Happy 2008
Happy New Year, everyone. May you all have beautiful and delightful years, full of everything you want and need and missing all misery.
My New Year’s Eve dinner was a traditional Aussie BBQ (in more than traditional Aussie heat). We ate early, because even a medium dinner in thirty-three degree heat requires the fullness of the evening to digest.
Why on earth do we do this to ourselves? Why don’t we simply live on leafy greens and slivers of ice for a month instead of eating full meals? It’s food history, of course. Australia was settled by the British and every time we eat a meal full of meat and bread and potato, we’re remembering our past, even when we don’t quite realise it.
What was wonderful about my New Year’s Eve barbecue was the way it summed up my Old Year. We had hamburgers with beetroot and accompanied by potato salad.. The small sausages were from my favourite local farm and we ate them with home made Southern ketchup, preserved in my mother’s forty-five year old Fowler’s Vacola kit. The dessert was raspberry icecream cooked to a 1920s recipe by Kate. It’s perfect on a hot day - the ideal summer icecream, light and with a flavour that fills the mouth.
I didn’t want to share it, but my freezer bulged prior to dismantlement. My New year present to myself is a new secondhand refrigerator big enough to deal with my lifestyle – my current one is 270 litres, 1/3 of which is unusable and which is patently just not working and which I equally patently dying of old age. From tomorrow I shall have enough space for all the homemade icecream my friends give me!
One very important bit of New Year’s Day was also to do with food memories. I had black eyed peas and broccolini to toast my best friend, who is from Arkansas. The broccolini was because Southern greens are just not that easy to come by in Australia in midsummer. I made a rather yummy sauce for this dish and it made a delightful small dinner for a very hot day.
I celebrated a number of friends and some family and remembered foodways through my meals. That’s why they were perfect. The flavours were pretty perfect too, but flavours without meaning are far less vivid.
Did any of you have good food memories in your end-of-year or beginning-of-year meals?
January 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I sort of an anti-foodways New Year’s dinner. My northern background means New Year’s Eve is invariably cold, cold, cold. But here — well, not so. Our NYE dinner was several huge platters of cold chicken, cold cuts, cheese, cut-up vegetables (crudite’s — can’t get the accent ague here), crusty bread, and mounds and mounds of fruit. And a bowl of whipped cream (the nod to my American-ness being that it was sweetened, thank you very much). And this was for just the three of us.
This is, for me, the shift to a new, or at least another, tradition. I refuse for Christmas — roast turkey or starve — but I’ll grudgingly admit I rather like a summer New Year.