Food History

The final post from Alma.

The people I come from, the Serbs, have something unique. Our faith celebrates a day called “Slava”, or literally “Celebration”, which is traditionally celebrated by every family on a different day – on the day that their ancestors accepted Christianity, so the story goes, and that day is celebrated and passed down over the generations, and the family takes the saint whose day it is as their own personal family saint – this guy is ours.

His name is Avramije, which translates as “Abraham”, and as a child I was terminally confused as to who had sainted the patriarch of the Jews into the Christian canon of saints and how we ended up with him as our patron saint – turns out he was quite a different “Abraham”, as it happens, and his day, November 11, is when my family celebrates our Slava.

Now a Slava is a great occasion. A tall candle is lit, and allowed to burn until it dies a natural death – it is bad luck to snuff it out by human hand. The candle flickers in the family home all day, giving a holy churchy atmosphere; all day friends and neighbours drop in with a “Sretna Slava!” (Happy Slava). There is a family feast – in fact, one time I was taken to a London Slava of a family I didn’t personally know but I went as a guest of a friend of mine, who knew them well. Being of the same cultural background, I knew what was going on – my neighbour at dinner, a hapless English innocent, did not. So, the first course arrived, the appetisers, and he helped himself to those. Then the soup came. Then, after that, they started bringing out the main course – roast goose, roast pig, roast beef, a slew of rich vegetable dishes. You could see the Englishman starting to turn green but he manfully ate up. The main course was followed by a selection of small individual cupcakes and tea cakes and biscuits, and he took one or two on his plate – and he was doing fine until one of the cooks popped her head out of the kitchen and said cheerfully, “Save room for the cakes!” (meaning those 16-egg monsters, and there were several coming…) Our Englishman simply slid under the table, groaning.

You have to grow up with this stuff to know how to pace yourself.

But one of the traditions of Slava is something called “Koljivo”, which is a dish made out of wheat… and it’s a dish of remembrance. Guests are greeted with it at the door, a small bowl of wheat and a teaspoon, and a taste of it is a reminder of those who were no longer with us, absent from the family table. Koljivo is something that is also prepared for memorial services in the church. It is the food of memory, and remembrance, and love, and loss, and also a sense that we are all always and forever part of a family, whether we still walk the vales of tears or watch over those who do from one of God’s own fluffy clouds. A taste of the wheat means that we are all, again, somehow, one – united under the name of a long-vanished saint whose day we have taken, as a family, to celebrate together.

I have a superstitious awe of this dish, and I do only make it once a year, in November. But I love it dearly, and if I weren’t constrained by its meaning and its meaningfulness I’d make it a lot more often…

So – Koljivo, or the Wheat of Remembrance –

Ingredients:
Equal amounts (by weight) of wheat, sugar, ground walnuts, ground cloves. Raisins, if your taste runs to it.

Cook the wheat in several changes of water, until it is quite soft, and then puree into a paste (we do it manually, using a meat grinder – pour in the cooked wheat at the top and collecting the “sausages” of mashed wheat in a bowl at the other end). Mix well with the sugar and the nuts (and the raisins, if you’re using them). Mix in ground cloves to taste (I like it quite strong. If you aren’t used to the taste, use a lighter hand). Place into a serving bowl, and chill until ready to serve.

There you are. May your memories stay bright. For a moment, if you make this dish, you may share my heritage, my traditions, my celebrations… my “slava”.

Alma Alexander is a novelist writing for both adult audiences (”The Secrets of Jin Shei”, “Embers of Heaven”) and YA readers (the Worldweavers trilogy, “Gift of the Unmage”, “Spellspam”, Cybermage”). Her work has been published in fourteen languages worldwide. She lives in the Pacific Northwest in the USA, with her husband and two cats. Learn more about her at www.AlmaAlexander.com, and more about the Worldweavers books at their own site, - or just come and visit at her blog.

The second part of Alma’s post.

