Free The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn

with animals and we used their produce daily. If only we had been market gardeners! But my mother was German, not Chinese, and it was animals that she and my brothers liked. (Although my father’s only brother, Doug, and he were found, when they were about ten and twelve, hawking fruit they had gathered from neighbours in a wheelbarrow around the streets. This was firmly stopped by their mother, who laughingly told the story to me years later. But something must have stuck, because Doug ended up with a fruit shop and his son Rob still owns it.)
    My mother’s attitude to food was, I think, inherited from Granny. In our house, food mattered; but not so much toour father, who, my mother said, was reared mainly on jelly. In fact, it is hard to imagine Nanna Brinkworth cooking anything at all except toast and eggs. The food we had – its quality, its quantity, its taste, its lavishness, its availability, its use for hospitality, its economy, its freshness and its ability to nourish and comfort – was important to the five of us. My brothers are cooks. They have pantries full of preserves that they have made. Tucker has a room-sized freezer. To enter it, you must step over a frozen shark. The walls are lined with shelves of wild duck and there are kilos of venison, beef and other unnamed things.
    The last time I opened the door, the cool-room had a side of venison hanging on a hook. (Where was the other half?) There was a haunch of beef hanging, too. Who are these meat-eaters? His friends, that’s who, and the duck shooters who come by the hundreds in the shooting season. Meat-eaters, all.
    Tucker is handy with a knife. One Sunday, when I was staying with him at home at Watervalley, near Kingston, two hours south of Adelaide, he quietly went out, killed a steer, skinned it, cut it up, and put it into the back of his ute. He drove it home and hung the pieces of it in the cool-room. When I told his wife, Patricia, I had seen him drive in with a lot of meat, she said, ‘You know, not one of the men on this place could do that alone. He is sixty and he goes out and does that, rather than ask somebody to go with him and help him. All because it is Sunday.’
    I once went with Tucker to a wholesale butchers’ outfitter. He bought a few knives; one was a boning knife and, inspired, I bought one too, and very useful it is. He bought jars of spices and some powder I didn’t know about. (Another of his secret weapons, I suppose. It looked like blood-and-bone fertiliser. Maybe it was gravy thickener.) Naturally, for all this meat, he’s got a boning room full of knives and cleavers. Maybe he’s got a saw – I don’t remember.
    One day recently, when Patricia was recovering from a small stroke, she was in bed, trying to read a thick book. Tucker walked in and saw her problem. He said, ‘Give the book to me.’ He took it to the kitchen and, with a carving knife, cut it through the spine into halves. Then he took it to her and said, ‘I often have to do this with my own books. It will make it easier for you. Just put the two bits back together when you’ve finished.’
    Our youngest brother Peter’s pantry is full of dark blood-red plum jam, jars of fig jam by the dozen, and jars of pickled figs and bright orange apricot jam. He gathers much of this fruit from wild trees on roadsides and old farms. He knows where the trees are and when they fruit.
    Bill, our middle brother, cooks for dozens of people when he takes them over deserts on safaris. He has been along the Canning Stock Route many times and over the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia; the Simpson Desert; Sturt Stony Desert; and to Maralinga and Emu,the atomic bomb sites; and all over the rest of Len Beadell’s exploration tracks. On all of these trips he has cooked roasts, casseroles and stews, curries and fricassees, and to accompany these he has made steamed puddings and baked custards for dessert.
    I’ve got a few jars of pickles and marmalades on the pantry