Mum and the Māori Bush Medicine

By R.M. Hamilton

Mum is not much of a cook. If that sounds like a blunt, disrespectful way to start a story, let me explain.

Mum is proud of not being much of a cook. We discovered this point of pride in our early years. We grew up surrounded by women who were excellent cooks. Mrs Winger made a sponge cake, cream puffs and rhubarb pies that ensured an invitation to any party that was going. Mrs Welsh made a rice pudding that was so creamy you’d hardly believe that it contained rice. Mrs Foote made a braided bread so bedecked with glinting red cherries it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the tower of London among the crown jewels. Mrs Williams was so good at cooking everything that I’m not even going to attempt to compile a list. I will say, however, that I’ll confidently bet the best chocolate cake you ever ate in your whole life would cease to impress if you ever got a slab of her chocolate cake wedged in your mouth.

And then there was Mum.

Mum cooked just enough to keep us fed. There was a time when, spurred on by a weird book and her own wistful thinking, she didn’t even cook that much. She purchased huge quantities of health food and released us to graze on anything raw whenever our stomachs ‘spoke’ to us.

Us kids quite liked the system.

Dad did not.

Mum sulkily returned to cooking on the inside of a fortnight.

We pointed out to Mum that she wasn’t keeping up with our friend’s mothers in the kitchen. The encounter was highly unpleasant and remains branded into my mind.

“Mum, why can’t you be a good cook?” We attached accusatory, crushing glances, to the question.

Mum, uncrushed, looked up from her handiwork. “Let’s say I did become a good cook,” she began. “Let’s say I spent all day in the kitchen, slaving away to make a delicious, gourmet dinner. What would you do once I put the meal on the table?”

Something about Mum’s tone made us reluctant to answer the question. She was eyeballing us in an unpleasant sort of way. Someone muttered that they “supposed they’d eat it.”

“YES! You’d EAT it.” She glared at us as if eating a delicious, gourmet dinner was the worst act of cultural hooliganism she’d ever heard of. “You’d just woof it down in five minutes flat. All my hours of work gone in five minutes!"

I opened my mouth to point out that none of the other mothers were spending hours to cook delicious dinners. That seemed like an exaggeration to me.

But Mum wasn’t finished. She waved her hand to the quilt she was working on. “Whereas this can be handed down for generation after generation. Your children will enjoy it. Your grandchildren will enjoy it. Your greatgrandchildren will enjoy it. Provided nobody wants it for a museum, of course.” She smiled dreamily. “Quilts do end up in museums,” she stroked her quilt lovingly.

“Mum, we’re hungry!”
Mum, subpoenaed from a glowing future where her quilts achieved historical significance, gazed gloomily at her four children.

She sighed.

“You ate thirty minutes ago,” she grumbled. “Fine, have an apple or a marmite sandwich.”

“Can we have ice-cream?”

“NO! Ice-cream is party food! Is today a party?”

Apparently not.

“But” said Mum, struck with a sudden hope, “I’ll give you each a tablespoon of ice-cream if you practice your times tables.”

We dispensed a second round of crushing glances.

In the kitchen, collecting apples and marmite sandwiches our irritation at Mum was increased by the sight of two antique preserving pans, hung artfully from the ceiling. They were beautiful and Mum had acquired them strictly for the purpose of that beauty.

We knew what women could use beautiful antique preserving pans for, of course. Our friend’s mothers were always making jams and jellies in their preserving pans.

Mum had been just as unimpressed with our complaints on that subject as she had been about the idea of making delicious gourmet dinners. “I stew apples, sometimes,” said Mum, dragging a large, circular saw out from behind a stack of sawhorses.

We opened our mouths to keep arguing, but Mum, who was busy building a wraparound veranda for our cottage in the country, didn’t want to hear it. “If you’re going to stay in the workshop, while I use the saw” she said tartly, “put some earmuffs on.”

So much for that. It looked like we would never see Mum leaning over the stove, concocting something in her preserving pans to make all our friends sit up and take notice.

But we were wrong.

