Keen for dijon

Our tastes have ebbed and flowed in line with historic events, developments in technology, and crossing cultural boundaries.

Words and illustration by Geoff Hocking

I read in the newspaper the other morning that we were about to experience a shortage of olive oil and Dijon mustard. Oh no! How will we ever be able to survive this latest crisis in the global supply chain? I ruminated on what my mother would have used when greasing the pan for her cooking in days gone by. I remember she always kept the outer wrapper from the knobs of butter for greasing her baking trays and a ceramic bowl full of dripping, which never, ever emptied, for frying, roasting and basting. For the younger readers: Dripping was the fat that dripped off the Sunday roast and, when collected before the gravy was made and cooled, became solid. We used to smear this pale yellow paste over slices of toast, add a sprinkle of salt and a smear of tomato sauce – and it was bloody delicious. I once embarrassed my mother when I was only four years old, when we were visiting someone she obviously wanted to impress. I was asked by the nice lady if I would like something to eat. After inspecting the various cakes on offer, with some degree of suspicion, I replied that I would quite like some bread and dripping. My mother turned crimson, her attempt at appearing somewhat proper by pretending that we would only have bread and BUTTER at home was shattered by her guileless second son, who had no understanding of social niceties. I just loved bread and dripping. We had never used olive oil for cooking. It was only ever given to us as a purgative. For cooking, it was dripping. Fried eggs in dripping. Sausages in dripping. Even fish started off sizzling in a bit of dripping, although this method did infuse the product of the open waters with a slightly rural, meaty, farmhouse flavour. In the immediate post-war years (and I mean WWII, not any of the later debacles that our nation has been so foolishly engaged in, but the big one that really upset the apple cart and from which the restrictions on foodstuffs was felt for many years to follow), what was often on the menu would turn the stomach of today’s gourmet generation. As 1950s kids, we occasionally sat at the dinner table and were served a plate of tripe – a flaccid, white piece of meat (I say ‘meat’ with reservations) embellished with a smear of tomato sauce. For the unwary, tripe is the lining of a cow’s stomach, bleached in chlorine to remove any ghastly bits, leaving just one ghastly bit, called tripe. Apart from jellied tongue, or lamb’s brains, there were few more appalling meals that our mother tried to serve us while trying to eke out her weekly budget. Lucky for us the Sunday roast was still an affordable deal, and we sat down to this after church. Roast lamb served with all the veggies, and the dripping was kept in the bowl. On Monday, leftover lamb was put through the mincer and became shepherd’s pie; Tuesday it was mixed with onion and egg and coated with herbed bread-crumbs and became delicious lamb rissoles; and by Wednesday, only cold cuts remained on the bone. We hardly ever had chicken. The arrival of Kentucky Fried heralded a blossoming for the poultry industry, yet for a long time chicken remained a very expensive meal. We only had a roast chook on special occasions. Bland processed meats were the main alternative to the butcher’s fare: the cold germans, strasbourg, heidelberg sausage and frankfurts. The Mediterranean snags remained a mystery. No chorizo, no salami, no cabana, no bologna, no pepperoni, no calabrese, nothing too spicy, just pale, pink British-style snags. We had full-cream milk delivered to our door by the milko – at first scooped into a billy-can but later arriving in a pint glass bottle with a little cardboard stopper. The rich cream sat on the top. One member of every family always got to the milk first and poured cream over their cereal, while the rest got virtual skim milk. If you wanted homogenised milk, you had to get to it quickly and shake the bottle. No almond milk, or low-fat, calcium-enriched, ‘Physical’, ultra-soy or paraben-free, just milk from local cows, via a local dairy. Lamb chops and three veg were the order of almost every day – a fried chop served with mashed potato, beans and usually pumpkin, or carrots. Just the colours: something green, something orange – a balanced diet.

If we were hungry after any meal, mum would just say, “You can fill up on bread and jam”. If we were still hungry because we refused to eat tripe, we just went to bed hungry. The worst threat my mother ever made was, “If you don’t eat it now, it will still be here for you tomorrow”. It never was. My grandmother would place a Salada cracker in a dessert bowl and scoop stewed apples on top. She added a little milk and claimed it was as good as apple pie. Maybe a little salty, but it saved her the tedium of pastry making. I have been attempting to replicate some of my mother’s classic dishes. So far, I have done a reasonable job of making Cornish pasties. I have baked her apple sponge, but am yet to attempt her rice pudding. I will forgo any attempt to try and cook her sago pudding. Maybe my father had eaten sago while serving in New Guinea during the war, but I could see no reason to try and digest such a hideous dish of something that resembled frog’s eggs in peacetime. I must cook her ky-si-min one day – her one attempt at “Asian” cuisine. Beans, mince, carrot and rice all mixed up with chicken noodle soup and curry powder. She always knocked this up in her electric frypan, as woks don’t seem to have reached Golden Square as early as the 1960s. When I consider what is available today, compared with what we had when I was a little chap, it is quite staggering. We have bottles of BBQ sauce from Texas and even Carolina in our fridge. There is a small tray filled with various mustards: whole-grain, Dijon, hot English, mild English; bottles of tahini, fish-sauce, some bloody-hot chilli sauce that makes me sweat and more exotic things that younger members of my family like to splash over everything. Once salt came in a cardboard box labelled Mermaid (with added iodine). Today, we use pink salt from the pink salt lakes in the Mallee. At least that is local, unlike some gourmet salt offerings from Himalaya. Do they really import salt from Mt Everest? Once we ate bread – white or brown – delivered to our door by a bloke in a horse and cart and a wicker basket over his arm. Today we can choose from a vast array of breads, some of which come from far and away – from young Helga or Mr Abbott, stone-ground, mixed grain, seeded and nutted, sour-dough, low GI, high-protein, gluten-free and some full of gluten, crusty, Italianate, French-sticked, hot-bunned and bagelled. Considering the food miles travelled by some items in our pantry, I can do without French Dijon or the Spanish olive oil, but there will always be room for the little gold and red box from Mr Keen – and a bowl full of dripping.