My grandmother bequeathed me half a dozen notebooks full of carefully copied-out recipes (most of them without any reference to how long or at what temperature anything bakeable should be baked…) Most of these recipes she knew off by heart, and they were made often, to our great delight. I’ll provide you with a couple of short recipes. The first is something called “Vanil Krancle” (that last would be pronounced more along the lines of “krantzler” – this was a perennial childhood favourite which still brings back the covers on her kitchen table and the heavenly feeling of baking cookies in the oven in a room filled with love. The second is “Medenjaci” (or, “medenyatsi”) which literally means, honey cakes. These can sometimes be on the dry side – they’re to eat with tea, and were sometimes even dunked. The third is a family mystery called “Kakao Kocke” or “cocoa squares” for which half a dozen different recipes actually exist written down, all of which taste great… but none of which seem capable of actually staying solid when they’re cut up into the squares. It’s a wonderful, if messy, cake.

The last is something that I will probably never taste home-made again. Kitnikez, or quince jelly, was something that used to be made in country kitchens and put away for the cold dark days of winter. I’ve had store-bought, and the taste brings back memories, sure, but my grandmother’s… was total heaven. I do remember, however, like most of the things that were done on a grand scale to be put away for the winter, that it was a huge and a messy job and it simply cannot be adequately done in a cramped modern kitchen with no family to help out and sit around the old kitchen table in the huge old kitchen, and steal tidbits from the sides of pots before they’re cleaned, and half a dozen willing pairs of hands to deal with all the little jobs that need to be done for the thing to be done RIGHT.

So, then. Recipes.

VANIL KRANCLE

200 grams lard (you can probably substitute about 250 grams of sweet butter0
250 grams sugar
1 egg yolk and 1 whole egg
1 sachet vanilla sugar (what, you’ve forgotten about Dr Oetker’s Vanilla Sugar Sachets already…?)
Flour as needed

Make into smooth dough. With cookie cutter, make shapes and bake on a cookie tray until light golden brown. Sandwich pairs of shapes into a doublet with strawberry or apricot jam, and then roll in a bowl of crystalline sugar until coated.

They are YUMMY.

MEDENJACI (Honey Cakes)

250 grams flour
120 grams sugar
2 tablespoons of honey (wildflower, if you have it)
2 eggs
1 level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
a pinch of cinnamon
(raisins, if you like them, but they’re optional)

Beat eggs together, and then mix in the rest of the ingredients. Mix until smooth. Bake in a square pan (MY COMMENTS: What was that? You want to know at what temperature and for how long…?) until dark golden brown, and then, when cool, cut into squares and serve.

They are YUMMY.

As I said, I have no idea what is wrong with the ability of this next recipe to hang together. I also have no idea what the “real” recipe is. Consider it a small culinary mystery.

KAKAO KOCKE (cocoa squares)

140 grams sweet butter
2 eggs
250 grams sugar
250 grams flour
1 heaped tablespoon of cocoa
pinch of sodium bicarbonate
¼ liter milk

Smoothly mix together butter, egg yolks and sugar. Add in flour, cocoa and the sodium bicarbonate, and finally the milk. At the very end add in the firmly beaten egg whites (beat until you get stiff peaks). Mix until smooth. Bake (at indeterminate temperature, until they’re done, or a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean) cut into squares. You can serve dusted with castor sugar.

This tastes GREAT. If you can figure out how to get it to hang together, let me know

KITNIKEZ (or quince jelly)

This is deceptively simple. The recipe calls for quinces, sugar, water, cinnamon and a lemon. You use equal amounts of quince and sugar, weight-wise, and what you do is, you cut up the quince into small squares and cook in a little water on low heat until soft. When they soften, puree them. Take an equal amount one-for-one in weight of sugar, and cook it in a little water until all dissolved. Add in the pureed quinces, and the juice of one lemon. Cook on low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens, then pour into moulds previously wetted with cold water and allow to completely cool. When cool, take out of moulds and these things keep forEVER if wrapped in cellophane or cling wrap. You can serve them in slices, and this is one of the BEST. THINGS. EVER. But it’s time consuming and messy, and a modern cook will probably be wary even to try it. It’s a lost sweet glorious taste…

This week’s guest writer is Alma Alexander. Those lucky enough to be able to attend Worldcon can talk to her there, but for the rest of us, there are her books and her food. She’s been generous and given us three nights of reading joy. Her fiction has this sense, too, of wonder and a big heart. Her landscapes live and her characters are always interesting. Now, though, let’s let her talk about her food.