Grandma had been to the library. “You see dear,” she said to Mum, “as I was looking for something hideously boring for your father to read, I saw this and it’s so good.” She waved a slim green volume at Mum. “There’s a lot of healing in the Bush you know. The Māori have known about these things for thousands of years. Anyway, you know Kawakawa?”

“That small shrub with the heart shaped leaves that grows everywhere?” asked Mum, flicking through the pages of the book with interest.

“Yes! Well, apparently, if you boil it down, it makes an excellent blood purifier.”

Mum’s eyes brightened. “That sounds healthy! And free.” Her eyes floated up to the ceiling where the preserving pans hung. “When we’re next out at Mt Tiger, I could pop over and we could make a batch of the stuff.”

It was now ‘next time at Mt Tiger’ and Mum and Grandma had been hard at it for about an hour. There was a small hill covered with trees outside of Grandma and Granddad’s house and it made an excellent vantage point to watch the doings in Grandma’s kitchen. We could see them bustling about with preserving pans and boughs of kawakawa.  Also, there seemed to be a lot of old milk bottles lined up along the bench. There was going to be a lot of blood purifier.

At the hour and a half mark, Grandma opened a window. A smell began to float out of the house.

A very yuck sort of smell.

I and my siblings exchanged nervous glances.

That certainly didn’t smell like Mrs Prentice’s rose petal jelly.

In fact, that didn’t smell like anything we’d ever smelt at all.

On the whole, running away from our close proximity to the scene of this dastardly smell seemed advised.

But suddenly, Mum appeared in Grandma’s garden. “Come and try what we’ve made!” she called in a friendly, coaxing sort of voice. “If you do, I’ll give you two dried apricots each!”

For kids who almost never got candy, that sounded like a good deal.

Ten minutes later, frantically rinsing our mouths out with the hose, we decided it wasn’t. Kawakawa blood purifier was a taste that I really can’t get across in print. I have read that the nose plays a part in taste. Kawakawa blood purifier was such an awful flavour it felt like the back of our eyes could taste it too.

Two dried apricots were no defence against a taste that glued itself into the insides of  your mouth like that.

Which is why, the next time Mum tried to dose us up on the stuff we disappeared. We disappeared as thoroughly as our maths books disappeared when she tried to home-school us.

If Mum was going to use her preserving pans for that sort of cooking, perhaps it was best if she stuck to carpentry and quilting.

I said as much to Granddad. I found him in his workshop, absorbed in an experiment of trying to extract tea-tree oil from tea-tree branches with Grandma’s kitchen juicer. It wasn’t working too well, and the juicer was getting the worst of the process.

“It’s all very well to be healthy,” I grumbled to Granddad as we pawed through the tea-tree branche chippings looking in vain for oil droplets, “but it just tastes so awful when Mum and Grandma do it.”

Granddad nodded sympathetically. “I know. Your grandmother’s found this bran muffin recipe that replaces sugar with an over ripe banana.” He shuddered. “However,” and he turned from the juicer to the cupboard that was nailed above the electric jug. He opened the door and reached a long way back. He produced a large tin can with the lid stuck down firmly. With the help of a flat blade screwdriver, he levered the lid off. “Here you go,” he said, gleefully. I looked into the recess of the can.

“Gosh, Granddad,” I said admiringly.

Inside the tin was an impressive assortment of large chocolate biscuits. “You can always buy baking,” explained Granddad. “Have a cup of tea?”

“Yes please.”

From the garden, Grandma’s clear voice floated, “Arthur! Have you seen my juicer?”

“Oh dear,” said Granddad.

As I finish this story on a bright but slightly chilly spring day in Australia, I have one of Mum’s quilts draped over my legs. Mum might not have been much of a cook, but she was, and is, an excellent home maker.

I seem to have caught her creative ability with fabric.

And she says I’m a much better cook than her.

But somehow, I don’t think I’ll ever be a dab hand with a circular saw and a hammer like she is.

If I ever get married and have children, I suppose they’ll find me and say, “Mum, why can’t you be a good carpenter and build playhouses like Grandma?”

And honestly, I’ll be forced to admit, compared to that, my apple slice that they can woof down in five minutes, is a little bit, well, lame.