Last week Jack and I drove out to the Chittering Valley, where the friendly people at Golden Grove citrus orchards picked 6 kilos of magnificent Seville oranges for us. As we drove home, the car was filled with the glorious scent of fresh citrus and we both inhaled deeply, imagining the marmalade already on our breakfast toast.

Today we cooked the last batch of oranges into marmalade, a process I have observed and in which I have participated all of my life. All of the women in my family have been careful housewives, making jams, jellies, marmalades, pickles, chutneys and relish from whatever excess fruit or vegetables came from the home garden.

It has always given me a great feeling of satisfaction to open my pantry door and offer a friend or visitor a jar or pot of jam or chutney. Somehow food always tastes better when you know that the fruit has been cut and stirred by hand and then bottled with love and a sense of pride in a job well done.

Here is the Seville Marmalade recipe, for you to try on some hot toast, in a bread and butter pudding or smeared over browned lamb shanks before baking for several hours in a low over.

Seville Marmalade (courtesy of David Herbert)

1 kilo (2 lbs) of Seville Oranges                 2 kilos (4 lbs) sugar

juice of 1 large lemon                                  1 tablespoon treacle

Wash oranges & place in large pan with 2 litres water. Bring to the boil & simmer gently for 2 hours (or until peel may be pierced with a fork). Remove from pan, reserving cooking liquid. When cool, quarter each orange & cut each segment into fine shreds, saving the juices and the pips (tie these in a piece of muslin). Place a saucer in the freezer.

Return cooking liquid to the pan, over a medium heat, adding the saved juices, the lemon juice and the muslin bag of pips. Reduce liquid by a third, remove the muslin bag of pips, add the chopped fruit and boil until reduced by a third.

Place clean jars into a medium oven, in a roasting pan. Add the sugar to the fruit, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. Increase the heat & boil rapidly for 20 minutes before starting to test of setting point. To test for setting point, drop a spoonful of marmalade onto the chilled saucer and allow to cool. If the jam forms a skin & wrinkles when pushed with a finger, it has reached setting point. Remove pan from heat when testing. Allow jam to cool slightly, stir in the treacle and pour mixture into the hot, sterilised jars. Seal and store the marmalade.

What is your favourite homemade jam recipe? Do you still use a recipe passed down from Gran?

Please forward your favourite jam or marmalade recipe to me.

This week I have been thinking back on my earlier blogs about love letters (I guess I’m just an old romantic a heart!) because my niece, Taff, asked me whether or not she should be saving her emails? “Of course you should, my dear girl,” was my immediate response and then I set my brain to working out just how to go about this task.

Preserving a digital object is not like preserving a book, photograph or document. You can place a book, say, on a shelf for 50 years and, if kept dry, it will last. The same can’t be said about a digital object, which is why digital objects like emails could be considered more delicate than physical ones.

I think of Emails as being ‘At Risk’ documents, often recording a very personal side of a person’s life history, as they reveal much about human nature, at that tiny instant in time. In today’s hectic lifestyle, they are the major source of communication (especially to Gen Y and X aged folk) and are a direct record of many people’s lives.  I believe that if Taff and her friends don’t start preserving their special emails now, much of their personal history will be lost.

Preserving Emails

Emails should be saved and managed just like any other important digital file. Save them on a hard drive as simple text (some people also store them onto a disk), making sure to capture the header information. Taff also asked her boss about whether the company had a policy about saving work-relate emails.

We spent a little money buying some different coloured, acid free papers, which she used to print off the personal emails, which she now has stored in archival quality document boxes. I guess that she is also a romantic as I noticed that she had tied a different coloured ribbon around the Mylar protective sheets enclosing ‘love-mails’ from different beaus! Maybe I’ll do the same with Jack’s love letters one day……..

Which letters or emails do you want to save? Where do you keep them? Do you have some letters from your parents or grandparents, perhaps from earlier beaus? Do let me know the types of letters you want to preserve!

As a strong letter writer in my younger days, I have accumulated a stash of letters over my lifetime that I just can’t part with! My collection contains letters from family and friends long gone, who have penned chronicles of their day to day lives, special events and people or places they have seen. Some are intimate love letters, some are from sweethearts from the war front, and others tell of surviving the Great Depression…………………

A letter is a precious thing, a first-hand account of another person’s innermost thoughts at a given moment of time; a tangible record of direct, open communication between the writer and the reader.