I was born in a part of the world where several rich cooking traditions met, collided, and re-formed in a new and rich cuisine which can only be summarised by simply stating that my people love food – the preparing of it, which is a ritual, the serving of it, which is celebration, and the eating of it, which is, well, just heaven.

It’s part of what we are and what we have become through the ages. Our kitchens are a testament to occupations by Turks and by Germans and by Hungarians and by Italians and all of this is used in ways that makes a culinary-minded person swoon at the merest whiff of the scents and aromas coming out of a traditional kitchen.

I really could talk all day about what we eat, how we eat, when we eat it, how it is prepared – but I’ll divide this up into three short(er) parts – the Way It Used To Be, the Family Memories, and the Culinary Arts of Rituals and Traditions (with recipes to match).

The Way It Used To Be

I own several cookbooks from Olden Times – both published volumes, and now-fading handwritten recipes from my grandmother’s time and possibly earlier, hand-me-downs from generations past. You have to understand one thing – my ancestors were people of the land, folks who grew their own food and ate well from it.

Things vanish, as they always do – I remember that when I was very young the village where my grandparents still had the ancestral house still boasted individually owned cows – who came home from pasture apparently by themselves every night and turned each into her own yard, which I found amazing. I drank milk still warm and frothy from being milked straight from a cow’s udder, and you know, I didn’t take any harm from it whatsoever. When I was five I tagged along with a team of wheat harvesters one summer – this was still often done by hand, and they were off to the fields with their scythes, and they naturally assumed that I had permission for this when I asked if I could come with them. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask, which meant that while I was having a wonderful time out in the waving gold of the fields of ripe wheat my parents were going out of their minds trying to figure out where I had got to – until a neighbour told them (everyone knew your business, back there, and the neighbour had seen me go). I caught hell for that, but what I brought away with me was the never-to-be-erased memory of that field of gold waving under blue skies, and the smell of heaven that was summer at harvest time.

Families also kept farmyards full of fowls, and chickens (and therefore eggs) were cheap and plentiful. One of my old cookbooks has a dozen consecutive recipes for cakes calling for more than a dozen eggs – which, today, is fairly boggling. But in the interests of chronicling food and its history, and the way things used to be, I picked a recipe which calls for SIXTEEN – sixteen, count ‘em – eggs, just so as to blow people’s minds. You may never make this cake. But close your eyes and sit back and try to imagine what it must look like, feel like, taste like – the richness that melts on your tongue, and in your memory. My ingredients are – and I will make no apology for this – given in metric terms; anyone used to ounces and things measured by “cups” should probably run for cover now, or bring out a conversion program to keep at hand…

Anyway, here it is. The Almond Cake.

Ingredients:
16 eggs
28 tablespoons of sugar
24 tablespoons finely ground almonds
3 tablespoons flour
310 grams of sweet butter
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lemon
1 bag of vanilla sugar (for those who have no clue what this is, go into your local continental food store and look for Dr Oetker’s Vanilla Sugar Sachets. One of those.)

