Have you seen the price of butter and cheese? Of course you have. Can you believe the price of butter and cheese? Of course you can’t.
But we are snooty about cheese at Lush Places, which is partly the reason we are broke. In an act of wild profligacy, we still occasionally make a cheese toasted sandwich. This is because we are addicted to cheese toasted sandwiches made with kimchi, or Korean fermented cabbage. When I was growing up the very idea of eating some stinky foreign muck like kimchi would have been incomprehensible, not that it was available. So between kimchi and the cheese, our toasted sandwiches probably cost about 10 bucks a pop to make, which is madness.
So I bought a tub of dripping last week. I want to try it on toast. I say “want”. But what I really mean is that I’d better get used to it now before I end up in the workhouse eating toast and dripping as a consequence of going broke buying butter. It sounds disgusting. But my now-retired esteemed editor, a recovering Pom, insists that dripping on toast is fantastic. “When we were sick Grandma used to feed it to us,” he wrote in an email. “It was well worth being sick, and preferable to the other therapeutic standby of bread and milk.”
He told me this in response to a Radio New Zealand article I had forwarded to him. The headline was Life on rations: What it was like to eat a wartime meal – the war in question being World War II. I sent this story to all of my elderly friends. All of my friends are elderly because I am elderly.
There was one recipe in the piece for something called a fidget pie. It sounds like the sort of meal you’d eat before going to the outside dunny and throwing yourself down it. Fidget pie involves mashed carrots, potatoes, swede and parsnips covered with gravy. The gravy was no doubt kept in an old peaches tin that had been sitting on the side of the stove for weeks right next to a dishcloth that smelled like dead things.
The “pie” was then to be covered by a pastry made of a combination of butter (if available), lard and margarine.
The question is, why in 2025 is RNZ publishing stories about how to cook on wartime rations?
Because of recent cost-of-living statistics, presumably. Here are some: milk cost an average of $4.57 per two litres in June – up 14.3% on the year before. Butter surged to $8.60 per 500g, a 46.5% annual increase. Cheese climbed 30% to $13.04 per 1kg block.
New Zealand is the land of milk and honey and cheese – but only if you can afford milk and honey and cheese.
I am not, you’ll be unsurprised to know, contemplating making fidget pie. But I am contemplating getting a milking cow.
I could, à la Marie Antoinette, don a milkmaid’s outfit and milk my cow into a porcelain Sèvres bucket. Strangely, I don’t happen to own a porcelain Sèvres bucket or a milkmaid outfit. My holey jumper and an aluminium bucket from Mitre 10 will have to suffice. I could then make butter. I have no idea how. But if I could figure out how to make butter I could swan about Masterton, à la Marie Antoinette, crowing: “Let them eat dripping.” I could make cheese, too, I suppose, but I have no idea how to make cheese, either. Who does?
I sent a text to Miles the sheep farmer, who has retired and fled to Perth, presumably in an attempt to get away from my mad ideas about pretending to be a farmer. Did he reckon I could get a cow and milk it, I asked him? He responded: “Mmmmm. Possible with help. With a quiet biddable cow. Other considerations: mating. Visiting a bull. Removing calf from cow overnight to milk her in the morning. What to do with the calf …” And so on. He was kind enough not to mention the cow friend I made and named Mama Moo and who turned out to be a steer.
I am not getting a cow.
