Memories of foods gone by

A couple of Christmases gone by my grandson pointed out to all and sundry that the large box of chocolates in the loungeroom was ‘out of date’.

He didn’t mean this as a fashion statement but as a comment of the use-by date on the bottom of the box. He thought we needed to throw them out, poor little bloke.

Use-by date? On chocolate? In 1967 I was a young soldier with an emergency ration tin in my pack. It contained chocolate and was sealed in 1947, two years after I was born. When I got curious and declared a personal emergency shortage of chocolate I opened it to find it had turned to a white powder – but it was still chocolate. Perhaps use-by dates don’t mean anything on army rations.

The point is that we did not have to worry ourselves about such things in the past because little of our food lasted long enough to reach staleness, except bread, to which I will come in due course.

If there were ‘blowies’ around the meat had a short shelf-life, of course, and in summer one turned over each slice of cold meat for inspection before eating it. If nothing moved, we ate it.

We didn’t have refrigeration until about 1953, when electricity came to Longwarry, and until then we relied on a Koolgardie safe. This was a perforated metal small cupboard which sat in a large pan of water. There were strips of flannel hanging down the sides and over the top. The water soaked its way up the flannel strips and evaporated, causing a cooling effect.

Years later I learned at Drouin High that the water rose by capillary action and the cooling effect was caused by the latent heat of evaporation. I learned it, but I didn’t understand it.

We also had a meat-safe which kept the flies away, more or less, usually, mostly, and a big oval mesh cover that could sit over the leg of mutton (we didn’t have ‘lamb’ back then) or beef, or the occasional chook. The flies must have hated us, but they did have the occasional win. The meat sometimes had to be thrown out, where it would immediately finish up inside a dog. The flies could not get it there.

The refrigerator made life a good deal better and it made eating meat a great deal less adventurous. The big thing, though, the really big thing, was that mum could make ice-cream just like the real ice-cream you bought in a shop.

Until then we could only have the occasional ‘family brick’ of ice-cream, in a cardboard box, covered with wet newspaper to keep it cool and usually needing to be eaten pretty much straight away, especially if Dad had walked home from Longwarry on a summer day. Now

Mum could make up condensed milk, etc, and freeze it, then take it out and beat it smooth, then freeze it again. When it was ready, so were we.

We could even get brightly-coloured iceblocks, made with jelly crystals. Remember ice-blocks and the square little ‘cones’ in which they were sold? Bright colours, sweet and cold. What child could ask for more.

Getting that refrigerator – a Crosley Shelvador 10, cream, with a rounded top – was even better than getting our first television in 1956 – an Astor 17. I really don’t know why I remember the labels (for example our first car was a pale green Commer 10 ute, bought from Perc Eacott in Longwarry, registration number GJK-883). Perhaps it was the magic they brought into our lives.

Mind you, the Koolgardie and the meat safe and the refrigerator, all in their turn, were only part of the story of keeping food. You grew it, caught it, killed and butchered it, got it from the cowshed or you bought it, and that cost money.

Preserving was a vital technique. Mum preserved excess fruit from our trees with a Vacola kit, a big green drum which went on top of the stove. The preserving jars were put in it, with new rubber band seals, a metal with lid with and a metal clip across the top to hold it down. When the bottles were heated enough they’d be allowed to cool and the resulting semi-vacuum in the top would hold the lids on tightly. Mum and all the other ladies in the CWA were careful to use the best fruit and to pack it into the bottles just so. After all, there was the annual flower show, where one’s preserved fruits could compete for cardboard prize tickets and, of course, prestige.

Jams were important, too, We ate huge amounts of jam, mostly blackberry jam, plum jam and apricot jam. Some of you readers will remember what a jam sandwich was like in a school lunch on a hot summer’s day, with the jam soaking through the warm bread. That was not good and to this day I will eat neither plum jam nor apricot jam.

For some reason blackberry jam was always good and I still love it, but the piece de resistance was fig jam. That was always bought when the herd tester was coming to stay. He loved it. Dad loved it. We little tackers hungered for it, sometimes successfully. We had figs but for some reason we never made fig jam; we got it in a tin from Bert Wenn’s grocery. All jams came in tins back then.

Our own jam was put up in bottles with the tops removed. This was an aw-inspiring process in which bottles would be washed clean, iron rings would be heated in the firebox of the stove (an IXL) until red hot and a bucket of cold water would be brought in. With tongs Mum would drop the red-hot iron ring over the neck of the bottle and plunge it into the cold water.

The iron ring would immediately contract and break the neck cleanly from the bottle (usually) and thus create – a new jam jar. When filled with jam the jar would have a brown paper cover pasted over it and there we were.

This column was going to be about how farmers got food deliveries but it has got away from that quite a distance. It’ll go on next week because I have notes I haven’t touched on yet.

It might seem arrogant to take you through the minutiae of my childhood like this, but I am doing so in the hope and the belief that many of you will, like me, be reminded of the “bad old days”, which were not by any means all that bad. In any case, I hope this one and the next will bring back memories.