Mix 12 eggs with 12 spoons of sugar until smooth, then add, spoon by spoon, the ground almonds and the flour. Pour the resulting dough into an oiled cake tin and bake at a medium temperature (MY COMMENT: This is why I hate these old recipes with a passion. WHAT is a moderate temperature when it’s at home? Bake for HOW LONG? No information as to these items is available in the recipe). Take out when done, allow to cool, carefully remove from baking tin and cut horizontally into three equal-thickness layers. In a separate bowl, combine 4 eggs, 10 spoons of sugar, and one grated lemon (MY COMMENT yes, they mean one grated lemon. Rind and fruit.) Stir on low heat on stove until it starts to thicken. When it does thicken, take off heat and leave to cool. Into the cooled cream add a smoothly-combined mixture of 250 grams of sweet butter and two spoons of castor sugar. Mix well, and then use the resulting cream to “sandwich” the layers of the cake together. In a separate pot, boil the last 6 spoons of sugar in a small cup of water and the vanilla sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat and stir until the fondant becomes white. Add 60 grams of butter, stir until smooth, and use mixture to glaze the sandwiched cake. Decorate as you wish (MY COMMENT: I particularly love this. Decorate as you wish. OOOoookay.)

There you have it. Not just sixteen eggs, but probably an entire day or at the very least a couple of steady hours of sustained effort.

There’s other cakes in there. 14 eggs, 12, 10. Close your eyes and listen to the patient clucking of hens just outside your window. You know that all you have to do is step outside into the nests and collect all the eggs that you need…

Today’s guest writer is Simon Brown, an Australian writer currently based in Thailand. Lovers of epic fantasy will know him for trilogies such as the Keys of Power and the Chronicles of Kydan. Me, I enjoy his fantasy novels, but I totally adore his short stories. My current favourite of his stories is a rather special one appearing next year in an anthology I’m editing, which was my excuse for bothering him and asking him to write a guest post. I also love his novel Winter. I think I might go drool over his writing. I’ll let him speak for himself and share a favourite recipe with you, while I go dream about his writing.

My proper writing routine occurs on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. (Wednesday and Thursday I teach small classes at my wife’s school, so can eat wonderful Thai food for free from the school cafeteria.)

I start work just after 7.00 am - when Alison and the kids head off to school -and keep at it until about 11.30. I then exercise for about 30 minutes a day, which picks up my energy again and suppresses my hunger, so when I have lunch I don’t overdo it.

My favourite lunch is a couple of toasted cheese sandwiches with salami and tomato. I figure no one needs a recipe for these. Afterwards I have a coffee (my second and last cup for the day), and watch television for one hour, the midday news if I can get it or a documentary if not. Then back to work for another three or so hours. I wind down from writing by getting dinner ready, almost always a stir fry with pork or chicken or sea food (good beef here in Thailand is very expensive, and lamb nonexistent). We eat pretty soon after the family arrives back home, usually about 6.00 pm.

My favourite meal at the moment is probably stir fried pork with cashews and spring onions:

“For four people, stir fry a good couple of handfuls of spring onions, sliced into 2 cm lengths, for 2 minutes. Add one diced red chilli. Fry for another 30 seconds and set aside. Then fry about 500 gm of pork fillet, sliced thinly, in three batches, until the last batch is nicely browned. Put all the pork back in. Add the spring onions/chilli. Add a good 2 handfuls of snow peas or sugar-snap peas. Add sauce made up of 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon fish sauce, 1 teaspoon soy sauce. Stir fry further 2 minutes. Take off heat, mix in a good handful of roast cashews (unsalted), and a bunch of coriander (well chopped). Mix it all up and serve on steamed rice.”

If you don’t like pork, this works well with chicken, and I’m sure will work well with beef. A good thing to do is to buy raw cashews and roast them yourself before you start the stir fry proper; careful they don’t burn, however.

My routine writing day usually ends with a family meal and a couple of really cold gin & tonics.

More from Laura. She’s going to be happy to hear that the Conflux banquet is actually a Louisianan barbecue (1883 style).

She blogs, by the way. “This very evening” (mentioned below) was two days ago. That was my fault. My punishment isn’t punishment at all - I must read more of Laura’s writing!

