Apple Crumble Generation Two

 

Moving on to the next generation, Mum Enid, was the third daughter. She was a wonderful mother and a hard worker but she would be the first to say she was not a cook. I doubt that Nana had time to teach her daughters to cook or, if she had, the enthusiasm would have worn off by daughter number three. Maybe Mum did some fancy cooking when she was first married and when her family was small. But she went on to have eight sons and five daughters. Some of my earliest memories were of the time before my sisters were born. I had an older brother and five younger ones before my next sister was born.

Big families were the norm around us. Most of my aunts and uncles on my father’s side had six to nine children and many families at our small Catholic school were also large. We took big families for granted. Our cousins were our best friends. We visited each other often and also met at my grandparent’s farm at Traveston. I think people were surprised at how well-mannered we were and we were certainly kept in line. However, when a couple of groups of cousins got together, it brought out the devil in all of us. We did things when our cousins visited that we would never have done alone because we knew that the adults were sitting and talking in the kitchen and no taking much notice of us. The adults, like us kids, were best friends and good talkers.

The kitchen was the heart of the house. As the family grew, we moved a couple of times until, when I was about 14, Dad built in Turner St, Scarborough. The family lived there for 47 years – and the house is still standing strongly to this day. The front has never changed but a deck and a swimming pool have been added and the inside is unrecognisable. It would be rare that there weren’t visitors around the long specially-made red laminex table on the weekend, drinking strong, sweet tea and munching on toast cooked in the slow combustion stove. My brother Denis once wrote about the kitchen as a place where issues were resolved, hurts were healed, and ambitions were polished.

Mum was the first of her sisters and sisters-in-law to have a drivers licence. Dad was very forward thinking and insisted that Mum needed to be self-sufficient and able to cope if he wasn’t around. I was always fascinated by her small hands on the steering wheel – but they were very practical hands as well. I remember that she got her hand stuck in the wringer of the washing machine and I had to call a neighbour to release it. Her hand was never quite the same again. To augment his Public Service salary and manage expenses, especially school fees, Dad always had a patch of pineapples or bananas and it was not unusual for Mum to take on the heavy work there at busy times like planting or picking. One patch was at Kobble Creek and we sometimes stopped at the creek to cool down and clean up on the way home.

As you could imagine, there was not much time for gourmet cooking. We always had meat and at least three veges, dessert and we could ‘fill up on bread’ if we were still hungry. Mum was probably better at desserts than main meals. Most nights after the dishes were done and the babies had been put to bed, Mum would prepare what we called ‘pudding’ for the next day, pop it in the oven, and let the fire go out. In the morning, there was a bread-and-butter pudding or baked rice or an apple pie ready to go into the fridge. On washing day, a whole day’s work, we often had rice and prunes because these both took most of the day to cook. Jelly and custard was also a staple. Homemade ice-cream was an occasional treat because it took hours to make, freeze, beat, and refreeze and yielded two silver ice-block trays – a very small serve for a grateful family.

However, like her mother Mum also had the old-faithful apple crumble. She taught me the proportions for the crumble, one of butter, two of sugar, three of flour which always worked, not matter what the unit used. She managed to simplify even Nana’s simple recipe:

·        A tin of pie apples, aided by her trusty can opener

·        Her 1 + 2 + 3 crumble mixture

·        Overnight in the oven or cooked during the day if someone was there to keep the stove going.

Enid Hardy O’Rourke 1920 - 2012

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