They also have a mobile classroom that teaches a new dish every week. A good idea for the Canberra market!

This was my first course: a fresh hot and enormous dumpling stuffed with roast pork, cabbage and vermicelli noodles.

And this was dessert: a fresh crepe filled with home-made pear and rhubarb jam. Mmmmm…

After that, I was  completely visually and physically satiated, so I went for a big walk and caught this view just before the skies opened and gushed down for the rest of the day.

I’m not much of a jam maker: it’s probably anxiety associated with figuring out when ‘setting’ stage has been reached, and the fiddliness of sterilising lots of jars. One solution to the jar issue would be to make smaller batches, but this seems a bit counterintuitive. I tend to associate making jam with making lots of jam. It’s partly because, as Gay Bilson has pointed out, we tend to make the error of thinking in terms of the fruit, when we should be thinking in terms of the fruit and sugar combined. It’s also about seeing preserving as a way of dealing with gluts and windfalls: you know, that box you got from the market near closing time. Or we make lots of jam because we want to move large amounts of it at the school fete.

Anyhow, the recipe, which is disarmingly simple, is below, but it got me thinking about the history of marmalade, and food history is always insightful, not least because it puts some of our current concerns about globalisation into some sort of perspective.

I recalled reading somewhere that Dundee became the centre of marmalade manufacture because oranges from Spain arrived there as the backload on boats that had shipped coal to Catalonia, a region which underwent an early industrialisation while the rest of Spain remained a rural, peasant-based economy. Perhaps this was in Robert Hughes’ book on Barcelona, which I don’t have to hand. I can’t find any other record of this theory – although I did find out that Spain is the world’s top market for Scotch whisky, so perhaps now it’s a case of whisky outbound/oranges home.

Whatever the historical explanation, the Scots still like to think of themselves as the inventors of marmalade, although the word derives from marmelo, which is Portuguese for quince, and quince preserves were probably the inspiration for English and Scottish preserve-making. Nowadays, under EU law ‘marmalade’ can only be applied to fruit preserves made from citrus. A product made with any other kind of fruit must be called jam. (Whenever I hear something like this it brings to mind memories of the dreaded ‘euro-sausage’ from an episode of ‘Yes, Minister’).

But the Scots didn’t just need the fruit, they also needed the sugar. The oranges in Dundee marmalade are Seville oranges, which are not sweet at all. We rarely see them in Australia – or not in Melbourne, at least – but I recall staying in the Barrio Santa Cruz in Seville early one January many years ago, and plucking oranges from the trees where they grew abundantly – mainly so I could pretentiously record in my journal ‘Didst breakfast on oranges from the Alcazar…’. But on biting into them, they were near impossible to eat. So the other part of the marmalade equation was the West Indian plantation system and the slave trade, which made sugar accessible to the British Isles.

Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power has described how the use of sugar by the eighteenth century British working class provides the first instance in history of the mass consumption of imported food staples. But this was in relation to sugar’s connection with new stimulant beverages: tea, coffee and chocolate. Marmalade doesn’t just require sugar, it requires lots and lots of sugar. It was a dramatic drop in the price of sugar (due to the removal of duties) in the mid-nineteenth century, along with the perfection of relatively reliable and cheap preserving techniques, that saw preserves adopted as a convenience food by the working class: full of calories, cheap and appealing to children, and tasting better than costly butter on store-bought bread.

So whilst I think of Dundee marmalade as a quintessentially Scottish product, it’s worth remembering that it contains no indigenous Scottish produce but depends entirely on ingredients being shipped from around the world.

There is now a Marmalade Festival, held not in Dundee but in England’s Lake District. During the festival, the local vicar offers up the following in church:

‘Let us remember in our prayers those who grow fruit and those who process fruit. Especially oranges. Let us remember in our prayers those who make marmalade. And those who eat it.’

So if you make and eat marmalade you’ll be twice blessed. And if you grow your own mandarins, thrice blessed.

Recipe

(adapted from Gail and Kevin Donovan’s Salute!)

Take a dozen or so organic mandarins (or, at least, unsprayed: you’re using the rind after all) and cut into pieces. I cut each into 6 or 8 pieces, depending on the size of the mandarin. Soak the cut up fruit in a cup and a half of water for several hours or overnight.

Bring the fruit and water mixture to the boil and then simmer until the rind is soft (about 30 minutes or so).

