It was a simple enough task. I just needed some cream. It’s strawberry season here in Australia. Or at least I presume it is, since it’s summer, and supermarkets are jammed with egg-sized berries.
When you move to another hemisphere, you either take a crash course in botany to familiarise yourself with the fact that plants – trees, grasses, fruits and vegetables – are different, or grow at different times of year, or you practise radical humility.
You point, jaw slack, at a fantastic tree that you later learn is commonly called a Bottlebrush tree, and you say something impossibly dim and embarrassing, such as “What a completely fantastic tree!” and you accept that you sound like a moron.
I grew up in the shade of lofty, conker-dropping horse chestnuts and pugnacious sycamores that would creak their way out through impossible gaps in the pavement, until their roots brought the walkway up two decades later. When I lived in Dublin, I’d pack a sandwich and visit the “hungry tree” at King’s Inns, which famously swallowed an iron bench almost whole. The sandwich was for me and not the tree, but you know. Just in case.
The natural world I know is dark foliage and damp moss, front gardens peppered with drunkenly tumbling nasturtiums in the summer. It’s the soft, inoffensive graze of drizzle on the gauzy petals of pink roses in May. It isn’t towering eucalyptus trees swaying in clumps, murmuring to one another in a hot, dry breeze. It isn’t gigantic succulents leering at you from verges as you walk by, their heavy heads making them look down on their luck. It isn’t thickety brush rustling with the primordial shrieking of insects or enormous, elaborate flowers that are trying so hard, as though they’re about to marry Jeff Bezos.
So the familiarity of strawberries appealed to me this week. I don’t go in for an ascetic January. I think it has too much of the spirit of 1950s Ireland about it, and guarantees a hedonistic, butter-smothered crash by February. Instead, I smatter some unhealthy joys through the month like a person who doesn’t see value in suffering for the sake of it.
After all, cutting dessert out entirely can, I choose to believe, be fatal. The withdrawal alone could kill me. So strawberries and cream sounded ideal. It’s fruit, sort of. A bit “notions”. Borderline British, even, but still very much acceptable within an Irish summer menu, and it is summer over here, so my defence would stand up in court.
[ The story behind roadside strawberry stands – one of the heralds of Irish summerOpens in new window ]
The tropical and unfamiliar fruits I see in every Australian grocer’s shop are a joy to eat – hefty, sugar-sweet mangoes and papayas, perfect “your-granny’s-bathroom-sink-green” avocados, the gnarled weirdness of Buddha’s hands or the uncanny mundanity of a tangelo.
But a strawberry is a fruit you can rest a pint on. Not literally, but you know what I mean. It’s a robust little fruit in all its weird shapes – cordate and oblate and globose and all the rest of them. A strawberry is a familiar, homely object. Macerate it in sugar and robe it in a thick cloak of double cream and you have yourself a mouthful of childhood summer holidays in west Cork.
‘Every Irish person instinctively understands that cream comes from happy cows, and double cream from especially happy cows’
It was a simple enough task. I just needed some cream. Never did I anticipate that this quest would pitch me into a vortex of homesickness that had me mentally drafting a letter of appreciation to the Irish dairy industry.
Because look, some people email me to say they think I’m hard on Ireland. You could look at it that way. Really, I’m invested in Ireland. I care deeply about it. I’m pained by its errors and failings and take immense pride in its wins. I treat it like a part of myself, because that’s what it is. I take no pride in its nonsense any more than my own. I am knitted up in its thriving.
I don’t mind admitting that Australia is an easier place to live in than Ireland for many Irish people, especially those of my generation priced out of luxuries such as a bedroom which your mother can’t walk into at 7am and whoosh the curtains open, or the ability to have a family if they want one while they still have functioning knees and reproductive capacity.
But the cream is a real problem. At the risk of being deported, I must admit that we have Australia beaten hands down when it comes to cream.
I went to Coles, which is like Australia’s Tesco, and there was reed-thin single cream, which is unfit to festoon a strawberry of any persuasion, and three different kinds of cream containing thickening agents. Why? While a scientist would probably talk about differing fat content being the reason double cream is thicker than your garden variety single, every Irish person instinctively understands that cream comes from happy cows, and double cream from especially happy cows. It doesn’t need pectin. We aren’t making jam. We aren’t grouting a public bathroom. This Americanisation of cream is an offence to the otherwise impeccable food culture of Australia.
Attempting to calm myself down, I went to Aldi. While historically Germany does not have a robust reputation for ameliorating disaster, I hoped that as a European culture with a strong track record of respectable fruit-based desserts, they might have the decency to leave their Australian cream alone. They did not.
Harris Farm Markets, which is like an Australian Whole-Foods-meets-Waitrose eco dish soap and artisanal baking affair, did have extra thick cream from jersey cows, who are, presumably like me, immigrants to Australia. I bought it. It was lovely, but it was clotted cream in texture, though not name. You don’t want to have to gouge a divot out of your cream for strawberries. The texture matters.
The rent here is cheaper. So are the utilities. The very pair of gym shoes I bought for the equivalent of €100 here currently costs €170 in Ireland. But Irish cream is untouchable. Impeccable. It was a simple enough task. I just needed some cream.