COUSIN DIDI

 "Hot crumpets with jam and butter. What could be more ambrosial?" - William Boyd

The year I was ten, my Cousin Didi descended on us. She came every other summer and stayed a couple of weeks. She was a perpetual student.  This year she’d been taking cooking lessons from a college. "Lok at me, I'm coo-king" she warble. She always smelled like lavender. She  liked to crush lavender in her hands and crumble it into her shoes and over her hair. She said it made her feel  “one” with all that lived and breathed. She liked to sit under the willow tree and  count the leaves. She was  child of the air.

“ I won’t cook with anything that has eyes,”  Didi said. She didn’t mind  sausages though. “They don’t have eyes.” So we had lots of sausages. But not with eggs, cause she thought  eggs looked like they were eyes…..

One afternoon we walked down to the store to buy small canning jars and peaches. We gushed over those peaches,  juice ran down our hands.  Didi liked to walk slowly, breathing in the air and remarking on how  “groovy” the world felt.  She  hummed  songs as we shuffled along. Her dark blonde hair floated behind her like  a web.

If we found flowers  growing  over fences she’d pick them, stuffing them behind her ears, and mine. Sometimes she brought a piece of chalk and she’d draw a hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of  fussy Mr. and Mrs. Bolt’s house.  We were hopping up and down the sidewalk as they  came charging out with their old dog.

 Didi had a way with people. Calming. Soothing. She asked  how the universe was treating them. Pretty soon they all seemed happy as clams.  

We came home to buckets of blackberries on the kitchen table. My mother was washing them. We had been picking the day before. Didi came along with us. She didn’t do much picking. She sat cross legged on a towel and communed with the sun. 

Some girls her age came along and she communed with them, while we worked away.  Then she sang us songs while we picked blackberries. She observed that the day was “groovy”.

The day we came back from the store,  my mother told us  she had to go work half a day. She wanted us to finish washing the blackberries. She planned on making preserves that night. 

My mother told Didi to keep me out of trouble. Keep me busy. And off she went to work. She’d be back at five. 

Didi  said we should make the preserves. “It  will be groovy,” she chirped.  I’d never made jam. Didi said they learned how to make  “Sun jam” in her last cooking  class.

She got the white plastic wash basin from the kitchen, put it on the grass and piled in  a ton of  fruit. Then she got the oven roaster, and filled it as well.  

She slipped off her socks and shoes. Lavender fell out of her socks.   We rinsed off our feet with the hose. Didi stepped into the roasting pan. I stepped into the white kitchen basin. We giggled.

We stomped and slushed and slipped  in blackberries till our feet were purple. It was fun. It was silly.   Didi danced out of the roasting pan . We rinsed off our feet with the garden hose. We put  socks back on, over our purple stained feet.

Didi  ladled soggy blackberries into small jars.  We set the 24 jars out in the bright sun. Then we plopped ourselves under the willow tree to listen to the lids pop. “Groovy”, intoned Didi as she  became as one with the earth.

My mother came home to find the little jars sitting nicely on the table.  She was thrilled. Didi was thrilled. I think I was  thrilled. I wasn’t sure. My feet were itchy from all the purple goo.

 My mother was tickled pink. She had us deliver jars to all of the neighbours. Kept quite a few for ourselves. Opened one  jar that night to ladle over ice cream.

Even the Bolts got a couple of jars. They thought it was the best jam they had ever tasted. Wanted to know what the secret ingredient was. There seemed to be a hint of lavender……

 By that time, it was the end of the week, and Didi left to return to cooking school. “But nothing with eyes. I don’t do eyes. ” She  had a “groovy” time with us.

Making jam  had made her feel “one” with her universe….. 

Photographs 2022

PEACHES

"A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the colour of an early sunrise..."

                                         -Allegra Goodman

Wouldn't be summer without peaches. Lots of them. Ripening in bowls. Ready to be eaten. Ready to be cut up into pie.

I used to have a cat called Peaches. She looked a lot like Rona. Poofy and the colour of golden peaches. Fluffy thing. She followed me everywhere.

The neighbours liked to go to Las Vegas, for the summer, way back when, and  said we could  pick peaches  from their peach vines growing along the sides of their house. The vines  resembled pythons without heads,  slithering along the siding. 

The peaches hung like  moons. I'd pick them on hot July and August days. Every day I'd pick peaches. My cat, Peaches, would follow me back and forth between houses. She would chase  quail that  toddled up and down the driveway. To no avail. They were faster than she was. The ultimate goal for the peaches was  Peach Pie  with blackberries that my mother would make. She always made it with her  shortcrust pastry.   The blackberries bled and bled into the peaches ....

PEACH BLACKBERRY PIE

SHORTCRUST Pastry: 4 cups flour, pinch of salt, 1 1/4 cups cold butter, 10 large tblsp COLD butter

Cut in butter with flour and salt, till crumbly. Add water a little at a time, till it forms a nice ball of pastry. Work quickly so it does not get tough. Divide in two. Flatten each disc. Wrap in cling film and keep in fridge or freezer till you need it.

