Joyce

Joyce McClure (née Slender), who preferred to be known as ‘Joy’, was the youngest of the nine children born to our grandparents. She was definitely a ‘mistake’ and remained very sensitive about this until the end of her life.

When it came to food she could be described as a reluctant cook but an enthusiastic eater. She loved chocolate, oysters, deep fried potato scallops, fish fingers, 4oz tubs of thick, rich Cahill’s caramel sauce eaten straight from the carton or over ice cream, deep fried Devon and just about anything prepared by her eldest sister Ivy. She hated tea and, with a passionate dislike that could be considered phobic, any type of fowl or chicken flavour. (Curiously one of our cousins shares Joyce’s fowl phobia). This meant that when Billie, her husband and my dad, won a chook at the local pub our neighbours were overjoyed to receive this majestic fowl, something that in the early 1960s, before intensive chicken farming was introduced, was considered a luxury. In return our neighbours, Eileen and Jack McCudden, invited me for a roast chicken Sunday lunch; my first. Despite being served with green peas, another dubious vegetable of childhood, it was memorable; golden and succulent.

Joyce often said that she would have liked to have been a dietitian. She possessed a surprisingly good nutritional knowledge; not that she let this influence her culinary behaviour or eating habits to any great extent. There was an orange tree in the back yard but I don’t remember that we ate the fruit. Perhaps it was bitter. To ensure that I had adequate Vitamin C Joyce use to buy orange flavoured tablets which I gobbled with delight. Our first battle over food began the night after Pa Slender died when I was forced to eat over-cooked, mushy green beans which I promptly regurgitated and have subsequently regarded with suspicion to this very day. (To be edible they must be simmered for no more than 1 minute and then dressed generously with salt and lemon infused olive oil). Cottage / shepherd’s pie, or braised steak accompanied by lumpy mashed potato, appearing on the dinner table inevitably led to tears (mine) and a row with Joyce, Billie or both. However there were many things that Joyce cooked or baked that were delicious like the little red cans of Heinz Vegetables and Bacon i.e. baby food, delicate lemon flavoured melting moments, crisp potato pancakes, Devon and mashed potato rolls or rice-a-riso for birthday parties! In later years I looked forward to her All-Bran and apricot loaf. She made it for me when ever I visited Sydney and sometimes even posted it to me. To this day I make it regularly and love it topped with Parmigiana Reggiana or simply butter if I am feeling particularly indulgent.

Billie cooked well but infrequently. He was heavy handed with butter and cheese when he made baked beans and consequently they were delicious. Skilled at wrapping them around the end of a wooden spoon, he made sweet crisp brandy snaps. He was a dab hand at turning out perfect chocolate curls to decorate the Black Forest cakes that I made. His Christmas cakes were always good and sometimes the Christmas puddings were as well. Each Christmas Day he re-boiled the pudding that he had made some weeks earlier, suspended from a piece of sturdy dowel, in the old laundry copper. As he removed the calico wrap from one particularly beautiful pudding it stood gloriously proud for a moment or two before disintegrating into a heap of fruit and cake. The copper must have gone off the boil. Billie was furious. It was still really nice with ice cream and custard though.

When he was about 30 Billie worked away from home quite often. After one of these projects, the ultimately controversial North West Cape in Western Australia, he came home with a recipe for jacket baked potatoes. Eating potato skins was not so much regarded with suspicion as unheard of in those days. The 3 of us congratulated ourselves on our culinary adventure when Billie made his first batch. With a few adaptations these became a firm favourite of ours particular when the hot baked potato flesh was scooped out, blended with a sharp cheese, packed back into the potato shells and returned to the oven to bubble and brown. Joyce made then every Christmas; so do I. Billie also experimented with olives, salami and mortadella before many of his Australian contemporaries. He might not have been so keen if he knew that mortadella roughly translates into English as ‘dead donkey’. As willing as he was to try new and different food, Joyce never did get around to telling him that the cheesecake that he relished contained real cheese!

Other influences changed the way we ate at home, for instance Chinese food. In the days before cling wrap and disposable food containers we trekked to the local Chinese restaurant on many a Saturday night with our saucepans and returned home with them brimming with curried prawns and rice, sweet and sour pork and sometimes a prawn omelette. Joyce and Billie would put away a few glasses of beer which led inevitably to a night of singing around the piano or singing along to old 78 RPM recordings of Mario Lanza or the Great Caruso.