin could be grown with virtually no work. Small settlers could plant pumpkin seed in the silt after the creek or river had flooded and then go droving for six months; when they got back they’d have a crop of pumpkins.

  When you moved the dunny you planted a pumpkin vine in the smelly but rich ex-hole that remained, and it would cover up to twenty square metres with dozens of giant fruit. Even when the drought bit, pumpkin seed could be planted in bare earth, watered every few days with a dishful of the water you’d used to wash the worst of the grime off yourself or the kids, and it would still give a crop.

  Like wool, the Aussie breeds of pumpkin survive long, chancy and harsh transport. But while the wool growers tended to become rich, those with a pumpkin crop to sell managed, at best, a safe life of three meals a day and a roof that didn’t leak (or, at least, only when it rained).

  Pumpkin seed arrived with the First Fleet, but those pumpkins were probably stringy, wet and somewhat tasteless, like all the European varieties I have come across. It was the Australian varieties of pumpkin, with manly names like Queensland blue, ironbark, iron man – firm, dry-fleshed, hard-skinned (some took a cleaver or a hatchet to cut open), tougher than a bullock wagon – that created pumpkin’s niche in our culture.

  The ancestor of our Queensland blue and ironbark pumpkins probably came from India, via members of the Indian army or those who had served on the Northwest Frontier and retired to Australia, often with land grants as a reward for service.

  According to the Queanbeyan Age of 16 June 1870, ‘a branded pumpkin of the Ironbark species has been found at Wagga Wagga … the flood having given it a speedy passage there’; even by 1870, ‘Ironbark’ in relation to pumpkin needed no explanation.

  Ironbark is probably the ancestor of the Queensland blue pumpkin, the classic roast pumpkin and backyard grower until it was surpassed by ‘jap’ pumpkins in the 1990s. Queensland blues were bred at Valentine Plains in the Redcliffe area of southeast Queensland, near Brisbane, in the early 1900s.3 Redcliffe has few frosts, so pumpkins could be grown year-round and sent to the markets in Brisbane and even Sydney, as they were such superb keepers.

  Don’t be put off by the often anaemic Queensland blues you buy in supermarkets – they have been picked too young for the early market down south and are insipid. A mature Queensland blue has a good rich flavour – but you may need an axe to peel it.

  * * *

  How to peel an ironbark or Queensland blue

  Take the pumpkin out the back and whack it with the axe, then lift the entire pumpkin, with the axe stuck in it, and hurl it down onto the hard-baked ground.

  Or just bake it with the skin on, so the tough coat peels off easily.

  * * *

  Even if nothing else grew – the cockies got into the corn, the wallabies were in the orchard, the drought destroyed the lettuces – you’d still have pumpkins. A friend who grew up in Alice Springs in the 1950s a
nd 1960s remembers being regularly served well-boiled pumpkin tendrils by his mum. Traditionally the Aussie dinner plate back then contained meat, potatoes, a yellow veg and a green one, and in the central Australian heat often the only ‘green’ was pumpkin tendrils.

  Pumpkin was the great colonial standby. Mashed pumpkin was added to bread, a habit possibly passed on by American sealers, whalers and gold diggers. (In the United States wild persimmon pulp was added to bread or cake dough so that not as much flour was necessary.) Pumpkin became mock ginger, or candied pumpkin was used instead of candied fruit in Christmas cakes and plum puddings. Boiled pumpkin fruitcake is superb. In the days before refrigeration and air-conditioning, adding pumpkin to cakes and bread meant they kept moist longer, and in the days before comfortable dentures this was probably a blessing also. But it is the pumpkin scone that became an Australian icon.

  How damper turned into a pumpkin scone

  Break up damper or soda bread dough into rounds and bake them in an oven and you have scones. Add pumpkin and you have not just an Australian icon but a foodstuff that will stay moist even in the worst of summer’s heat, when a scone or damper turns into brick five minutes out of the oven.

