Dust off those frugal habits
At last, vindication of a lifetime’s habit for which I’ve been teased for ever, even by people who were happy to take a jar or two home with them. Shame it took a virus to make it happen. The way I’ve seen it, hell would freeze over before men took over the preserving habit, thus righting generations of female subjugation, and I assure you that I am in no way subjugated by my lemon curd on toast in the morning. It’s delicious.
Within the next day or so I’ll make tomato relish, as I have done for a trillion years. If the bought stuff tasted better I might stop, but it never does. The recipe’s in the Edmonds book. My observations: don’t bother peeling the tomatoes, chop them and the onions smallish, and go easy on the chilli. You’ll thank yourself for it.
Plum jam couldn’t be easier. It sets. Plum and quince paste are trickier; just watch the mixture closely. Marmalade is best made with Seville oranges. If you can’t get them, use grapefruit with lemons. And that’s enough, I expect: there’s only so much more progressive people can take before they gag.
More fool them. I’m the one with preserves in the pantry when war, viruses, Depression or ecological disaster strikes. I’ll go down with my own raspberry jam on my lips if I can’t be hurling a grenade.
When I was a kid most people in my small town seemed to have sheds full of stuff awaiting an imminent calamity that never came. Nothing was thrown away. Old frocks, wrecked knitwear, strange shoes, worn-out blankets, my mother’s short fur cape and yellowing wedding dress in a box, ancient women’s magazines, baby clothes, plastic shopping baskets, preserving jars, and sometimes mason bees, thrillingly scary, who’d found a way in and made a nest.
All this junk was heaven for a kid to rummage in, though I wasn’t supposed to, making it inevitable that I would. It set me up for a lifetime of rescuing old textiles. I now have my own equivalent of a shed.
Lack of money was a fact of my life. Nobody we knew was rich, and that was good: we had no-one to envy. One aunt was so steeped in the Depression ethos that she turned up one day with a bunch of old and unappealing dresses, meaning for me to cut them down to make new clothes for my startled children. She startled them further by undressing for bed in front of them, a family habit, born of living in small spaces, that I’d spared them from. They never forgot.
High fashion was already headed toward recycling before the virus happened. The overproduction of clothing aimed at each seasonal change, the ethics of production and the sourcing of materials had been scrutinised and induced general guilt attacks among the people who charge $1000 for a T-shirt, and the price of a car for a simple frock with clever construction.
They’ve rediscovered patchwork, for the elegant rich person who wants to save the world while wearing recycled, cut-up couture fabrics. Cuba St is the new Paris, and my grandmother’s shed was the treasure house I always knew it was. None of this is bad news, though the rich aping the poor is ironic. It’s inevitable change, and fashion is the definition of that.
Extravagance and obvious displays of money are going to look increasingly gross and inane as the world recovers from this disaster that finally came. Whatever is made with ingenuity and charm will be valued for what it is, and homemade jam will be tomorrow’s luxury treat.