Those Forgotten Skills

Welcome to my first blog. Its certainly taken me a while.

For my inaugural post I have chosen to publish a copy of my column that appears in Dish issue #34 that is just out. 

There’s a tui keeping me company in the tree that shades me and the cicada orchestra is in full swing. The last task of the year has turned into the first of the New Year but what better place to tackle it than on the terrace of my holiday cottage looking out to sea on the first and most glorious day of 2011.

I’ve been toying with several subjects that have had me thinking lately, seafood sustainability for instance, and also considered looking back at the culinary highlights of the year just ended but decided instead to reflect on times well before that.

As usual a tall pile of books; fiction, non fiction and cookery, have accompanied me to the beach. I even have a few extras loaded on my recently acquired ipad – including Remembrance of Things Paris – Sixty Years of Writing From Gourmet Magazine Editors, which although published in 2004, I have only just discovered.

But the one that has captured me the most so far is one that has bought many memories to the fore and further confirmed how much to do with what we eat we now take for granted, how many basic skills are indeed forgotten and how little appreciation most have for good food.

Darina Allen’s latest book, Forgotten Skills of Cooking (Kyle Cathie), also made me feel rather old. As she talks about all the culinary skills we no longer have I realized that I could remember my grandmother and mother carrying out many of the things she talks about. They were experts at utilizing what was available, creating another meal entirely from leftovers, knowing when foods were past their best etc. Nowadays everyone relies on use-by or best before dates, resulting in mountains of perfectly edible food being discarded. We are afraid of food. Back then they didn’t waste so much as a crust of bread.

Neither could they run down to the supermarket for any and every ingredient. But they could go out to the garden and pick fresh vegetables for dinner and make jam with or preserve the abundant fruits of summer. They knew how to sour cream if they needed it, how to turn the rest of the Sunday roast into shepherd’s pie or store potatoes and apples so they lasted through the winter without going green. They also, and this is what I most envy, knew where most if not all of the food they used came from.

My memories extend to observing all these things, but also to the small and pleasurable jobs such as saving the top milk or cream from the top of each milk bottle to have on the porridge next morning, podding peas or cracking walnuts that came from the big tree at the bottom of the garden (this was a mid winter job done in front of the fire). Even remembering to take the butter out of the fridge to allow it to soften in time for breakfast is a lost ‘skill’ – no longer required, thanks, or not, depending how you look at it, to the advent of margarine and then spreadable butter.

I also happily remember mushrooming across friends’ farms and the feast that followed, and blackberry picking under the hot Canterbury sun, when more fat juicy berries found their way into my mouth than into my basket. I realize now of course that what we were doing was foraging – something that has now been reborn as a fashionable trend, though I admit a positive one.

Darina’s book is a valuable record of myriad skills. For anyone born before 1970 it’s a walk down memory lane, for those born after that it’s probably an eye opener. For instance the chapter on poultry deals first with the why’s and how’s of keeping hens, how to dispatch one for the pot and what to do with it from that point on until it gets to the table. There is a great chapter on making sausages and curing pork too but if vegetables and herbs are more of interest then the first chapter on foraging and chapter nine on vegetables, herbs and salads will have you riveted.

Interestingly puddings also take up a chapter. As Darina asks “I can’t quite understand why so many people nowadays think that having dessert is bad for you.” I have such fond memories of my mother’s puddings; gooseberry fool and apple sponge pudding are two that come to mind. Both were made with stewed fruit, the first folded through whipped cream, the latter sitting under a layer of ‘sponge’ that was baked to come out of the oven steaming. All it needed was a generous splosh of cream. It’s hard to imagine that the making of puddings is a forgotten skill but I suspect it almost is. I can’t help thinking that I have failed my children on the pudding front completely. Perhaps that was why they were always so excited when I did produce one when we had guests or on a special occasion. Oh well there are always the grandchildren when and if they come along.

I haven’t made any resolutions this New Year but perhaps a good one for all of us would be to hone a few of these forgotten skills – after all you never know when one might come in handy.