  Scones took over from damper in Australian homes – at least the more affluent ones – by about the 1880s. Scones need an oven while damper does not. You can, if you are a very good cook indeed, make scones in a camp oven, but a damper is far easier. Although ovens have been around for thousands of years, it was only around the 1880s that a middle-class or even working-class housewife would have had her own metal oven – as well as be able to afford the baking powder or self-raising flour to make scones.

  Scones migrated to Australia from Scotland, where royalty was crowned on their ‘stone of Scone’ (Scone being a town, not a small delicious cake, though a badly made or heat-prostrated scone may indeed be a scone of stone). Scones almost certainly evolved from hearth cakes, rounds of dough baked on the hot stones or the ‘hearth’ by the fire and, later, in a metal frying pan.

  They are, in fact, a single serving of Irish soda bread, and one could make a politically incorrect joke here about the thrifty Scots serving a cake for one, as opposed to the spendthrift Irish making one large enough for everyone, and the cow too. Further south, into northern England, similar single-serve soda breads were called ‘cutties’, probably because they were cut into triangles, though also possibly because the butter is cut into them with a knife, not with hands, as scones made with hot hands can be tough. In the United States, scones turned into ‘biscuits’, bigger and with more butter or other shortening (fat) added, eaten more often with breakfast sausages, eggs, grits, bacon or red-eye gravy than with jam.

  From the 1860s, as more and more Australian homes began to have ovens, scones became one of the basics of Australian domestic life. You served them with butter and jam at afternoon tea (which was a great excuse to show off your different varieties of jam). If unexpected (or even expected) guests came, you could whip up a batch of scones before they’d taken their hats off – one minute mixing, fifteen in the oven, and by the time the cosy was on the teapot and Aunt Delilah had finished explaining about her hernia operation, the scones were steaming on the table.

  Scones were also served with stews, to sop up the gravy. Their dough, with some finely chopped parsley added as you mix them, makes excellent dumplings that can be tossed into a goulash or other wet casserole. My grandmother served toasted scones at breakfast that were almost better than when they came fresh out of the oven.

  A scone must be fresh if it’s to be good (unless of course it’s toasted), and I mean steaming fresh. Those nuggety doughy things in cake stores and supermarkets are probably the reason we no longer eat as many scones. And scones are infinitely variable. Grandma usually added chopped dates to hers, or sometimes a few sultanas or currants. A day-old scone, especially a small ‘drop scone’, made to rise high in a preheated drop scone pan, could also be coated in moist chocolate icing and coconut and turned into a faux lamington.

  Yet scones have one major failing: in arid climates (and that’s most of Australia) a scone can turn into something resembling a rock. In the 1980s an English friend employed for the first time as a cook in Queensland had shearers playing cricket with her scones. In the harsh dry heat, all the moisture just evaporated – unless she added pumpkin.

  A pumpkin scone – like pumpkin bread – used to be an admission of poverty, or at the very least of making do. Certainly they were known by the early 1900s, when my grandmother was learning to cook. But although Grandma taught me how to make pumpkin scones as a standby for mid-summer in the years I was living without a fridge, she never served one to her guests. (She also taught me to make an excellent pumpkin fritter, which is basically a pikelet with mashed pumpkin added, served sprinkled with white sugar). I suspect pumpkin scones may have become more acceptable during World War 2, when sugar and butter were rationed; pumpkin adds sweetness, as well as richness without butter.

  * * *

  Bloody good pumpkin scones

  1 teaspoon grated orange zest

  2 cups self-raising flour

  2 tablespoons butter

  1 tablespoon icing sugar

  half a cup milk or buttermilk

  1 well-beaten egg

  1 cup mashed pumpkin - as orange and sweet as you can get it, not butternut

  Optional: an extra egg, beaten, to glaze the tops so they are shiny

  Mix the orange zest with the flour, work the butter and icing sugar in with your fingers. Add the milk and egg and pumpkin - work it as little as you can at this stage. Roll it quickly on a floured board, using a rolling pin, tin can or glass. Don’t roll too much, or the scones will be tough. It should just stick together. Now cut into thin rounds about as thick as the width of your thumb, or do as I do, and don’t roll at all, pinching off nuggets of dough to place in the tin side by side. They are messier, but lighter. Brush with milk and/or beaten egg and bake in a hot oven for ten to fifteen minutes.