Measure out the fruit mixture into a new saucepan and then add the same volume in sugar.

Heat up, stirring and dissolving the sugar. Add 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, bring to the boil and boil until setting stage (shudder: this will take again about 30-45 minutes. The test everyone recommends is to put a blob of the marmalade on a chilled saucer, return it to the fridge for a few minutes, then run your finger through the blob to separate it into halves. If the halves remain separate, you’ve reached setting stage nirvana. I take a near-enough-is-good-enough approach. Most preserves will set further as they cool in a jar)

Ideally, stir in something like Cointreau or Grand Marnier if you have some to hand.

Spoon into sterilised jars, etc, etc.

The first instalment of the tale of Pamela’s journey is here.

Day 1: Canberra to Mildura (700 and something kms)

This morning the Parents sent me off into the world with a stomach full of poached eggs and bacon and in a ute packed with donated blankets and clothes (thank you Wamboin craft group, and Trish and Glen). I only got as far as Yass before I stopped for a coffee (it was a slow start). It was the beginning of what turned into a disastrous day’s eating.

Handy Hint #1: If you are ever in the position of having to buy a tall flat white at McDonald’s McCafe, make sure you ask for a double shot.

The coffee was in fact so bad that I couldn’t drink it. But against all logic, I actually chose to stop at the next McDonalds (Gundagai) to buy another one. But this time, a long black. I figure there’s not too many people in this world who can ruin a long black.

Turning off the Hume Hwy, I made north for Wagga Wagga and then west through a landscape that produces so much of our food, gourmet or otherwise: the endless, empty wheat fields of the Hay Plain; the orchards and irrigation flats of the Murray-Darling basin rivers of the Murrumbidgee; the acres of land cleared for grazing around Balranald. I was playing tag with a truck carrying 600 sheep for live export to Saudi Arabia, the driver of whom stopped to check on his flock almost as regularly as I was stopping to pee.
 

 

We were motoring along with not a care in the world, until suddenly just outside Narrandera I was confronted by a barrage of fruit flies of gigantic proportions.
 

I had completely forgotten about the “no fruit” rule in orchard country. The resulting loss was profound. Into the bin goes the kilo of NZ apricots brought at Woolies Dickson (no great loss, weren’t that nice anyway); a Tupperware container harvest of my own cherry tomatoes (these, on the other hand, were very yum); the one capsicum I had managed to grow this summer (just the one, lovingly tended for months!); and the last of the yellow plums off my tree in Kaleen. All this beautiful food now sits in the bottom of a bin somewhere on the Sturt Hwy. How depressing.

I was so upset I resolved not to buy any other food for the rest of the day. So I nibbled my way to Mildura on boiled eggs, carrots and a slice of tasty cheese. All washed down with sips of a long black that was getting on for six hours old. Finally pulled in to Mildura around 8pm, paid ten bucks for a tent site at a caravan park on the banks of the Murray River, rolled out my swag beside the car (who needs tents?!?) and popped on the billy to make myself a cup of instant miso soup. While waiting for the water to boil, I headed to the amenities. The Ladies featured a striking fake-plant-fairy-light-sculpture that I loved so much I considered stealing it.
 

Handy Hint #2: When instructed to mix instant miso soup with a small cup of boiling water, make sure the cup is VERY small. Or add a double shot.

Day Two: Mildura to Adelaide (a leisurely five hour drive)

Handy Hint #3: Check the weather report to make sure it’s not going to rain in the middle of the night when you decide to forgo the shelter of a tent and sleep out under the stars…

Today was Gourmet all the way. It started at Mildura’s most famous café, Stefanos, with a truly gourmet hot cross bun (generously sized with big, juicy raisins, perfectly spiced, glazed with marmalade and still warm – I would drive hundreds of kilometres just to get my hands on one of these) and a coffee. Perfect for a drizzly autumn morning. I don’t usually have a great deal of time for men who like to put their faces on bottles of sauce, but it has to be said that the presence of celebrity cook Stefano in the neighbourhood has given the local foodies something worth cooing about. And what a perfect place for Gourmet to be, with the best of fresh fruit, veges, meat, olive oil and wine all locally available. His cafe stocks it all, from blood-orange marmalade to squid-ink pasta. I couldn’t go past the “Murray River gourmet salt”, soft flakes of perfect pale pink harvested from local lakes. Delicious. My sagely frugal (and gorgeous) sister-in-law will be horrified to learn that I paid $8 for a bag of the stuff, but I figure I was merely spending a little of what I saved by sleeping on the ground in the rain last night.
 

