This week my thoughts are on the worst month of the year in Canberra, because that is the month I am living in right now.
It’s simple. It’s winter. There is no snow. The only holidays are school holidays and most people who take them have headed over the mountains and are currently at the beach, where it’s less cold. Last year I did this for a week and my July as so much better. This year I spent a bit more money and flew to Perth for a science fiction convention.
For northern hemisphere folks, it’s January with the memory of Christmas half a year ago rather than days ago. No snow, but much black ice.
It used to be worse. When I first moved to Canberra the only fruit in winter was stale apples and amazing oranges. The first two weeks of oranges were wonderful but it became very dull very quickly. Now we have new varieties of citrus, plus some clever folks realised that all those farms near the coast have different fruit. I bought dekopon and bananas and finger lime yesterday at the market. I can get through July more easily with dekopon and bananas and one luxury fruit.
Also, Canberrans do dinner parties. I don’t get many of those (some people are worried about disability cooties, some about the cooties that older folks bring, some about the cooties generously distributed by childless women, and far too many about Jew cooties), but those I do get make me very happy and make the month tolerable. And some friends visit me. I am about to make vast amounts of chicken soup to feed myself and those friends.
That chicken soup has a second purpose. I suspect lovage might have been replaced with celery or vice versa in some types of chicken soup. This theory is based on not nearly enough knowledge at this tage. Thanks to some Polish friends I have heaps of lovage and thanks to Fyskwick Market I have celery leaf and enough boiling chicken and etc to make two big pots of soup, one with lovage and one with celery. This is just one step of a path I began to walk when the same friends who sent me the lovage sent me (for my 60th birthday) a 1682 book that clearly and wonderfully walks all the way through Polish court food of that time. I’m pulling together lots of things from this and from other sources and from chats with those same friends. One of my more interesting discoveries is that the antisemitism in Poland in the 1920 and 1930s led to poorer food being labelled as ‘Jewish’ in at least one city and led to some really interesting Jewish cooking techniques that were modified when families reached Australia. This chicken soup is, then, a small step in a long journey.
It’s a handy step, because its really difficult to be entirely miserable when one has excellent chicken soup.