Tag Archives: Elizabeth David

When the fridge died

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Of course it happened in the small hours of Friday morning. Of course it happened not only in summer, but during a mini heatwave. Our fridge stopped working. I discovered this about 8:00 am when I went to add ice cubes to my water bottle and found the tray awash and the freezer contents squishy.

The fridge was old. Over the years a few bits snapped off and it acquired the odd small crack, but it was such a reliable workhorse. We knew its days were numbered, we knew we’d need to replace it sooner rather than later. But still.

I bought the new fridge online. Where we buy everything these days. The earliest it could be delivered was Tuesday. It was Friday now—that meant four days without refrigeration. Not ideal, but we’d manage … wouldn’t we? After all millions of people in many parts of the world don’t have access to cold storage.

The world’s first ice-making machine was invented in the 1850s by James Harrison, a Scottish-born Australian. A process with huge implications for food, medicine and science. ‘Ice within the tropics will soon be looked upon as a necessary of life,’ ran a report in the Illustrated London News in 1858.

Our sad old fridge

Nothing in the defrosting freezer compartment was salvageable. I cleared it out. As for the fridge, by Friday afternoon the butter was runny, the cheese soft, the beer warm and the yoghurt on the turn. Anything unopened was kept, everything else went in the garbage; I shuddered to see all that food waste.

What I was unprepared for was how unsettling it was without a functioning fridge—and how much it disrupted our routines. We had to think through and plan not just meals, but every snack and every cup of tea. Without any means of cool storage we had to buy what we wanted to eat when we wanted to eat it. The milk we bought for breakfast had to be tipped down the sink after a couple of hours. I couldn’t make a cheese and tomato toastie unless I threw out the ingredients I’d just bought once I’d eaten it. It was a hot, incredibly humid weekend and in the end, we went out for dinner, we ate a lot of sushi, and the whole experience has prompted me to start re-reading Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months The Social History of Ice and Ices.

The new fridge arrived yesterday. Yay! The delivery guys took away the old one. Hopefully parts of it will get recycled. At the bottom of a cupboard I found the original receipt—we’d bought our old model fourteen years ago almost to the day.

One last detail. If you’re interested in the history of refrigeration (I am) check out Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley.

 

No scones for us

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No scones for us—sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland, doesn’t it?

A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time … ”

Wednesday afternoon in downtown Sydney we were after a pot of tea and scones. Neither a difficult nor an unusual quest. But it was not to be. At the Westin in Martin Place the only way to obtain a scone was to order their set afternoon tea at (a minimum) $54 per person. Unimpressed with their brazen upselling, we left the Westin and tried the Sheraton on the Park where we’d had tea and scones before. But we were out of luck there as well. Although scones were on the menu, there were none today. The waitress told us we should have phoned ahead. For a pot of tea and a scone at 2:30 pm on a Wednesday afternoon! What’s going on here? Isn’t peak scone-eating time 3:00-5:00 pm? How long would it take to rustle up a batch?

That’s the thing about scones. They’re easy to make, quick to cook—and cheap. Recipes for scones are in every beginners’ cookbook and older cookbooks frequently offer several recipes—plain, date, fruit, savoury, pumpkin and other varieties. When I make them I use a recipe from an early edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly Basic Cookbook. I don’t do a lot of baking, but if you follow the instructions, there’s not much that can go wrong with scones.

The scone is described in culinary references as a quick bread (i.e. breads and bread-like products leavened with agents other than yeast or eggs—namely baking powder or bi-carbonate of soda.) Quick breads are popular with cooks because they can be made quickly and reliably. Unlike traditional yeast breads which involve a measure of waiting.

Traditionally cooked on a griddle, the scone is thought to have originated in Scotland and migrated south. That may be true. Who knows? What we do know is that, as Elizabeth David wrote in English Bread and Yeast Cookery, ‘once you start on scones, where do you stop?’ She recommends anyone interested in such recipes consult The Scots Kitchen (1929) by Miss F Marian McNeill which devotes some fifteen pages to the subject.

Oatcakes, puftaloons, Australian damper—there’s a huge range of breads and scone-like cakes made without yeast.

Whatever its origins, the scone has become the quintessential afternoon tea accompaniment, perfect with a cup of Assam or Darjeeling. I like my scones hot from the oven with butter and either a thin slice of cheese or a generous dollop of jam—blackcurrant and blackberry are my go-to preserves when it comes to scones.