I was not a barbecue insider until years after I left my homeland to come live in Australia. I was working on my first novel, and suddenly the characters all became deeply concerned with barbecue. I realized it was because I had become deeply concerned with barbecue. I couldn’t have it. Nobody in Australia could have it.* I would have to learn barbecue on my own, a lonely acolyte with no master but the Internet. But I needed — I mean, my characters needed — barbecue. And it had to be authentic. So I researched diligently, and I set up my first alchemical experiment. And, just to make it easy on myself, I invited 40 people in advance to come by when it was done and eat it.

Luckily for me (and for my guests), it was a triumph. It was an entirely legitimate and acceptable example of the genre.

While that book still languishes, undiscovered, I have continued to find barbecue to be a rich feast indeed for my inner writer. In fact, this very evening, The Lifted Brow will be launching its Issue #5, in which appears my story “Piggy In a Pit.” In this story, barbecue and its inscrutable alchemy figure prominently. (You can order the issue, or even subscribe, from their web site.)

I will offer, for your enjoyment, one manifestation of my favorite style of barbecue sauce. Kansas City-style is thick and sweet and complex, and it goes particularly well with a hunk of roast pork (shoulder is acceptable, but frankly, although purists would disagree, barbecue wants to be good and will forgive inconsistencies and improvisations). Your slow-cooker or a covered dish in a VERY slow oven (no more than about 220 F/104 C) is adequate for cooking the meat — it will take a long, long, long, long time. Use a meat thermometer and when the meat gets to about 190 in the center, you’re good. Shred it, pour the sauce into the slow cooker/dish, and let it cook at that same low temperature, or even lower, for as long as you can. (This is a dish to start very early the morning before, if possible; you can refrigerate the cooked meat overnight before shredding and saucing a few hours before your guests arrive.) Anyway, here’s the sauce.

Kansas City Barbecue Sauce

400 grams or so tomato paste
1/2 cup water (more if the sauce ends up too thick)
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup dark corn syrup (or, for the Australians, whatever other sweet, gooey stuff you have in the cupboard)
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon dried, ground chilli/cayenne (if you’re not actually smoking the meat, try smoked chilli powder for a better flavor)
3 or 4 cloves crushed garlic
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1/2 medium-sized minced onion
1 tablespoon sage
1 tablespoon salt
1 bay leaf

Combine all ingredients in a large, nonreactive saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring to blend well. Reduce heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure sauce does not scorch.

Note: I cut the chilli in this sauce way, way, way down, so feel free to ramp it up with dried chilli flakes, fresh chillis, whatever sears your mouth in the way you like it seared.

*I have since discovered that there is a genuine barbecue restaurant in Brisbane. It’s called Blue Smoke and it’s run by a guy who is also from the DC area. Huh, whaddaya know.

Today’s guest author is the wonderful Lucy Sussex. I love her short stories. Some of them are elegant, some of them are dangerous, but all of them are lovely.

It is not often that we have an author leave us a recipe as well as fiction, particularly from the nineteenth century. It is even more unusual when the author was pseudonymous for nearly all of a very long career, her identity only being established long after her death. Moreover no photograph exists of detective writer Mary Helen a Fortune (c1833–1909), and even her death date is unknown.

Fortune was born in Ireland, but had a Scots background—her father George Wilson was an engineer who emigrated to Canada, and then to Australia during the goldrush era. Mary had married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor; whom she left, taking their infant son to Australia in 1855. It is most likely that she ran away from her husband, a factor in her subsequent secrecy. Eleven months after she arrived in Melbourne, she gave birth to a second, illegitimate son, George Fortune; she later bigamously married a policeman, Percy Rollo Brett. That marriage seems to have quickly foundered, but it gave Mary Fortune knowledge of the police, something very useful when she began writing police procedurals for the Australian Journal.
She was a pioneer woman crime writer, and also wrote the longest early detective serial known, ‘The Detective’s Album’, from 1867–1909. But her private life was marred by homelessness, drunkeness and George Fortune’s life as a petty criminal, for which he spent 20 years in jail.

