Kelly over at The Occasional Epicure has tagged me for the Childhood Memories meme.
This tag has passed down through the hands of blogger royalty. Pascale tagged Clotilde who tagged Adam who tagged Augustus Gloop who tagged Kelly who tagged me. It is such an honour to follow these bloggers.
I grew up on a farm between Augusta and Margaret River in Western Australia. Like many people from my generation we were a large family with little money. Which I guess was a good thing as we didn't get to indulge in lots of sugary drinks and sweets.
These are the five foods I miss from my childhood.
Blue manna crabs
My maternal grandparents lived 50 miles away at Busselton, one of the most beautiful places in the world. They lived on the Busselton beach before there was a road between the houses and the beach. We would walk outside the back door and over the sand dune and onto the beach.
Most Sundays we would visit my grandparents and when it became dark my grandfather would take us crabbing. It was always a family expedition with Mum's brother and my cousins joining us. My grandfather would walk along the waters edge with a scoop on a long pole which was called the crabbing net. Behind him were all the grandchildren, the little ones carrying torches to spot the crabs with and the bigger kids carrying buckets of sea water. My grandfather would quickly scoop up the crab before it could escape and drop it into the bucket of sea water.
The other adults would make a fire on the beach with driftwood. This served two purposes. One to keep us warm and secondly and more importantly, to cook the crabs. The catch would be tipped into a large bucket set over the fire and when the crabs were cooked we would all troop back to my grandparents house where my grandmother would have spread newspaper on the table with salt and pepper and lemons cut into quarters. The crabs would be dumped on the middle of the table and we would all sit at the table eat fresh crab until we could eat no more.
Marron
This is a fresh water crayfish native to the rivers of South Western Australia. It is now farmed commercially in the region. Again it is my grandfather responsible for this food memory. Every year I would spend a couple of weeks holiday with my grandparents. Totally by myself - no brothers or cousins to distract their attention away from me! Sometimes my grandfather would hitch up his caravan, put his little rowboat on top of the car and we would drive to his secret spot by the river where we would camp overnight. When we arrived he would put the boat into the water and we would row out into the middle of the river where he would drop the marron nets. Next morning we would row back out to bring up the nets and our booty of marron.
Peas
Living on a farm we didn't always have access to quality fruit and vegetables so my mother had quite a large garden area with various vegetables planted in nice straight rows. The row of corn screened the entire garden from the house . My brother and I were particularly drawn to the pea vines. These peas were the variety called English peas or shell peas. You shell the pod to remove the peas inside which are then cooked, often with a sprig of mint and served with a knob of butter. Not many peas made it to the table as my brother and I spent many an afternoon, hidden by the row of corn, crouching alongside those vines searching for the pod that was almost ready for picking. It was important to pick them just before they were ready for the table and before my mother had a chance to pick them for dinner. We had quite a little production line going. Pick the pod, split it open, run your finger down the inside to release the peas and quickly eat the tender sweet little morsels, then hide the pod in the corn patch before my mother came into the garden.
Mashed potato on white bread
Take a slice of fresh white bread (delivered to the front gate daily by the baker), slather it with butter and top with mashed potato. This made my mother furious when I did this at the dinner table because she said it was bad manners. She denies it to this day but many times she would slap it out of my hands as I went to take a bite.
Watermelon
My paternal grandfather was also a farmer. When he retired off the farm and went to live in the suburbs he had quite a large garden area where he grew grapes, rock melon and watermelon. He loved to come and stay at our farm and relive his own farming days. When his visit coincided with summer he would arrive with watermelons and liquorice allsorts. I like liquorice allsorts now but at the time I didn't so I always went for the watermelon. His watermelons were the sweetest and pinkest you could grow. We would sit on the front steps eating the watermelon slices, our faces and shirts covered in sticky juice, seeing who could spit the seeds the furtherest.
Crabs and marron and peas and watermelon and mashed potato on white bread are all available today. They don't taste the same. It is the people I shared the food with that made the food special.
And now I get to tag three people and I chose.
1. Melissa
2. Kurikuri girl
3. Rainey
