Snow On the Lindis by Bee Dawson

Author:Bee Dawson [Madge Snow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775537939
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2015-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

The sheep were sent into the shower dip after shearing.

Shearing was a busy time for everyone, but especially so for the cook. We didn’t have a cookshop during those first few years so the men, usually about 12 in all, trooped into the old house for all their meals. They all sat round the large table in the big room off the kitchen, smoking, yarning and putting the world to rights. I quickly learnt it was best to start preparing early, so at least six weeks before the shearers’ expected arrival I began filling up the tins. Every day I made fruit cakes, fruit loaves or two or three kinds of biscuits. Being organised was half the battle. I guess it is the same with everything in life. By the time the men arrived most of the baking was done and it was a matter of cooking and cleaning, which, providing we had no hold up with the weather, went on for three to four weeks.

Before shearing we always placed a big grocery order with Wardells in Dunedin. Everything came in bulk: boxes of dates, boxes of sultanas, large tins of golden syrup, sacks of flour and hessian bags of sugar. I would unpick the seams of the sugar bags and make aprons. Women always wore aprons in the kitchen in those days.

This all seemed a lot, but it was nothing to the supplies that were required in the McLean era. On 31 March 1874, 10 tons of flour was ordered! In those days it seemed that men lived on little other than bread and mutton.

When the shearers were there we would eat a sheep a day. All the men had a chop and eggs in the mornings. Every evening Max would cut off the required chops and I’d put them into the huge roasting pan that was the exact size of the oven. Before I went to bed I’d bank Dirty Dora with lots of wood, put the pan in and cross my fingers that by the morning the chops would be well cooked, succulent and delicious. I was a great believer in long, slow cooking, especially for mutton. In the middle of the day we would have mince, made from shoulders of meat with the help of an old-fashioned grinder which I screwed to the wooden kitchen table. In the evening there was more mutton — this time in the form of two legs roasted in the big pan.

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