Today I made pear chutney.
I make a lot of preserves. How many hours have I spent hunched over a table chopping produce, carefully cutting around imperfections and salvaging half apples, sweltering as I stirred on days long and hot where the harvest is bountiful, perched shoulder deep in plum mush picking out tiny stones as my weary back threatens to give way and send me tumbling into the pot and my eternal sticky entombment? My walls sigh with the memory of oppressive acridity, vinegar surely oozing from the framework. My children know the pop of a cooling jar seal deep in their aural memory alongside cycadas and lullabies.
I long for the ordered artful shelves of the memes my bemused friends sometimes tag me in. Aproned housewives preparing for doomsday with saccharine smiles. Is this how people see me? I don't know if I like that. I'm not a very good preserver, I'm rough and ready, I never follow best practice "canning" protocol, and I never wear an apron. My dresses are a patchwork of handprints, small sticky ones overlapping my own paint, dirt or flour ones. My own shelves are a mess of boxes and jars with peeling labels and tacky glue remnants stacked in a way that makes me grimace every time someone mentions the word earthquake. How long could I live on jam that hasn't quite set I wonder, and what a grim apocalypse that would be.
I've been preserving, and baking, and cooking for many years but today I did something I've never done before. I took out a pen - a permanent pen not a pencil - and I amended a cookbook. I've re-wtitten recipes in my own books and altered them but never defaced a book before.
The chutney could use some mace I decided so I added it in ink. I specified a quantity, something I never do, preferring the ambiguous sprinkle, pinch, large pinch, or that most maddening to the beginner cook "to taste". People may one day read this book after me and I want them to know how to replicate what I make. I amended the cooking process too, the dates broke down quickly and necessitated a much more involved and frequent stirring schedule than I normally follow, add them later in the process I dictated.
A lover of second hand books I frequently come across such additions. "This is what you call the bollan" amends the confident pen of Helen Welsh of Taihape next to the Bowline entry in our book of knots. It has always seemed far too audacious of me to make these private edits though I often alter recipes. Who am I to be so presumptuous as to add to or correct an author who is well versed enough in their field to have literally written the book on it? What if I'm wrong?
Having skills in something can sneak up on you. I am perplexed every time someone asks me for advice. I cringe with scarlet modesty when I find myself talking to someone and notice others intently listening in because they genuinely value the accumulated knowledge I've amassed in a certain field. I don't know how I got from making jars of green tomato chutney to salvage what I could from a crop ruined by blight to being someone that people I barely know seek out to offer groaning boxes of excess pears. I don't see these skills as anything special and downplay them. Imposter syndrome comes pricking as a splinter deep in my foot, I can't get it out in the moment I'll just have to ignore it until I am home and can extract it messily in private.
It's probably no accident that I feel this way and am so conflicted about blowing my own horn when the things I excel in are traditionally assigned to women and unpaid. I'm deeply conflicted.
I recognise the work involved in these skills and want to honour my foremothers. I'm acutely aware that so many of my sisters are unable to do these things or have zero desire to. I have no wish to perpetuate a culture that puts toxic gender expectations on us all and lauds a mythical 50s white housewife figure as peak womanhood. I silently simmer in my rage when these skills aren't seen as contributing to the household economy and regulations put in place so that I can't financially benefit from them without excessive hoop jumping and fees to be paid. I abhor waste and take pride that my labour is a subversive act against a the industrial food complex, I haven't bought the ubiquitous tomato sauce in a long time. I love having a ready to go currency in the gift and barter economies. I genuinely enjoy tasks like cooking and mending and I love feeding people.
With a stroke of my pen I shelve all this internal conflict in a brain already messy, crowded, and stacked in a way that threatens to collapse with the slightest wobble. Permanent ink denotes a confidence I'm barely sure I have but I'm good at preserving, I enjoy it and like to think that I can offer others advice should they one day pick up my tattared copy of my book in a second hand store. I join the ranks of many women before me who have adorned margins.
Maybe my children will treasure these notes as they replicate my chutney one day faced with a box of pears gifted or standing looking up at the pear trees we planted together laden with fruit. I'll make sure to teach them both how to make a jam or a chutney or a sauce if they want to learn. If they don't hopefully some second hand book fan stirs with ease and enjoys their own maced chutney one day and ponders who was bold enough to fiddle with the recipe and commit this to the historical record. As long as they don't picture me as a 50s housewife in a f**king apron.
i love it when you make something that's "off recipe" and you're a bit dubious about it, and then someone comes for dinner and hoes into it. recently, lime pickle - not everyone's go to - naturally sun-fermented from a mashup of 3 different recipes but somewhat overcooked; a friend of our lodger came and i cooked a jackfruit and tofu curry with the pickle on the side and, saying "i love lime pickle", he lashed into it, eating about half a jar! very rewarding. and you've reminded me i haven't written down what i actually did to make it... so best i do! ;)