I remember my mother doubling this recipe quite often. I also remember Peaches, the cat, taking a liking to  pie pans. She would sit in them. She preferred the glass ones.  So in between making the pastry, we would be washing pie pans. Only to find Peaches sitting in them again. Finally we gave her a pie pan of her own to sit in, on the table. She would sit there, purrfectly centered in her pie pan,  grinning her cat grin. Probably imagining she was a pie......

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Line piepan with a disc of pastry Brush with some of  beaten egg

Cut up a ton of peaches  at least 5 cups or more. throw in a cup or two of blackberries

Mix with 2 tblsp lemon juice, 2/4 cup flour,1 cup white sugar, sprinkle cinnamon, sprinkle nutmeg. 

Pile into pastry lined piepan. Dot with dobs of butter.Cover with other pastry disc.

Brush with beaten egg.  Do this twice if making double pies.

Slash to make gashes in pastry. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes.

Lower to 350 for an additional 35 minutes. Or longer. Till juices bubble.

That year we left the two pies  out on the counter to cool. Went about the day. One pie was for us, and the other one for the neighbours who were coming home from Las Vegas the next day. In the kitchen, Peaches had vacated her pie pan. We found  paw prints  in one of the pies,  pastry smooshed and  peaches flicked all over. Blackberries  stuck to the fuzzy paws of one guilty  cat.

So the neighbours got the undamaged pie. We salvaged a couple of pieces out of the other one. A little slice of gold. And Peaches sat in her  own pie pan. Grinning at us.

Photographs 2021

 

BLACKBIRD PIE

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night.You were only waiting for this moment to arise..." -the Beatles

My father called it Blackbird pie, way back when. Blackberries were something my mother loved to pick in late August. She would be amazed that we can now get farm blackberries earlier. Without the picking. But back then we used to have to pick them way out at a church graveyard. I hated going out there. It was so far. The canes were so scratchy. wasps buzzed. Snakes slithered.  We  loaded up the old Dodge with basins galore and a large metal ladder. The old car had holes in its floorboards. You could see the road swish by. I could stick my toes down into the holes.  Feel the wind on them. Shudder.

My mother wore her engineer overalls. Stained with blackberries, bleach, paint, etc. She drove in them. Stopped for gas on the way. Got out of the car to open the gas cap. Someone else pumped gas....those were the last   years of THAT before we had to  do it ourselves. The other car behind us   thought she was an employee. They asked for gas. I  slumped down in my seat. Stuck my toes into the holes in the  floorboard. Then we'd be off for the blackberry patch. My mother sang as we went. Her out of pitch songs wafted out of the open car windows.

The Blackberries were located in a cemetery on the outskirts of town. The church it was connected to is now long gone. Years later, they put up a parking lot and aerobics studio around the old  gravestones. But back then, I imagined zombies and vampires coming to get us. My mother  grabbed her long metal ladder and laid it up the massive bramble wall.  Cars whizzed by overhead. People trundled by on the sidewalk above.  She climbed that ladder like a pro and her hands flew. Berries plopped into basins . They sounded like bullets.

I think I ate more then I picked.  My mother's face was streaked with purple juice , on her hands, on her overalls. Basins were full. But my mother couldn't get down from the ladder. One of her suspenders got caught  on the ladder rung, and she swung from it like a pinata, shrieking for me to cut her down. She managed to rip off the offending suspender and plopped into the brambles; just scratched up a little but fine. She  laughed and retied the scarf on her head. She was pleased with our haul.

The ladder, the basins of blackberries all piled back  into the car. On the way back I stuck my toes into the holes  on the floorboard. It was starting to rain, and my toes got wet. My mother  made Black bird pies, Blackberry cream pies, tarts, crumbles, Blackberries and cream, Blackberry muffins, jams, jellies, even juice. She mended the overalls. Much to my chagrin. She wore those overalls  to the store later that week to get varnish to do the downstairs floors and when she took a pie to the couple across the lane, and the neighbours  on the other side as well. 

The next  August we returned  to our blackberry haunt, like we did every year.  It was all  torn out. The graves were still there. But the church was gone, the little forest was gone. A construction sign had gone up. My mother got out of the car. She just stood there for a while. She finally told me how she used to come to this place with my dad. They'd pick blackberries almost every year. Only then he was the one wearing the overalls. That's why she wore them. They were his. And this was their place. Where they would pick enough blackberries  to make him Blackbird pies.......

BLACKBIRD PIE: 6-8 cups fresh blackberries ( Better than frozen which can make for a gooey pastry), 2 pie shells ready to roll out, 1 cup sugar, 4-6 tablesp flour, sprinkle cinnamon, sprinkle almond flavouring, 

Combine washed berries with sugar and cinnamon and almond flavouring. Preheat oven to 400F  Add the flour .............

"If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries..." 

                   -Shakespeare

Combine all together.

Pile into pie crust. If you want to blind bake the bottom you can first. But I didn't. Worked well.

Top with pie shell and slash with a knife.....

Melt a little bit of butter and spread over top of pastry.

Sprinkle with raw sugar

Bake at 400F for about 30 minutes. Really does a nice job on the pastry. Cover with foil and then lower temp to 350F and back a further 40 minutes till the juices bubble out. Serve plain or with vanilla  ice cream.......

Photographs 2021