Women living in pioneer conditions in C19th Australia knew a lot about rough-and-ready cooking. Arriving on the goldfields of Kangaroo Flat, Fortune reported in “Twenty-Six Years Ago”, her memoirs, on a truly dire breakfast, brought in from a nearby restaurant and served in her father’s tent:
…chops that were burnt into cinders and swimming in fat, several thick slices of dirty-looking bread, and about a pound of awful butter rolled up in a bit of green paper that I afterwards discovered to be part of an ancient play bill.

It was accompanied by a billy of tea, milkless, for there were then no milk or eggs procurable on that diggings. Fortune records Wilson buying her a frying pan and a camp oven, both “two feet in diameter”, with the pan’s handle “a yard and a half in length”. Both were intended for cooking on log fires, camping out at the diggings. Instead, she made a tart “baked over a fire in the bullock-hide chimney on a short-handled frying pan, and the fruit it contained was bottled preserved gooseberries, the only fruit then obtainable on the Flat”.

Elsewhere Fortune shows a more American side to her cooking, mentioning pumpkin pies, something unusual in the very English-influenced food of the Austral colonies. But she shows her Canadian upbringing most strongly in her recipe for Buckwheat Cakes:
To one pound of buckwheat flour, add a little salt, and half a teaspoon of carbonate of soda; mix thoroughly together,and make it into as thick a batter as can be stirred with some milk or buttermilk. Butter a shallow tin (it will not rise so well in a deep one), and bake in a quick oven. This preparation, only made thinner, and poured in spoonfuls on a hot plate—the top of a stove, for instance—forms the well-known ‘Flap Jacks’ of American cooking, For [Far?] more delicate ladies prepare it with eggs and cream or milk, and bake in the same way. Buckwheat is not any good baked in any way from a thin dough.

Mary Fortune’s Three Murder Mysteries is published by Mulini Press, and will be launched by Kerry Greenwood at the Crime and Justice Festival, Abbotsford, Melbourne, on July 19th.

Lucy Sussex is an award-winning writer, working in fields ranging from the history of crime fiction to science fiction and fantasy. She has an abiding interest in the stories of nineteenth-century women. Currently she is writing “Mothers of Crime”, the story of the first women to write in the crime genre.

Reading Pickle to Pie

Today’s guest is Glenice Whitting, author of Pickle to Pie. She’s a lovely, warm person and she guest-blogged here when her book first came out. Note the particularly splendid picture of one of Glenice’s readers.

Food. We need it, want it, enjoy it. We swap recipes with friends. Life can revolve around the dinner table where we share our joys and lows. But is this becoming a thing of the past? Many modern families take a packaged dinner out of the freezer and zap it in the microwave. Quick, easy and to all accounts nourishing. For the body, yes, but not the soul.

I’ve just returned to Australia from the Qualitative Inquiry 2009 Conference at the University of Illinois. While there, I had a chance to meet for the first time, an Internet friend of ten years. We decided to book lunch in an Amish home. Sitting around a long table with other guests, we talked of family, friendship, discussed different cultures and of course the unseasonable heat. Without air-conditioning, we sweltered together united by a common bond, and reached for the salads. We laughed, swapped stories and felt as if we had known each other all our lives. I then travelled on to Arizona to visit my penfriend of thirty-five years. Martha is now ninety-three and lives on her own on five acres in Portal. We had four wonderful days together.

I arrived home to Melbourne to the coldest snap this winter. Rain, hail and a top temperature of 10 Celsius. I grabbed my slow cooker. There is nothing better than to watch through steamy windows rain lashed trees, and share a hearty beef casserole, crusty bread and stories with family and friends. Looking around the table at flushed happy faces I realized that food is important and can bond people together, but it is the getting together, the talking and sharing that counts. If Martha and I had a feather on our plates we would have thought it was chicken.

