34 GOURMET TRAVELLERProduce
ILLUSTRATION DAWN TAN.I
never met Grandma Peggy. She was
a breeder of racing greyhounds, a
wearer of pearls, a chicken farmer
and a wonderful cook. I feel I should
wear white conservator’s gloves as I open
her copy ofThe 21st Birthday Cookery Book
of The Country Women’s Association in
Tasmania. It was once spiral-bound, but
each time I open it another batter-stained
page works itself free.
I try to divine things about her from
pages made brittle with years of floury
fingers and stray drops of lemon juice.
The biggest mystery being which of the
equally stained fruit cake recipes was
her favourite. The page I’ve contributed
the greatest patina to is the shortcake – a
buttery thing cooked in a pair of shallow
tins and sandwiched around whatever
takes your fancy. I bake one, filled with
lemon butter, for our tiny staff Christmas
party – just Matt, my husband and farming
partner, our mate Jess who comes weekly
to weed and eat excellent lunches, and
our two girls who’ll join us when the
school bus arrives.When I was hairdressing, our work
Christmas parties were mad affairs, begun
with a small ration of decent Champagne
followed by lurid Margaritas in awful
Mexican restaurants, bad dancing in
terrible nightclubs, and
even worse mornings-
after. Being a bit older,
a little wiser, and with
December being such
a busy time on the farm, a
pot of tea was my drink of
choice for this year’s party.
It was perfect weather.
We’d put in a good day’s
work and set the table
under a gum tree by
the dam with pretty
plates, teacups and that
shortcake – now dusted with caster sugar
and sitting prettily on a gilded plate. As
Matt, Jess and I sat down to pat ourselves
on the back for a good spring’s work, the
postman turned up with one of those little
cards telling us we had a package at the
post office – in some insult to the regionalThe postman
turned up telling
us we had a
package, and
since the card
read “wine”, wild
horses couldn’t
have kept Matt
from retrieving it.people of Tasmania we have to collect
heavy mail from town – and since the
description of this heavy mail was “wine”,
wild horses couldn’t have kept Matt from
going to retrieve it.
Jess and I sat, pooh-poohing Matt’s
bad manners as we gazed at the cooling
cake. But, having broken some land-speed
records, he quickly returned, with the
kids collected from the bus and a case
of wine, and was soon forgiven.
About six months earlier, a friend
had brought someone to our farm to taste
herbs for gin, and promised us a thank-you
wine from a Tassie project he was involved
with. The first case he sent went on a long
trip and returned to him as a sodden
box of broken glass, but his second
attempt serendipitously saved us from
a sacrilegiously teetotal Christmas party.
(It turns out the Brian field blend pairs
magnificently with lemon-curd shortcake.)
We talked, as you do, of the year that
was, of dreams for the year to come, and
enjoyed a window of tranquillity, until
a gatecrasher arrived.You might expect a
family member, or the neighbours who’d
helped us move pigs or pot seedlings, to
have seen us enjoying wine in the paddock
and considered themselves deserving of
staff drinks, but our gatecrasher was of the
feathered kind, a young rooster destined,
merely because of his gender, for the pot.
Jess and my girls tamed the rooster
with shortcake crumbs and saved him
from his coq au vin
destiny by naming him
Brian after the bottles
he strutted among.
I still haven’t solved
the mystery of whether
Grandma Peggy preferred
the Fruit Cake (Light)
from Mrs M Holmes
of Irishtown, or Fruit
Cake (Rich) by Mrs W
Spaulding of Dunalley.
Toward the end of each
year I promise myself I’ll
find time to bake them, serve them to
my mother and see if we can figure it
out, but it seems with the rush to care
for a December farm I’m destined to
console myself with a quick shortcake and
delicious wine with a rooster under a tree.
Which is not a bad compromise at all.●A farm Christmas party means cake, surprise wine, and a
rooster spared the chop, writesPAULETTE WHITNEY.
O, Christmas tea