A post by The Food Whore about pomegranates brought back memories of my own school days.
(Or if you were cynical, you might just say she gave me a story idea. OK. She gave me a story idea.)
As everyone knows, apart from breakfast and dinner, lunch is the most important meal of the day and at school, lunchtime meant I got to stop doing something boring and uninteresting - schoolwork - and do something fun and interesting instead - eat.
Sometimes we ate at our desks - one year our teacher read a whole chapter of a novel aloud to us every lunchtime and I sat and ate and listened, drifting off into a kind of otherworld combining food and fiction, creating an association between eating and writing which has stayed with me to this day. If that makes sense.
We had sandwiches nearly every day and as I was one of seven children, that means my mother made approximately eighteen billion sandwiches between 1959 and 1986. That's a lot of brown paper bags.
We had vegemite sandwiches, sardine sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, Peck's paste sandwiches (anchovy or salmon), cheese sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches, baked bean sandwiches (they're better than you think), beetroot sandwiches (ditto), strasburg sandwiches, kabana sandwiches and banana sandwiches.
Then one day someone gave my mother a huge load of lemons and she made about fifty jars of homemade lemon butter and for the next six weeks we had homemade lemon butter sandwiches and I never got bored with them for the whole six weeks because it was delicious.
There was, however, the occasional deviation from sandwiches.
There was a fish shop on the corner, just metres from the school, and on Fridays the school allowed the children to order fish and chips from the fish shop. In the morning, all the orders were delivered to the fish shop and at lunch time we went to the shop and collected boxes and boxes of orders, all individually wrapped in newspaper, marked with the right names and steaming with the aromas of salted and vinegared fish, chips, potato cakes and scallops. I can smell it to this day. Beautiful.
What wouldn't you give to be back in Grade Five, around about midday, waiting for your teacher to start reading a new chapter from an exciting novel while opening up your fish and chips? Or your homemade lemon butter sandwiches?
*
Thanks for the story idea, Food Whore. And since I'm channelling other people's work today, here's a wonderful lemon butter story, picture and recipe from fellow Melbourne blogger Niki.
(Or if you were cynical, you might just say she gave me a story idea. OK. She gave me a story idea.)
As everyone knows, apart from breakfast and dinner, lunch is the most important meal of the day and at school, lunchtime meant I got to stop doing something boring and uninteresting - schoolwork - and do something fun and interesting instead - eat.
Sometimes we ate at our desks - one year our teacher read a whole chapter of a novel aloud to us every lunchtime and I sat and ate and listened, drifting off into a kind of otherworld combining food and fiction, creating an association between eating and writing which has stayed with me to this day. If that makes sense.
We had sandwiches nearly every day and as I was one of seven children, that means my mother made approximately eighteen billion sandwiches between 1959 and 1986. That's a lot of brown paper bags.
We had vegemite sandwiches, sardine sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, Peck's paste sandwiches (anchovy or salmon), cheese sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches, baked bean sandwiches (they're better than you think), beetroot sandwiches (ditto), strasburg sandwiches, kabana sandwiches and banana sandwiches.
Then one day someone gave my mother a huge load of lemons and she made about fifty jars of homemade lemon butter and for the next six weeks we had homemade lemon butter sandwiches and I never got bored with them for the whole six weeks because it was delicious.
There was, however, the occasional deviation from sandwiches.
There was a fish shop on the corner, just metres from the school, and on Fridays the school allowed the children to order fish and chips from the fish shop. In the morning, all the orders were delivered to the fish shop and at lunch time we went to the shop and collected boxes and boxes of orders, all individually wrapped in newspaper, marked with the right names and steaming with the aromas of salted and vinegared fish, chips, potato cakes and scallops. I can smell it to this day. Beautiful.
What wouldn't you give to be back in Grade Five, around about midday, waiting for your teacher to start reading a new chapter from an exciting novel while opening up your fish and chips? Or your homemade lemon butter sandwiches?
*
Thanks for the story idea, Food Whore. And since I'm channelling other people's work today, here's a wonderful lemon butter story, picture and recipe from fellow Melbourne blogger Niki.
Mmm.... lemon butter. I believe it's the same as lemon curd? )
ReplyDeleteI could eat it right from the jar.
And have.
I love it on fresh scones with clotted cream.
And I love it on pound cake that's been toasted in pan with a little butter, and topped with fresh raspberries and cream.