Summer solstice food

Seasonal baking - Christmas Cake, Christmas Tree Biscuits, our daily bread of sourdough wholemeal, and Psomi, a Greek form of baguette that will be used to make croutons for Caesar Salad.

The origins and reasons for the dating of Christmas are contested, although it seems that it was not entirely coincidental that the period of the northern hemisphere winter solstice was chosen over other possible dates. (Such as March 25 – in itself a 'natural' date because it is close to the northern spring equinox). Be that as it may, in this part of the world the festival falls at the summer solstice, and the foods of the season are very different from those in cold northern latitudes.

I think the summer solstice is worth celebrating in its own right, for this is a special time of the year, when the earth is closest to the sun, and the delicious first summer fruits of garden and orchard have returned again. So now when I think about 'Christmas' food, I think about whatever is best in this season, and making the most of it.

I make an exception for rich fruit cake and spicy biscuits, which are good any time of the year. So on December 23 I baked some Christmas Tree Biscuits (flavoured with ground cardamom and almond essence) and my usual Christmas cake. This is Alison Holst's Easy Mix Christmas Cake from her Christmas baking book, and it really is easy and quick. It has no creaming of butter and sugar, no spices or essences, and yet it is the best as well as the easiest Christmas cake I have ever made, rich, moist and full of flavour from the kilogram of dried fruit it contains, which is soaked in a mixture of rum and sherry for 1-2 days before making the cake. 

 A summer solstice dinner - light, fresh and tasty

My other solstice food is much more seasonal. Now is the time of year to revel in raspberries, strawberries, currants, cherries and other first summer fruits. It is not the time for stodgy northern food, and so once again I look to lands bordering the Mediterranean for inspiration on what it is good to eat that suits our climate and our bodies. Hence we had a light Christmas dinner which owed much more to Greece, Lebanon and Morocco than it did to England at any time of the year. There was a salad of asparagus and avocado dressed with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing flavoured with the Moroccan herb and spice mix za'atar, a pâté of butter beans, tzatziki (grated cucumber and chopped dill in thick yoghurt), olives and a delicious Neudorf sheep cheese. The pâté and tzatziki were scooped up with pita bread which was crisped in the oven.

Dessert was the remains of the raspberry trifle (made with the first picking from our raspberry canes) which was served to guests on Christmas Eve. I put thin layers of fresh raspberries and raspberry jam made from last year's crop between the thick layers of sponge cake that has been well sprinkled with sherry, make a thick custard to go on top of that, and top it all with with a layer of whipped cream decorated with fresh berries. It never fails to please! 

 Christmas Tree Biscuits are so-called because (if they are cut into suitable shapes and have a hole made in them before they are baked) they make good tree decorations. I iced some, sprinkled them with silver cashous,  and hung them on a branch of holly for a seasonal decoration.

 

Baking Belgium (or Belgian) biscuits

 Noelani is thrilled at baking her first batch of Belgium Biscuits

The only ingredient from the Eco Garden in this classic New Zealand biscuit recipe is the raspberries in the home-made raspberry jam filling. Mind you, that is well worth having if these biscuits are to taste their best.

After making them for the first time in ages, at the request of my young American friend Noelani (who conceived a passion for them when she first came to New Zealand to study earlier this year) I remembered how very good they are when home-made. They are also more work to make than most biscuits, so I am lucky that my mother took the time and trouble to make them for us when we were young. She also used the biscuit dough part of this recipe as the basis for the gingerbread people and animals that we used to make for fund-raising fairs. After they were baked to a crisp and shapely biscuit she would ice them with a white icing, and we kids would decorate them with eyes and noses made with currants, mouths of red glace cherry slices, and sprinkles of hundreds and thousands.

In hunting out a recipe for the biscuits I went first to the Edmonds Cook Book, where they are called Belgium Biscuits, and then to Alexa Johnston's Ladies a Plate Traditional Home Baking, where they are called Belgian Biscuits. I knew that the name had been changed from German biscuits during World War I, in an outbreak of patriotic nominal lunacy, so hoping to find which was the original or correct name, I consulted David Veart's story of New Zealand cooking, First Catch Your Weka. On p. 225 he says that German biscuits became Belgium biscuits in honour of the 'brave little Belgium' of Allied propaganda. He then gives a recipe supplied by a Miss Baigent to the Town and Country Patriotic Women Workers Cookery Book, which was published in Palmerston North in 1917.

This recipe is not the same as the one which Johnston obtained from the 1945 edition of the Women's Institute Home Cookery Book, where it is called Belgian Biscuits. The change from noun to adjective may be more euphonious (and more in line with the original name, which was German not Germany biscuits) but now that I know what the original name was and why it was given I think I will stick with that one.

Baigent's 1917 recipe had ground rice as well as flour, a phenomenal amount of butter (1 and 1/4 lb), much less spice, no cocoa, and brown sugar is not specified for the sugar measure. The Women's Institute and Edmond's recipes have all the same ingredients, with the Women's Institute one having more butter and sugar. Noelani and I made that recipe, with the minor alteration of less cocoa, pure white icing, and a hundreds and thousands topping. 

These are very sociable biscuits to make, with lots of opportunities for working together rolling and cutting the dough, sandwiching the baked biscuits together with jam, and icing and decorating the tops. Good fun for friends, partners or parents and children to do together and keep this Kiwi classic going for another century.