On the wall of the Amish home was a beautifully needle worked sampler.

Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.

My passion is writing and the journey it is taking me. Ten years ago I would never have believed the novel I was sweating over titled Pickle to Pi’ would be published by Ilura Press www.ilurapress.com. I certainly would not have believed that I’d be studying for my PhD in creative writing at Swinburne University of Technology and travelling to America for a conference.

Amish Overnight Pasta Salad
2 cups lettuce (cut up)
4oz cooked tiny shell macaroni
2 hard boiled eggs (sliced)
1 cup ham (strips)
1 cup Frozen peas (thawed)
½ cup Swiss cheese (shredded)
½ cup Miracle Whip
¼ cup dairy sour cream
1 tab onion (chopped) 1 tab mustard.

METHOD
Put lettuce in bottom of 2 qrt casserole dish. Sprinkle salt and pepper. Top with cooled macaroni. Place egg slices on top. Layer ham, peas, and cheese. Combine Miracle whip, sour cream, onion and mustard . Spread over salad sealing to edge of dish. Cover and refrigerate 24 hrs. Sprinkle with paprika if desired. Toss before serving.

Auntie Clarice’s Quick Casserole
1 kilo scotch fillet (cubed) or 6 forequarter lamb chops (cut in half)
Dip in seasoned flour
In pan, brown meat and 2 large sliced onions. Add 1 cup chopped green and red capsicum, ½ cup chopped carrots, ½ cup chopped celery. Brocoli can also be added. Place in slow cooker or casserole dish
Mix
1 large tin tomato soup
1 dessertspoon worcester sauce
1 tab vinegar
1 dessert curry
Pour over ingredients and simmer/ake 1 1/2 hrs (or 8 hrs in slow cooker).

Biography
PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne Australia.

My first novel, Pickle to Pie, published by Ilura Press in 2007 and is biographically based on my father’s life. It tells the story of the children of German descent who lived in Australia during the last century and struggled to come to terms with their opposing worlds..
The creative component of my PhD is a letter and diary based novel, Hens Lay, People Lie, exploring the chance meeting and thirty-five year pen friendship between an elderly American poet and a young Australian mother. It is the story of their personal and literary journeys 1975-2005.

Glenice Whitting
12.6.09
www.glenicewhitting.com

I did try to make golden syrup dumplings once. I got as far as buying the jar of golden syrup at the local shop and carrying it home. I dropped the shopping bag at the front door, shattering the jar and spreading golden syrup far and wide across the landing. Never tried again.

My own list of favourites, foods to give you a sense of me, would run more like this: caeser salad, chicken soup, beef, black olive and fetta pie, chicken pie, pad thai, Anzac cake, butter chicken, any kind of tagine but I always leave out the prunes, Greek potatoes and roast chicken, spaghetti alle zucchini and prawn curry. This is my favourite prawn curry, inspired by the local Suva restaurant Singh’s Curry House.

Kaaron’s Singh’s Curry House’s recipe for Prawn Curry

Grind 4 tablespoons coriander seeds and 4 tablespoons cumin seeds.
Mix with 2 tablespoons paprika, 1 teaspoon turmeric and 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper.
Fry that for two minutes, or until fragrant, as they say.
Add 8 finely crushed cloves of garlic, 1 grated onion, some ghee or butter, a piece of grated ginger, a pinch of salt and 4 finely diced tomatoes.
Add a litre of coconut milk. That’s easy here because I make my own coconut milk.
Simmer for ten minutes.
Add a heap of peeled and deveined prawns. How many depends on how many you are and how much you like prawns!
Squeeze some lime juice over.
Sprinkle some freshly chopped coriander over.

After all that cooking, and after a hard day’s writing and book-launching, there’s nothing better than a lovely glass of “Tail of the Monkey”, a drink from Chile.

6 cups milk
1 cup sugar
2 cinnamon sticks plus a pinch of cinnamon
¼ cup instant coffee
2 cups tequila
1 teaspoon vanilla essence plus a bean if you have it.

