Guest Blog: Country Pudding

Country Bumpkin is a frequent visitor to Kiko's House from New Zealand. He resides in the lovely Wairarapa region at the foot of the Tararua Mountains on the North Island, which was one of the shooting locations for the magnificent recreation of Tolkein's Middle Earth for the "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.

I am passionately fond of mushy pudding, filled to the brim with eggs, milk, vanilla beans and sugar. Rice, tapioca, sago, bread -- any or all of the above. And not to forget plain old custard. I will happily dispense with first and second courses just to get to the pudding, and no restaurant has ever had bread pudding on its menu without selling a helping to me.

But not to my wife. Mention rice pudding to her and she will screw up her face, put her finger down her throat and make retching noises -- she calls it a psychological reaction to an overdose of this sublime food from a childhood which was subject to disciplines not often reported in today's society. "Eat your pudding! There are millions of people in China who would kill for food like that!" (They would, the way I make it.)

Imagine my surprise, if you can, when I proposed (for maybe the thousandth time) yesterday that I whip up a bread pudding for dessert, and my wife said yes! So I did, and I sprinkled raisins and slivered almonds through it, and in this simple fashion, after 47 years of marriage, we broke our duck. (Overseas correspondents not familiar with the game of cricket may care to know that this means our score advanced from zero.)

Oh, bliss . . .

We are into the Indian summer now, and of course the grass has begun to grow again -- as have the mushrooms -- after the summer recess. And very well it looks too. March was cold, and we actually lit the fire on several days -- a most unusual thing to do in recent years as the climate warms. It was a good test for our freshly filled woodshed, because we seem to have acquired a stock of exceptionally good firewood, an uncertain business at the best of times. This year's supply burns hot and slowly, the best of all combinations.

While all this is going on, the trees are changing colour and dropping their leaves, such that a big vacuum cleaner comes along the street every morning and sucks them up, lest it rain and the drains can't take the water away. It's all absolutely beautiful. But a bit messy.

Last weekend we went to the French Fair at the beautiful Tauherenikau Racecourse, near Featherston. The horse racing industry in New Zealand has fallen on hard times in recent years, and this can be seen in the rather old-fashioned and run-down look of so many race course buildings. Tauherenikau stands out nevertheless, because its public areas are cleared out of old native bush, which provides a wonderful dappled light and shelter from the heat.

The Wairarapa is a popular venue for fairs, and the goods and food and crafts on sale are brought to them by petit bourgeois traders from all over the country. Of them all -- the fairs, not the traders -- the biggest and most famous are held in Martinborough in February and March, where easily 25,000 people mill around buying hand-crafted wooden bowls and eating ice cream. But I have a feeling the Tauherenikau event, held on the first weekend in April, might soon outshine the older fetes. All the traders are dressed in black berets, red scarves and white polo shirts with horizontal black stripes, there is a "gendarme" directing the traffic -- including bus loads of pensioners -- and although they all speak with Kiwi accents (aaaarghhh!) the chanteuse who accompanied herself on the accordion (while her boyfriend played bass) all help to alter the reality for a little while. There was a cracking good jazz trio, a man with a wood-fired pizza oven on the back of his ute making beautifully crunchy disks covered with mozzarella, tomato and mushrooms, and others were selling more varieties of herbal hand cream than you can shake a stick at.

Great fun! And when you leave the trees and walk up a little rise overlooking the race course itself, the big sky stretches out to the horizon.

I've been writing these Country Life newsletters for three and a half years now, yet not once have I written (so far as I recall) about life on the heartland itself -- and I mean the real heartland now -- itself. But today I lunched with a native of the Wairarapa who farms dairy cows and sheep, and whose family connections sell huge Swedish and American farm machinery in serious quantities, thereby helping to make the land more and more productive.

He took me on a tour of his extensive holdings, which stretch for many kilometres in every direction, on some of the best land in the valley. For the first time since I was a small boy, I stood in a milking shed. The cows stand on a turntable, a man fits the milking machine to their teats, and as the stand turns and a gap opens, another cow voluntarily, nay eagerly, steps up to the plate. Once the milking is finished, the machine drops the suction cups, helped by the cow which detects the drop in vacuum and kicks the cups free, then turns and walks out to the field to start eating again. The body heat from the milk is used to warm the water used to clean the milking shed, and in the exchange of heat the milk is chilled to storage temperature, ready to be collected and taken to the factory for processing.

Water is always a problem in this drought-prone valley, so many farms have irrigation systems. My farmer friend drills for underground water, and has great success in finding it. His technique is to hire the skills of a local water-diviner!

When I was a boy in a milking shed, water diviners were to be found. But not the turntables, computers, valves, machine-readable ear tags, pumps and sensors which make it possible for one or two farm hands to milk 500 beasts or more, twice a day.

If you think I was impressed, you're right.