A letter travels some distance from the author to the recipient, the envelope plastered with stamps, perhaps franked with the names of faraway places. Your letter is able to pass through time zones, across borders, sometimes via air or sea……..travelling from distant places I have only heard about! Words travel well, tucked safely inside their snug envelope, and often the receiver will take a few moments to sit down in a quiet place, perhaps with a cup of tea, before slitting open the envelope to read the precious contents.

Do you have a sense of anticipation when you hold the envelope in your hand – does it contain good, much anticipated news, or maybe bad, or sad, news? Perhaps you sniff the envelope to gain a quick scent of the origin of the writer, or maybe the envelope has a lipstick-stained kiss on it or the initials S.W.A.L.K.

Letter writers carefully select the words used in a handwritten letter as they seem to carry more weight that an impersonal typed letter. Reading words that have been scratched into the page or perhaps blurred when tears made the ink run really has a different kind of emotional impact on the reader. Consider also, the difference between a letter handwritten with violet or sepia ink to one printed via a modern digital printer.

All of my letters were previously gathered together in different sized bundles and tied together with various coloured ribbons, but, once my family realised what a treasure trove I had tucked away in assorted shoe and glove boxes, they insisted that each letter be placed into a Mylar protective sheet and stored in archival boxes as part of our collective family heritage. I am so delighted that they are interested in my earlier days, my travels and friends, and do understand that damp and silverfish could damage them.

I urge you to make a start on sorting through your letters and preserving them as a legacy of family heritage. Let me know about some of YOUR special letters!

I was out at lunch the other day in a friend’s home when most of the table gasped in unison! Bill, an old dear friend, declared that he would give his ‘right arm’ for just one love letter from his recently deceased wife Jessie. He wanted tangible proof of their love!

Although having been school sweethearts, and married for 47 years, he said that Jessie had never written of her love or feelings for him in a letter. Bill told us that such a letter would now be his most treasured possession; now that Jessie was no longer beside him.

This made me think about the kind of loving communication between couples of the Gen X, Y, Z generations – sending text messages in strange symbols, or speedy emails and quick phone calls; none of which you can take out to re-read over and over again.

I wondered whether the gentle art of expressing our most intimate thoughts and feelings by writing them down in a letter to the person we love and cherish is as old fashioned as high-buttoned boots?

How many of us take the time to sit down and write a letter from the depths of our heart to the ones we love – a REAL love letter (the kind that crooners sang about when I was a young thing), on special paper and in our own handwriting?

Here are my ideas for writing your own love letter:

• Practice on a spare sheet of paper first;
• Place a photo of your loved one nearby for inspiration;
• Start slowly by writing down everything you feel in your heart; you can always edit later;
• Write at least three things that you especially love about her/him;
• Always end with your thoughts and hopes for the future;
• Re-write your love letter on special paper (look for acid free to last forever), in your own handwriting, for both first and lasting impact.

You know, love letters are not just for young, courting couples. They are a very personal way to rekindle the romance in a marriage after the ecstatic highs of the honeymoon phase have dwindled into the ‘ho-hum’ of everyday routine.

Remember, the letter you carefully write with love today, can end up becoming a treasured personal keepsake.

Maybe I’ll write one for Bill!

I have had yet another busy week in my family story keeper role, when I wandered down ‘memory lane’ as I sorted through my linen cupboard (a chore I have been putting off for quite a while). However, I find the Australian winter an ideal time to sort through and re-assess many of my family belongings, now that I am getting older.

I began with the serviettes (or you may call them napkins) and found some of my parent’s beautiful damask linen 15″ squares, and was reminded of whitening them with lemon juice and starching them with Star Starch. We all had our own serviette ring at our family dinner table when I was a child.

Then I found several sets of placemats and matching serviettes that I had embroidered at school to place in my Hope Chest, along with over a dozen embroidered huckaback hand towels and initialled handkerchiefs – I think the Sisters of Mercy hoped we’d all enter the convent!

I came across a cache of dressing table sets (1 large oval or square cloth and 2 smaller circular cloths), tray cloths, mats to place the bread board & carving tray, smaller cloths for cake plates & sandwich trays and even crocheted covers for sauce bottles! My goodness, we did make a lot of washing and ironing for ourselves, didn’t we? Some of these I’d made before I married and others were made by my mother, sisters and family as gifts (home-sewn gifts were highly prized when I was a young lady).

Right down on the second to bottom shelves, under the sheets, were several pairs of pillow shams, which Mum had embroidered and Nan had crocheted around the edges. They were so beautiful, I have decided to place them on my bed for the first time in years, when I am reminded of both Mum and Nan daily. There were also about six pairs of embroidered pillow slips and some darling, tiny baby pillow slips & bibs which I made for my children.