  These scones should be eaten fresh. If there are any left over, toast them for breakfast, or cut them into slices and bake in the oven till crisp then crush for very superior ‘breadcrumbs’.

  * * *

  Pumpkin scones retained their slightly shameful reputation until Joh Bjelke-Petersen became premier of Queensland in 1968. His wife, Florence, known as Flo, contributed her pumpkin scone recipe to newspapers and magazines and even served them to guests. Her pumpkin scones, she insisted, had to be made with Queensland blue pumpkin as its rival, the butternut, was too fibrous to make a good scone.

  Flo Bjelke-Petersen was a member of the Australian Senate from 1981 to 1993, but although she once said she hoped to be remembered for her work as a senator rather than her scones, she did still keep making them.4 Joh Bjelke-Petersen was knighted in 1984, Flo Bjelke-Petersen became known as Lady Flo, and her recipe became ‘Lady’s Flo’s pumpkin scones’.

  The pumpkin scone had arrived.

  Pumpkin scones are still made but, in these days of refrigeration and air-conditioning, more for their iconic or even comic value than as a response to the land and its climate. At their simplest they are just self-raising flour and mashed pumpkin, mixed and baked, which results in an edible scone, especially if eaten straight away and you are hungry.

  Supporting our boys with Anzac biscuits

  Another of our cultural icons, the Anzac biscuit, tells us much of the state of our armed forces in World War 1 and the level of community support for them. Although it is often claimed that these biscuits were named ‘Anzacs’ after the war, and merely sold to raise money for ‘comforts’ for fighting men, my grandmother and others of her generation contradicted this firmly, as does the entry in my grandmother’s handwritten recipe book dating from about 1916.

  Anzac biscuits were sent to men fighting overseas, rich in butter, sugar, and complex carbohydrates from the coconut and rolled oats, then baked in a slow oven so they would last for months, if not years. Perhaps six
ty per cent of men at the front had teeth too poor to eat the hard-baked soldier’s biscuits that were one of the staple rations, and water in the trenches was too polluted to use to safely soften them.

  Men survived on food from home: fruitcakes rich in dried fruit and vitamin C, and Anzac biscuits. If our armed forces had been better fed – or if there had been dentists in the medical services – the Anzac biscuit might not exist, or at least might have been named travellers’ biscuits instead, useful for trips to the outback.

  * * *

  Anzac Biscuits

  Adapted from the handwritten recipe in the notebook of Mrs Thelma Edwards, née Sheldon.

  Grandma made these in World War 1 to send to relatives and family friends serving overseas, along with soldiers’ ‘comforts’ like soap and paper and pencils, or to help fund assistance for wounded soldiers. She was still making them up two years before she died.

  Quarter of a pound of butter (approx. 125 grams)

  Half a cup of sugar

  1 tablespoon golden syrup

  2 tablespoons boiling water

  Half a cup of flour

  1 small teaspoon baking soda

  2 cups rolled oats

  1 small cup coconut

  Melt butter, sugar and syrup with the water. Add dry ingredients. Let stand for 30 minutes, then place small teaspoons of the mixture on a greased tray and bake in a slow oven for about 30-40 minutes until golden brown, not dark brown. Take the tray from the oven and leave the biscuits on it till cool. They will turn crisp as they cool down.

  * * *

  But Anzacs biscuits survived their initial purpose as troop tucker in World War 1 for the same reason the pumpkin scone evolved – their longevity. An Anzac biscuit lasts for weeks in the biscuit tin, if the kids don’t find them first. More importantly, they could be made in a hot kitchen in summer.