I am crouching over a bed of freshly hoed dirt placing seeds into furrows – fennel, beetroot, peas, radicchio. Sowing seeds makes me think, always, of how my friend Kris would say it was ‘an act of faith in the future’ when we both had gardens in Brisbane all those years ago; hers spectacular, being in an old swimming pool filled with soil, mine less so, being relocated on an almost nightly basis into a giant pile of dirt and bark by brush turkeys.
It’s quite strange really that growing your own food, eating from your garden, is these days something very much out of the ordinary, radical even in that it almost by definition represents a deliberate shunning of the mainstream, yet not so long ago most people with access to a patch of dirt would have done the same as a matter of course, with no second thought as to it being anything other than essential or sensible.
I remember Barry up the road telling me how when he was a kid seventy odd years ago the families in this valley had a communal garden, more like a market garden I suppose, on the creek flats just at the front of his farm; in the rich soil there they grew amazing crops, enough to feed their little community. But when there was a wet winter it would flood, and he has clear memories of rows of cabbages and cauliflowers floating off downstream, beaching themselves in far flung paddocks and getting tangled in barb wire fences to the delight of cows and distant neighbours; ‘after a few of those we gave up on that’. The gardens moved uphill a bit, but still Barry and Beryl, and many others around here, tend a garden daily, and manage to grow most if not all of their own fresh produce, meat and eggs too, the legacy of a different time and place, of a simple and uncomplicated relationship to food, one in which being nourished by what you put in your mouth was a given.
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Last weekend was a weekend of classes and lunches, and the great conversations that we enjoyed around the table in that glorious afternoon light really got me thinking – again – about all this stuff, our relationship to food and recipes and also about baking. I had made fig bread – using our figs slow roasted in balsamic vinegar and honey – to eat with a sweet and fresh carrot soup, and it reminded me of just how important bread was in getting me here.
Twenty years ago, when the first stirrings of restlessness, of a need to be elsewhere, started within me, good bread was very hard to find. There was that amazing Jewish rye bread that I was lucky enough to be able to buy from the corner store, and Silo in Canberra, which used to make the best sourdough I think that even to this day I have ever tasted. I mail ordered a book from America called ‘The Italian Baker’ by Carol Field, and the slow fermented, hearth baked, chewy, dense breads flavoured with wild herbs that she described set me alight with the need to bake for myself. And for years I did, my increasingly rusty tray of stones to super heat my oven coming with me whenever I moved house, as did my sourdough starter which I managed to keep alive for years (killed in the end by leaving it out of the fridge during an excited and impromptu trip to see Jackie French’s garden in NSW). Because the best bread comes from the freshest, least refined flour, this was the start of my quest to trace all my food back to the source, to understand more about what I was eating, and whether it was as good and fresh and delicious as it could be.
Chatting with serious bread bakers is like eating really good bread – it is nourishing. And I think a big part of that is because baking real bread is embedded in a long and genuine tradition of providing crucial sustenance and energy and nourishment, not just to the individual but the community, a tradition of community care if you like, and the best bakers see themselves as custodians of that.
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I know this is a long letter, but a $10 Kindle purchase has reignited in me a passion of another kind, not for baking this time but for a book that I first read many years ago, and borrowed from the library so many times that I rather hoped in the end they’d just give it to me; ‘Lulu’s Provencal Table’ by Richard Olney. A more exuberant and intoxicatingly joyful book about cooking and eating would be hard to imagine and I can almost guarantee that it will change the way you think about cooking. Lulu and her husband owned the Domaine Tempier vineyard near Marseilles, and this book is Olney’s account of Lulu’s famous cooking and hospitality during the 1950’s and 60’s.
Lulu (and Olney) are of a different time and place and sensibility, and Lulu’s cooking is full of things that I suspect we would now see as contradictions; she is at once frugal, tremendously so, but the spirit is one of unfailing generosity. She is a stickler for tradition, because it works and why mess with that, but at the same time intensely creative and independently minded. She doesn’t like gadgets or fuss or things that make life harder than they need to be, and would probably be horrified at all the electricity (and money) that whirs its way through our modern kitchens, yet her food was nuanced and delicious and perfectly technically executed, and mostly cooked on a massive hearth in the kitchen or a simple and small bonfire of vine clippings outside.
There are some marvellous passages in the book that teach us so much – Olney follows Lulu around as she makes her famous bouillabaisse – he is trying to construct a recipe, but Lulu’s feel for what she is doing is so instinctive and embedded in physical and sensory memory that she has trouble explaining when to add a pinch of this, or how much of that, or why an ingredient is used this time but not the next. The ‘recipe’, if you can call it that, runs over six delightful, vexatious pages, and in the end Olney concludes that really, the most important ingredient is the weather.
And how perfect and beautiful is that.