I was in no hurry to get to Adelaide, so I pottered along the highway, stopping at wineries, fruit stalls and coffee shops along the way whenever the whim took me. I had a particularly tasty spinach pastie from the bakery at Waikerie (home of Nippys – the makers of the best commercial ice-coffee ever). The filling was a bit too salty but I was totally sold by the caraway seeds on top. Nice.

There is something particularly indulgent about tasting ten different wines at ten thirty in the morning, particularly if (like me) you have no idea about wine. I found a couple of organic bottles near Renmark, and a rather yummy 2005 cab sav as I came through the Barossa. Think I’ll save that one for next time I fall in love.

We often have two breakfasts on weekends. The first is emergency carbo loading of early waking children, usually porridge, often at an inhumane hour. A hour or so later is still a very long time before morning tea, let alone lunch. This weekend’s second breakfast was baked eggs, from a recipe in the Sydney Morning Herald/Age weekend colour magazine last month by Andrew McCo. I ripped the end of his name off, poor love, and the paper doesn’t seem to include the weekend recipes on their zhuszhy site. So sorry, Andrew.

You sweat some finely chopped onion with honey in butter, then add a tin of smooshed up tomatoes, allspice and cinnamon and let it simmer until thick. You can do that the day before because Christ knows you’re not going to do it dressed in your ugg boots at 5:45 am. What you do do at 5:45 is put the oven on about 180C, generously cover the bottom of a ramekin with the warmed sauce, crack on a couple of eggs and then cover with foil and bake until the yolks are still runny. His recipe says about 5 minutes, but his oven is obviously more obedient and reliable than mine. Do keep checking if you’re a fiend for runny yolk, as a couple of minutes can make a huge difference. When it’s ready, spoon on some thick plain yoghurt and dukkah. We were all out of dukkah as it happens, so I substituted sumac and some seriously grassy green olive oil. In my opinion, if you can’t pour a slug of olive oil on your breakfast before 6 am, you may as well just lie down in front of Video Hits and cry.

I first made this a week or so ago, and it was a big hit. When I made it a second time I decided to simmer some canned broad beans along with the tomato sauce. (They’re labelled “foul moudammas” but are not at all foul – a point made by The Canberra Cook’s Cath in a post yesterday covering her visit to Canberra’s middle eastern grocery “Cedars of Lebanon”.)

The beans were a mistake, which explains why Andrew McCo gets the big bucks to write in the Good Weekend and I am a suburban housewife. The heaviness of the beans robbed the eggs of centre stage and their skins added a toothy edge that worked against the silky texture of the original recipe. Also, they didn’t look very pretty:

That yellow is the oil, btw, the yolks are still intact underneath. We ate it scooped up with softened tortillas. And that yoghurty spoon in the photo is all about the pressures of trying to take a picture of your breakfast quickly under the disdainful eye of the folks. It always amuses me to see food blogs criticised for not having publication-standard photography. This food’s for eatin’, peeps.

Coincidently I caught the last bit of SBS Food Safari last night, where O’Meara explored Lebanese food. The last item, running quickly over the credits, was a breakfast pizza called manouche. Owen started groaning about how good it looked – and as we’d coincidently had pizza for dinner and there was coincidently some dough left over I told him he was in luck.

There was no recipe at the SBS site, but it wasn’t too hard to work out. (And there are lots of recipes and suggestions at mankoushe.com and no doubt many other places on the web.) Roll out the dough and spread generously with good olive oil and plenty of za’atar. Cook briefly in a very hot oven, and top with sliced tomato and onion, some olives and a handful of freshly picked Italian parsley and mint. Slurp on some more oil and eat. Feel slightly sad about having no pink picked turnip, labneh or feta to put on top.

The final step is to drive your partner to his job on the other side of town while contemplating the silliness of missing buses by faffing around making cooked breakfasts* on a work day when you woke up at 7:30 instead of one of those days (like yesterday) when the one year old decided that he and everyone else might as well get up at 5. It was bloody delicious though, and because the oven was on Owen scored a calzone for lunch too.

* Except porridge, which is always a good idea.