Raz looked at it a little dubiously. There was an illustration of a sliced-open feijoa displayed on the bottle. “Never seen one of those before,” he said, and took a tentative gulp of the drink.
“Yeah, that’s not bad – not bad at all,” was his way-north-of-Brisbane opinion, and that from a north-Queenslander on anything that is Kiwi was high praise indeed. He’d never heard of the fruit, so we fell to explaining as best we could what it looked like, its flesh and its skin, what sort of tree it grew on, where it came from originally, how one ate the fruit, what time of year it was ripe, and how good the wood was both as a firewood and as a timber for carving and wood-turning.
And we explained also that in another couple of months it will be feijoa season again, and the fruit will be falling in their unused, rotting thousands along footpaths, hedgerows and the back fences of home sections. Smart kids will be bagging up the good ones and selling them at their front gates for $2 a bag. And the dwindling number of people who know about how to do home-made jams and preserves will be using large boiling pots of feijoas to make jam and jelly and relish.
Feijoa cake is also a special seasonal treat too. My mother made a lovely translucent jelly from feijoas, boiling them and then straining the pulp through several layers of muslin tied up inside a 25-pound cotton flour bag which she suspended and left to drip out into a bowl in the laundry. I think she may also have used the left-over pulp for the production of a chilli-peppery-onion-rich chutney that was gritty with the tiny seeds of the feijoa and was a marvellous, tangy adjunct to cold red-meat roasts of lamb and beef. That feijoa jelly also tasted great on hot thick slabs of toast slathered in butter, which in those times was considered good, healthy food.
Yellow Anchor butter and great blocks of cheese were both touted as some of the best tucker available for growing, vibrant, vigorous children. Most of us are still alive to testify to the veracity of it too. We also had dripping on bread with liberal sprinklings of salt and pepper – and can’t you just hear the dieticians screaming and retching at such appalling intake. (And for those who don’t know, dripping was the left-over fat and ‘gubbins’ at the bottom of a mutton or beef roast pan – and nothing, but nothing, could match a dripping sandwich when ravenous boys came scrabbling indoors for an instant feed-me-now lunch at the weekend).
A truly remarkable woman who married just prior to World War Two and who nurtured several children as a war-mother whose husband was ‘away at the war’, my mother really knew the meaning of frugality, and she wasted nothing. Every spare left-over scrap of food went into a soup or a curry or a kedgeree or a bubble-and-squeak, and even a few plumstones were added to the plum jam to leach out the last of their goodness and flavour.
The left-over carcass of a chook-roast (we used free-range chooks in those days, whose heads had been swiftly severed without ceremony on the chopping block out near the dog-kennels; not the lily-livered, over-fat, modern-day battery-chickens whose plastic-bagged frames are limply loitering in supermarkets), that left-over chook roast was minutely picked over after it had been gently simmered for an hour or so in a large pot of water, and every last morsel of meat from the bones was pared away with a small fruit knife. The pickings, back in the pot of water, would become a rich lentil-thick ‘chicken’ soup – wonderfully warming fodder on a cold King Country winter’s black frost day.
The huge Aga coke-fired stove that dominated one side of the kitchen never went out. It was stoked every morning at 5am by my father before he went out to morning milking, and the rattling, scraping rumble of the coke being shaken out of the coke-scuttle into the stove was the signal for me to roll reluctantly out of bed and get blearily into my milking gear. I had to get the cows in. The stove was stoked again in the evening after dinner, and the coals raked up and the damper closed for the night. Almost always, one or two of the massive old heavy cast-iron yellow enamelled pots that came with the stove were quietly sitting at the back of the broad hotplate, simmering away with a soup or a curry or a stockpot or a rich, thick mutton or blade-steak stew of some sort. The two cavernous ovens on the right-hand side of the stove (the firebox was on the left) were big enough to take great deep metal dishes holding whole legs of hogget or several chooks at a time.
Sometimes, when my brother and I had the time and inclination, we would provide a couple of rabbits or a hare, and I remember on several occasions that having secured rabbits for the family table I was also encouraged to go out and bag several Californian quail. In those days the lovely little quail were plentiful in season, haunting and scuttling and calling from the barberry hedges and the small copses of lawsoniana and the big blackberry patches dotted around the Otewa Valley farm. The little Falke 60 .177 air-rifle was easily up to the task of taking three or four birds from a covey. It had already cleanly despatched one or several rabbits earlier in the day.
The birds, which I was required to pluck and clean before presenting them to my mother, were then carefully stuffed with breadcrumbs and sage, parsley, thyme, mint and several others herds she had picked from her garden, and each quail would be inserted into the chest cavity of a rabbit – which I had also been required to skin and clean. The rabbit was then wrapped in several rashers of fat bacon – because rabbit is a lean meat and it needs the fat-moisture provided by the bacon. The thus-prepared multi-layered carcases were placed in a high-sided roasting pan with a heavy lid and put in the top oven of the Aga for a couple of hours. The aromas, when we came into the back porch adjacent to the kitchen, were, in more than half a century’s hindsight, magnificent. That kitchen always smelled of solid, rich nourishment – porridge in the mornings; thick soups for lunch; surprises of roasts or curries or smoked fish, or game provided by us boys – all sorts of interesting and enticing foods. Broad beans were about the only thing I accidentally dropped on the floor …
In the evenings it would be close to dark when we came in. The milking was finished, the cows put away in the night paddock, the dogs chained up and fed, maybe a barrow-load of firewood had been handled into the woodbin off the front terrace so that the lounge fire could be stoked and restoked as the cold of night set in.
And then we would kick off the long gumboots and stack them neatly just inside the back porch away from any possible rain – and there would be these magic, enticing, gimme-gimme-gimme aromas streaming out of the adjacent kitchen. They were warm and rich and heady, and we just knew dinner was going to be the best meal we had ever eaten. Always we were famished. My little mother would be hunched over the great big stove, stirring and turning and keeping everything all under control. She invariably wore a pinny – several hung on a peg behind the kitchen door – and always while she was working in the kitchen she hummed. The tunes were often hymns, and she was totally unaware that such music was quietly and endlessly wafting through her domain.
Most of 60 years on, those long-stored memories of country life, hard yakka, free-roaming childhood and marvellous meals are all still real and clear. I don’t care if it’s old age that brings them out with such clarity – I’m enjoying them.
We older folk like to reminisce sometimes. It’s because we’re old that we’re able to do so.
Kingsley Field is a journalist and published author. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz