by Helen Lowe<\/p>\n
When I was a child, we lived in Singapore for three years and clung, in expatriate exile, to New Zealand culinary traditions. It is not that we completely shunned the exotic cuisine that surrounded us, but by and large we continued to “eat New Zealand”. Now I regret the opportunities lost, but as a young child I simply accepted it, as children do. Perhaps it was my mother’s way of asserting identity and normalcy in a strange land, but\u2014whatever the reason\u2014she was determined in her pursuit of New Zealand butter, lamb, milk powder, and cheese for our consumption. When New Zealand products could not be sourced, Australian produce would graciously be countenanced as a “next best” alternative.<\/p>\n
So even in Singapore, just eighty miles north of the equator, our family continued to enjoy the Kiwi Sunday roast, usually of lamb but with chicken permitted as an acceptable substitute. In addition to the roasted meat and vegetables we always had dessert as well, usually either a cake or a cooked pudding. It seems probable that consumption of these Kiwi delights in the heat and steam of a Singapore noon\u2014we always ate our Sunday dinner in the middle of the day\u2014was only possible because we lived in an old colonial mansion, with high plastered walls and electric fans clicking ceaselessly overhead. It was very pleasant to sit in the cool dim interior with the heat and brassy glare of the day held at a distance.<\/p>\n
My mother was adamant about other things than diet. We children were not, she determined, to be spoiled by the expatriate lifestyle that she clearly thought hedonistic, or grow up expecting “to be waited on hand and foot”. (Servants were an integral part of the expatriate Singapore life.) We were to clean up after ourselves, keep our rooms tidy and make our beds\u2014and yes, learn to cook.<\/p>\n
Looking back, I can see that my mother, in her own unique way, was a staunch egalitarian. Another quality that I admired then, and still do now, was her refusal to pay our household employees what she considered sub-standard wages, even if that was “the market”. Nor would she insist on an “amah”\u00a0 living in.<\/p>\n
“She has a family of her own,” my mother would say. “She should be able to go home to them at the end of the\u2014no more than eight hour\u2014working day.”<\/p>\n
My cooking lessons started with puddings and cakes, which may explain why I am still far more adept and intuitive with baking than with main courses, even though I love cooking in all its forms\u2014yes, even the preparation. One of my early favourites was a chocolate steamed pudding with a self-saucing lemon sauce, particularly delicious when served with vanilla ice cream and runny cream.<\/p>\n
I remember standing at the bench, which at eight I was barely tall enough to reach and so stood on a footstool, beating the mix in a blue and white Cornish-ware bowl that had travelled with us from New Zealand. The lemon went at the bottom of the metal steaming bowl, which did not have a lid as the modern ones do\u2014we tied greaseproof baking paper around the top with string. And then, in the high heat of a Singapore Sunday, it would boil merrily away until it was ready to be carried in triumph, hot and steaming with the lemon sauce spilling down the chocolate sides, to the table.<\/p>\n
They tell me that the grand old house is gone, long since demolished to make way for the Mt Faber cable car. But I still have the blue and white Cornish-ware bowl and I still make the lemon self-saucing chocolate steam pudding\u2014but only in winter.<\/p>\n
Esther Campbell Lowe’s Lemon Self-Saucing Chocolate Steamed Pudding<\/strong><\/p>\n Ingredients:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 egg Method:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Break egg into a bowl, add the \u00bd cup of white sugar and the lemon juice; Enjoy!<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n I wrote the first draft of this anecdote in a food-writing course with Lois Daish, several years ago now, and re-wrote it for Narratives with Nosh, Stories Poems & Recipes, <\/strong><\/em>Ed. Margaret Beverland with Jenny Argente, Tauranga Writers, 2009, where it was published as “Of My Mother and High Noon in the Tropics.” <\/em>I felt it would be a fun way to end the selection of poetry and prose, both mine and others, that I have featured over the Christmas-New Year holiday season. Of My Mother, High Noon in the Tropics, & Lemon Self-Saucing, Chocolate Steamed Pudding by Helen Lowe When I was a child, we lived in Singapore for three years and clung, in expatriate exile, to New Zealand culinary traditions. It is not that we completely shunned the exotic cuisine that surrounded us, but by and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funstuff","category-short-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3037"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3043,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3037\/revisions\/3043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u00bd cup sugar (white)
\njuice of 1 lemon
\n1 cup plain white flour
\n1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder
\n\u00bd teaspoon of mixed spice
\npinch of salt
\n1 tablespoon of cocoa
\n\u00bd cup of brown sugar
\n1 \u00bd ounces butter (approximately 1 \u00bd tablespoons or 45 grams)
\nmilk\u2014as required<\/p>\n
\n2. Sift together flour, baking powder, spice, salt and cocoa;
\n3. Mix brown sugar through the rest of the dry ingredients then rub in the butter with your fingertips;
\n4. Mix together with sufficient of the milk to form a moist dough;
\n5. Place the lemon mix at the bottom of a steam pudding bowl, then spoon in the chocolate mix on top;
\n6. Cover the top of the bowl then steam rapidly for 1 hour;
\n7. When ready, turn out and serve with ice cream and\/or cream as preferred.<\/p>\n
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"