Noelani cuts up butter and Christine adds the weighed measure

of brown sugar to the mixing bowl.

 BELGIUM BISCUITS

Ingredients
1. Biscuits
225g butter
225 g brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
2. Filling
raspberry jam
3. Icing
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
red glace cherries; hundreds and thousands


Method


Cream the softened butter and the sugar until pale. Beat in the egg.
Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix to form a soft dough.
Cover the dough and chill it in the fridge for 2 hours, or overnight.
When ready to bake the biscuits, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and grease two baking trays with butter.
Divide the dough in half, return one half to the fridge and knead the other half on a floured board until it is malleable enough to roll out.
Roll it out on a lightly-floured bench or board until it is 3 mm thick, and cut it into circles about 5 cm wide. (If you don't have a cutter this wide, use a glass or tea cup which is the right size.)
Repeat with the second measure of dough, putting the circles on the greased trays as you work, until all the dough is used up.
Bake the biscuits for 10-12 minutes, rotating the trays halfway through, until they are firm on top, a little brown underneath, and giving off a spicy baked smell.
Cool the biscuits on a wire rack while you make the icing by sifting the icing sugar into a bowl and mixing it with the lemon juice and a little hot water (add slowly) to make a spreadable mix. If you are topping the biscuits with glace cherries, cut them in half.
When the biscuits are cold, ice half of them and decorate them with cherries or a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands.
When then icing has set, spread the non-iced biscuits with raspberry jam, and sandwich pairs of biscuits together.

Australian wildflower walks

The Eco Gardener

in Molonglo Gorge, 

20 km from Canberra.

I'm back from Australia, where I had a wonderful time seeing friends, taking part in the Agri-Food Research Network conference, and (of course) spending lots of time looking at plants, both domestic and wild. It was a great time of year to be seeing wildflowers, and eastern Australia has been getting so much rain lately it was the greenest I have ever seen it. That was good for the flowers as well.

On December 4^th I was taken for a walk up a beautiful gorge near Canberra, the Molonglo Gorge. It is quite high up (for Australia) – nearly 600 metres above sea level – and I was surprised how many of the small herbaceous plants I saw were cousins to New Zealand plants growing at lower altitudes (and latitudes). 

 A view of Molonglo Gorge

These included the Wahlenbergia genus (one species of which is named the Australian bluebell and another the NZ bluebell, and they are indeed in the the same family – Campanulaceae – as the European bluebells, although their blue flowers are much more open and not bell-shaped), Dianella, Helichrysum, Craspedia, Mazus, Pratia and Cotula.

 The Australian Bugle, 

Ajuga australis.

 An Australian hebe - no idea 

which one - please help!

 A manuka or Leptospermum

- possibly grandiflorum -

but I'm happy to corrected on that.

 A Dianella or flax lily -

probably D. revoluta

Flowering shrubs with NZ relations included Hebe and Leptospermum (the manuka genus). I also saw a wattle which displayed a habit which quite a few New Zealand shrubs have – radically different juvenile and adult foliage. 

A red-stemmed wattle 

displaying juvenile and 

mature foliage.

 Hibiscus trionum

Wandering near the coast at Thirroul on December 9^th I saw Hibiscus trionum growing wild at the beach, as it does in northern New Zealand. I always thought this was New Zealand's native hibiscus, so was surprised to see it there, but with a little research when I got home I discovered that the experts now think it is not native at all, although how it got to Aotearoa is unclear. As it is found in Europe, its Australian lineage may also be doubtful. A more authentically Down Under seaside plant is what is known as New Zealand spinach here and Warrigal Greens there. Either way its scientific name is Tetragonia tetragonioides and it makes good eating. 

NZ Spinach or 

Warrigal Greens

My coastal wildflower walk was crowned by finding a tall ground orchid flowering freely across a hill of spoil covering a long-abandoned mine site. The bush had grown back, and so had these beautiful little freckled flowers. New Zealand has ground orchids too, which grow in some challenging alpine places, but they are very tiny and obscure compared to the Hyacinth Orchid.

Dipodium punctatum, 

the Hyacinth Orchid.

The Eco Gardener in Oz

No space is wasted in this inner city Melbourne front garden.

Crops growing in the garden include tomatoes, beetroot, spring onions and herbs.









I went to Melbourne on Tuesday to catch up with friends I had not seen for ages before going on to Canberra for the Agri-Food Research Network conference which starts next Monday. In the inner city Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, just down the road from my friend Gitanjali's place, I found this well-planted little front garden which was looking very healthy and promising. Most houses in this part of town have very little land front or back, and as the front faces a busy road and is not suitable for relaxation - why not make it productive? This was not the only front garden I saw in the area which had some food plants growing. I can't say how recent this development is, or if it represents a major trend, but at least some Melburnians are now rejecting the 'ornamental front/useful back' approach to gardening which has been dominant in both New Zealand and Australia for decades.

Community gardening is a trend which has certainly grown rapidly in both countries in the past decade, wherever suitable sites can be found. I visited the Railway Park community garden in Queanbeyan this morning, and enjoyed a delicious orange and poppy seed muffin baked by my gardening friend Katrina for morning tea for her fellow gardeners, and for the expert on water-saving techniques who came to lead a workshop in the garden. The vacant land beside railway lines has been used for allotment style gardening in Northern Europe for over a century, and it is good to see this resource being utilised Down Under.

Four scenes from the Railway Park Community Garden.