The family Christening gown lies in its box, protected by tissue paper, ready for the next generation of infants in our family, along with a tiny gossamer bonnet from the mid 1850’s. I handled these treasures carefully and lying them back in their protective box reverently, aware of the 70+ tiny infants who have worn these items, hand stitched with such love and tenderness, though the subsequent generations.

What treasures lie in your linen cupboard?

Is your cupboard filled with family heirlooms, stitched carefully with love for your mother’s Glory Box? Do you have a collection of family aprons through the ages – what stories could they tell about the everyday life of the woman who wore them daily?

Don’t just discard these old remnants for an earlier age – get them out, talk to your mother and female relatives to discover the stories attached to all of these memorable pieces of your heritage.

Today Aunt Ruby made her debut on radio – Twin Cities 89.7 in Perth, Western Australia and she had a wonderful time.

She has a collection of aprons from various decades and, as she was wearing the pretty calico, hand embroidered apron from the 1930’s, she chose 1932 as the topic for her discussion with the compere – Trish Duke.

Most Australians will remember 1932 for the following reasons:

• The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened

• It was the 3rd year of the Great Depression, when many men left their families to go out on the highways and bye-ways as ’swaggies’ or ‘rabbitoh’s’; the government paid ‘the susso’ to families in need, many children grew up eating bread & dripping or ‘Cockey’s Delight (bread & golden syrup) for their evening meal;

• Peter Pan won the Melbourne Cup, the Bodyline Cricket series started, and Haydn Bunton won the Brownlow Medal for Fitzroy.

• Entertainment revolved around the radio (where programs went out ‘live to air’) or sing-songs around the paino, sing such hit songs as – ‘Putting on the Ritz’, ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, and Cole Porter’s hit, ‘Night & Day’

• At the cinema, Lionel Barrymore, John Wayne, Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby played the hero roles and Clara Bow, Joan Blundell, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich starred in the female roles.

• New products launched that year included: Mars Bars, Wrigley’s Double Mint Chewing Gum, Ovaltine (the Swiss Health food!) Ritz Crackers and Heinz’ tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce

As the family story keeper for her family, Aunt Ruby is able to wander back through her memories whenver she pops on one of her collection of special aprons (she has always worn and apron in the house since she was a small girl!), the apron acting as a Memory Trigger, allowing long forgotten memories to percolate up into her conscious mind.

Have you tried this idea with you older relatives? Aunt Ruby suggests that you do so soon!

As she says:

“Time passes, memories fade………….and we take our stories with us when we go!”

This morning Uncle Jack and I went to buy some cat food – an easy enough task for us, but we tried a different supermarket (we’re always on the look-out for a bargain!). I used a shopping trolley to load the cans of cat food, a new floor mop, leaf tea, a fresh chook, some snags and several other items.

After going through the check out, we put our shopping bags back into our trolley and Jack headed off towards our car, parked near some bollards. As he neared the bollards, the trolley stopped dead in its tracks! He reversed it and tried again, several more times, before a passerby told us that the trolleys were activated not to pass the bollards (to minimise loss to the supermarket!!). Whatever next?!!

I remember shopping for groceries in the days before supermarkets, when I walked to the corner store and often sat on a stool, waiting my turn to be served by either Mr or Mrs Haigh. They both stood behind a wide, well scrubbed pine counter, both wearing spotless white buttoned cotton coats and Nana Haigh (Mr Haigh’s mother) presided over an enormous brass cash register with a bell on top.

Items like cheese and butter were cut from large slabs and fresh cream was ladled into a clean jar you brought from home. Dry ingredients like flour, rice, tea, sugar and biscuits were weighed out by the half or full pound and poured into brown paper bags.

There was a special lolly counter, behind glass, which contained a treasure trove of sweets, toffees, chocolate frogs, musk sticks, fruit sherbets and all-day suckers. Mrs Haigh also made home-made ’stick jaw’ toffees, coconut ice and marshmallows rolled in toasted coconut, which went like hot cakes. Children pressed their noses against the glass, deciding what to buy with their weekly pocket money. My friend, Daphne, preferred to spend her money on a bag of broken biscuits, and sixpence bought about half a pound’s worth.

What memories of shopping do you have? Was your milk delivered by the milko with his horse and cart? Can you remember some of the prices you paid for staples like bread or milk? What were some of the products you regularly bought – floor polish, Velvet Soap, starch and blue bags….?