Boil milk, sugar and cinnamon. Dissolve coffee in the milk. Add vanilla. Cool for an hour or two, then add tequila.

I think it’s important to separate yourself from your character in many ways to ensure you aren’t writing yourself, unless you are, then go for it.

My character Steve has an almost adversarial disinterest in food, which is very, very, very different from me. It’s part of her character. I do tend to judge people in part on the way they deal with food. I don’t think this is shallow. I remember winding a friendship down when a woman refused to eat nuts because they were fattening. She wouldn’t even eat one nut and she loved them, because she wanted to stay a size 10 for her husband. All this was stated clearly. We had nothing in common beyond our sons, so it wasn’t a friendship lost with sadness, but it was certainly one I never bothered building on. By contrast, my husband and I spent our first year or so eating out, and those many hours of food and conversation built a deep and abiding friendship.

My first guest writer is Kaaron Warren. I’ll let her introduce herself.

I’m an Australian writer living in Fiji. We’re nearly finished our three-year stint here and it’s been very inspirational for my writing. I have two children and a husband and at the moment we have five cats, but at three grand each to take them home, I believe we’ll be going home without any. I’m talking about the cats, of course.

“Slights” is my first published novel. It’s the story of Stevie, who accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and almost dies herself. Her vision of the afterlife is terrifying; she doesn’t see a golden path, her mother and father waiting for her with welcoming arms. She sees everyone she’s every slighted, waiting to slice her, flay her, destroy her. The thing is, she is so lonely in her real life, so out of place, she goes back to this place because at least there she is centre of attention.

She’s strong, though. She believes in herself and the decisions she makes. She is confident to the last that she is right. She’s funny; some of the things she says and does still make me laugh.

My publisher is Angry Robot Books, a new imprint from Harper Collins. Their website is here.

You can download a sample of the first chapter there. I blog my Fijian adventures and some writing stuff at my livejournal and I blog mostly writing stuff, including interviews, reviews etc over at wordpress

I’ve made a list of all the food I mention in my novel “Slights”. It’s a long list, and includes: chicken breast with camembert, salad with blue cheese dressing, golden syrup dumplings, fried sandwiches, scones, lemon biscuits, chicken drumsticks, chocolate slice, baby quiches, prawn cocktails, Beef Wellington and fried rice. I’m fascinated by the fact that cold rice can harbour as much bacteria as raw chicken. Food poisoning is a bit of a thing with me, and once Gillian posts her research on ergot, the hallucinogenic mould on bread, I may well write a story about it.

Does that list make you hungry? It doesn’t me, because I deliberately avoided choosing my very favourite foods, in order to separate myself from the character. Mind you, I’d happily eat all those things, but they are not my cravings. Mind you, chocolate slice is a something we eat a fair bit of in this house. My friend calls it “cupboard slice”, because you sneak bits of it in the cupboard when the kids aren’t looking. I call it Three Piece Slice, because you can’t possibly eat only two. I love this recipe because it has melted butter. I hate that whole ‘cream the butter and sugar’ part of cooking.

Three Piece Slice

½ cup plain flour
½ cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2/3 cup caster sugar
¾ cup desiccated coconut
125g butter, melted
½ teaspoon vanilla essence
1 egg, lightly beaten.

Get your oven light to turn off at 180 degrees. Prepare a slice tin of some kind with melted butter and line the base with baking paper.
Sift flours and cocoa, then stir in sugar and coconut. Make a well, then add cooled melted butter, vanilla essence and the egg.
Press the yummy mixture into the tin. Don’t eat any off the spoon until the slice is in the oven. Smooth the top a bit unless you like it bumpy, which I kinda do. Cook for about 15 mins for a nice chewy slice, 25 for a crunchy one.

Top with chocolate icing and sprinkle with coconut, if you like. You’re supposed to toast the coconut, but I burn it every time so I gave up.