Food History

(I’m claiming quite a large area as my hometown. Deal with it.)

Sharyn Lilley here again, taking a break from Eneit Press, to annoy … er, that would be share, more recipes and history from ‘my home town’ with Gillian’s readers. I grew up in North East Victoria, nicely situated between the Rutherglen wineries, The King Valley winery and gourmet food region, the Murray River, and the High Country. I claim them all as ‘home’. The Aurealis Awards short-list has been posted here. Huge congratulations to those who have made the short list, there has been some fantastic speculative fiction put out this year. For those who didn’t make it through I’m sharing one of my favourite comfort food recipes. Normally this would mean chocolate, today’s recipe, however, is pumpkin soup. And for pumpkin soup, you need honey!

The oldest written reference to the use of honey is thought to be Egyptian, of about 5500BC; it has been used in medicines, it was once considered a cure for dropsy and bladder stones; cosmetics (hands up every woman who has had a former boyfriend attempt to eat their foundation because it was called honey beige? Oh, only me? Really? Oh dear.); used in libations to the gods and in funeral rites. Honey has been fermented and made into mead – giving rise to the term honeymoon, and it has been found in archaeology:

“In 1800 some archaeologists working in Egypt found a large jar of honey. They opened it and found that it tasted perfect even though it was thousands of years old.”

—Pickled, Potted and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Processing Changed the World, Sue Shepard [Simon & Schuster: New York] 2000 (p. 11)

As a small child I remember trips to Stanley (near Beechworth) to buy apples. Of course apples could have been brought much closer to home, my father often boasts that his wife and his mother shared a home for 23 years without an argument. Putting these two facts together, I believe I now know why my mother insisted we children needed to learn about ‘where our food came from’.

However, as children this information was not important. What was important was that the big storage shed, with the hand painted ‘apples for sale’ sign, where we bought bags of apple and bottles of cider, also had for sale big containers of Beechworth Honey complete with honeycomb. The Beechworth Honey company began when one of the gold miners who flocked to the area during the gold rush in the 1800s. Honey being a warm golden colour, and gold being well, a golden colour, Benjamin Robinson’s change of career made perfect sense to me. My brother, on the other hand, thought he should have stuck at gold mining, become really rich, and bought a race car. It was always a challenge to see which of us could get the most honey closest to the waxy comb, without getting any of the wax on our toast. As the youngest, I usually lost this challenge.

Family Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients:

3 litres water
2 - 3 large butternut pumpkins
4 chicken or vegetable stock cubes
6 tablespoons Beechworth Honey
1 tablespoon nutmeg
sour cream to finish.

Method:

Put water and stock into a large stockpot, and onto boil. Peel and seed pumpkins, cut into cubes and put into boiling water. Once the pumpkin is able to be mashed lightly, turn heat down to simmer. Simmer, and continue mashing the pumpkin occasionally til no large lumps are left. Add nutmeg and honey, and simmer for another half an hour, or until the soup has condensed to desired density (I like a nice thick soup so I allow it to reduce to approximately half the size.)

Serve as is for a rustic appeal, or use a stick blender to get the texture nicely smooth. Swirl in sour cream to finish off. To make this a meal, serve with mini cheese scones:

INGREDIENTS

2 cups self-raising flour
2 teaspoons sugar
1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup) grated tasty cheese
15g butter
250ml (1 cup) milk, approximately.

METHOD

Line a 20cm round cake pan or biscuit tray with silicone paper. Sift flour and sugar into bowl, stir in cheeses. Rub in butter, stir in enough milk to mix to a soft sticky dough. Turn dough onto floured surface, knead lightly until smooth. Press dough out to about 2½cm thickness, use a small fluted biscuit cutter and cut into rounds. Place scones into prepared pan, brush with a little extra milk. Bake at 240°C for 10 - 15 minutes.

Variations:

Add finely diced ham and onion, or herbs and garlic, or camembert and herbs in place of the parmesan and tasty cheese.