Our foremothers made jam in prodigious quantities. All
the farm produce that couldn’t be immediately consumed was preserved in
some way – by pickling, salting or jam-making. Jam was particularly
useful, as well as delicious. A slice or two of bread and jam is a
wonderful ‘filler’ at the end of a meal. Before you shudder, bear in
mind that those hard-working people consumed far more calories to get
them through the day than we, in more sedentary times, would need.
Farming meant hard physical labour, not just for parents, but for any
child old enough to contribute.
My copy of the Barossa Cookery Book, (first published c.1917) gives
awesome quantities in some of the recipes, like this one for Melon Jam –
24 pounds of melon, 20 pounds of sugar, ½ pound preserved ginger….it
must have been a big preserving pan!
I’m told that some women made large batches like this in the copper…
Jam-making had to be done when the fruit was ripe, usually the
hottest time of the year, and was done on a wood fired stove. Somebody
had to keep a close eye on the pan for several hours, to make sure it
didn’t burn – burnt jam is horrible.
Often a task for one of the children, the consequences of inattention
were dire – fruit and firewood were free, but sugar – and preserving
pans – had to be bought.
Almost anything could be made into jam, and there were many ingenious
ways to stretch out the fruit. Carrot jam relied on a few oranges or
lemons to add flavour; the addition of lemon or ginger made the bland
pie-melon more appetising. Pie melons were a staple crop back then, for
actual pies as well as jam. Very easy to grow, and HUGE in size.
Quince jam, apricot jam, peach jam, fig jam, grape jam, and gallons
of plum jam – well-stocked pantry shelves were a source of justifiable
pride to the thrifty housewife.
Cheek by jowl with the jam would be jars of pickles and chutney, and
bottles of sauce and relish – all valued to dress up the ubiquitous
mutton that turned up at nearly every meal. Vegetables, especially
beans, could be salted in earthenware jars.
I still have the patent bean
slicer my mother used – it clamped to the table like a mincer – and
remember helping to salt beans. Mum knew full well that the beans didn’t
have too many vitamins left by the time the salt was soaked out of
them, but what can you do when the garden is full of beans?
Another nutritionally dodgy habit was the custom of adding a pinch of
soda to the saucepan when cooking peas or beans – it keeps them looking
nice and green, but destroys most of their vitamin content in the
process. We know better now.
I loathed green beans as a child, with good reason. String beans, as
they were called then, have a long fibrous strip running down each side
of the pod. Unless they were carefully ‘topped and tailed’, peeling off
the strings in the process, they were disgusting to eat!
Modern plant breeding seems to have eliminated the stringy bits, and now I love them.
The advent of Fowlers Vacola Bottling outfits was a welcome addition
to food preserving. Joseph Fowler had begun with a fruit bottling
business in his Melbourne backyard, and by 1915 had formed the company
of J. Fowler & Co., producing home bottling kits. These comprised a
stove-top sterilizer, glass bottles, rubber rings, tin lids, clips, and a
thermometer.
At first Fowler sold his kits door-to-door from the back of a cart.
During the Depression Fowlers Kits became a household name, and in 1934
Fowlers was registered as a public company. Housewives all over the
country were encouraged to bottle their own produce by ‘Mrs B. Thrifty’
in the Fowlers ads.
Almost everything was preserved in the glass bottles, which
were vacuum sealed by heating on the wood stove. Mum preserved rabbit
and chicken meat, all kinds of vegies, even mushrooms, and fruit in a
thick sugar syrup.
‘Bottling’ quickly became an art form – there were competitions at
local and State Agricultural Shows for the most decorative jars, and
some women spent hours arranging carefully cut portions of carrot and
parsnip in rows.Then botulism was discovered, and the dangers of
preserving vegetables outweighed the benefits.
When I had a family to feed I used to make lots of jam, but the need
passed until more recently, when I had a market stall and sold homemade
jam – and very popular it was too.
For a while I enjoyed making all
kinds of jams and jellies, relishes too. I got sick of it in the end,
yet it was a far more pleasant process than it used to be, with a gas
stove, and a freezer, so fruit could be stored for cooler weather.
I still make jam now and then, not too much, because I don’t need the
extra calories, but when you have a lovely crop of quinces or figs,
what’s a girl to do?
