TWO CITRUS RECIPES

It is 48 years since I married my first husband and moved on to a dairy farm to live. I milked cows morning and evening, boiled water in a copper to wash clothes and cooked on a wood burning stove. The only way to gauge the oven temperature was by putting ones hand in the oven and hazarding a guess. Wood was split to different thicknesses, making it possible to regulate the heat by the quantity or variety of wood being burnt. For slow cooking of dark fruit cakes for Christmas only a small amount of wood was allowed to burn and several thicknesses of stiff brown paper was layered around the mixture in the tin, while other sheets of the same paper were placed over the tin. It was generally considered desirable to have the cake cook 3-4 hours, with testing after 3 hours with a straw from a broom to determine if the mixture was still sticky.

Those were days when men joked that they had bought the Missus a new axe for Mother’s day so she could split her own wood.

I had a kerosene fired refrigerator – a temperamental thing at any time, but it was better than a tin meat safe swinging in the breeze that blew along the veranda.

Granny Potts irons were heated on the top of the stove for pressing our freshly washed clothes, which had been hung in the sunlight to dry.

Such limitations, which had also been faced by my mother in earlier days until electricity was brought to her home just a few years before I married, meant that my mother had seldom attempted cooking anything other than plain meals. Thus when I married, I was not an experienced cook.

Unfortunately for me, my husband grew up in a town which had electricity and his mother was a superb cook. I don’t think he ever realised how difficult it was for me to prepare our meals and bake the cakes he enjoyed with the restrictions imposed by my situation.

I was challenged to overcome my inadequate facilities, I now realise, and set out to become a champion cook. When presented with any new recipe, which I thought I had perfected, my husband would say, “It’s alright, but I wouldn’t want to eat it every day.”

My mother-in-law was noncommittal about my efforts.

Attempting to draw praise from her, I would say something like, “This cake turned out alright.”

She would reply, “You reckon?”

The only way to both learn from my mistakes and prove to myself that I could cook, was to enter my baking and preserves in the local agricultural show each year. It was an advantage that Aunty Lorna was the steward in charge of the cookery section as she accompanied the judge each year and could relate to me any comments that applied to my baking.

One year the judge refused to award a prize to any of the lemon and melon jam exhibits. instead, she wrote out her own recipe, gave it to Aunty Lorna to distribute, and said she hoped to see an improvement in entries the following year. To this day, I still use this recipe.

LEMON & MELON JAM

2kg melon, Juice of 3 lemons, some lemon rind, 4 cups water, 2kg sugar

Remove rind and seeds from melon. Cut into small cubes. Pare skin thinly from lemons and cut into very fine strips. Place melon cubes, lemon rind and water in large pot. Simmer gently, uncovered, for about 2 hours until fruit is opaque and soft, and volume is reduced. Add sugar and lemon juice, and bring to rapid boil. Now the pot must be watched to avoid boiling over and stirred regularly to prevent sticking. The faster the jam can be cooked the clearer and lighter the colour. When the mixture stops frothing and makes strong bubbles that begin to spit, it is close to jellying. Place a small volume in the refrigerator to quickly chill to test for jelly. Push it with a finger and if it wrinkles thickly, it will be ready to bottle.

If placing the jam in a commercial bottle with a good seal, fill the jar, screw on the lid tightly and turn upside down for 2 minutes. This will sterilise the remaining air in the jar and create a vacuum seal to keep the jam air-tight to prevent spoilage.

Jam melons

It may be that you will never make this jam, which was once a staple Australian spread, because you can’t obtain the seed or purchase a melon. Once they grew wild like weeds on farms where the vines had room to spread, but were seldom found in small suburban gardens. Thanks to modern herbicides they now appear to be disappearing from the countryside. I save my seed every year and already this spring of 2008 have young vines established in my organic garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B. Not only does the tasteless white flesh of these melons take on the flavour of other fruits like lemon or pineapple to extend the fruit, it can be used for the same purpose in savoury mustard pickles with cauliflower and onion. I believe these melons are known as Citron in Canada.

It was typical of that era when I was learning to bake that we wrote out in longhand recipes for family favourites or cut recipes from magazines to create a scrapbook.

One year I won first prize for an Open Filled Tart when I used as pastry the recipe from the cutting below.

Orange double-deckers

I don’t remember what fillings I used to for the precooked pastry shell, except that I made a two tone filling with an orange first layer and a topping flavoured with lemon. As a final touch, I found an out of season spring of citrus blossom on our bush-lemon tree and added this fresh garnish.

The judge broke off a portion of the pastry to taste and remarked to Aunty Lorna, “She has even flavoured the pastry with orange juice.”