In this chapter Agatha details her and Archie’s year-long, round-the-world tour with the quasi-charlatan Belcher. There’s a lot about the landscape and a lot about surfing, though rather less about food than you might expect.
The only thing she recalls of South Arica was “having iced lemonades.” Melbourne’s cuisine is remembered as chiefly “incredibly tough beef or turkey.” New South Wales stands out for “Ripe oranges plucked straight from the trees… the most delicious things you can imagine,” but she was disappointed to see how pineapples grow, like a field of cabbages. Another stop in Australia featured cocoa and coffee.
The most memorable item from New Zealand was not anything on the menu, but how they “fell into the clutches of a man known to us all as ‘The Dehydrator.’” No, not a super-villain who dessicates corpses, but an entrepreneur who wanted to figure out how to dehydrate, package, and sell every kind of food. “We were given dehydrated carrots, plums, everything—all, without exception, tasted of nothing.” Even Belcher had to tame his tantrums and endure “dehydrated carrots and potatoes.”
Hawaii stood out for its bananas, “an enormous variety… red bananas, large bananas, small bananas called ice-cream bananas, which were white and fluffy inside, cooking bananas, and so on. Apple bananas were another flavour, I think. One became very choosy as to what one ate.” This formed a dramatic contrast, in Agatha’s mind, to the other great passion of Hawaiian gastronomy: “hot meat stews.” She remarks, “I had always thought that Polynesians lived mostly on delicious fruits of all kinds. Their passion for stewed beef much surprised me.”
By the end of the Canada portion of the tour, the young Christies were dead broke. Archie filled up when invited to public appearances with Belcher, but Agatha was not always allowed to attend. So she developed a two-pronged strategy. First was to absolutely gorge herself on the one-dollar hotel breakfast: “grapefruit… pawpaw… buckwheat cakes, waffles with maple syrup, eggs and bacon. I came out from breakfast feeling like an overstuffed boa constrictor.” That got her through the day fairly well. In the evening she would request a carafe of hot water and then stir in a spoonful from “an enormous jar of meat extract from New Zealand.” That would comprise dinner in its entirety, and Agatha would wish “heartily that I had flattered the Dehydrator to the extent that he would have pressed large quantities of dehydrated carrots, beef, tomaotes, and other delicacies upon me.”
Once again, as I have noted time and again going through this autobiography, the reminiscences of food related to Archie foreshadow the unhappy ending. He came down seriously ill in Canada—for which Belcher seems to have blamed him as sheer irresponsibility—and as the “hotel food was not suitable,” Agatha had to scrounge up an “invalid diet: a barley water, and thin gruel, which he quite liked.” (Restraining myself from the all too obvious commentary here.)
Agatha ultimately compensated for her unbalanced Canada diet with a trip to see Aunt Cassie in New York, who took her to “splended restaurants and fed me delicious food.” Rather to her aunt’s bemusement, Agatha’s one fervent request was to eat at a cafeteria. “Cafeterias were unknown in England, but I had read about them in New York, and I longed to try one.” Aunt Cassie graciously consented. “I got my tray and collected things from the counter, and found it all a most amusing experience.”
Settled back in England, with their daughter Rosalind (a tad frosty with her parents after not seeing them for a year!), and with new help in the form of Miss Site, it was up to Agatha to feed the family again. Even with Site’s assistance, they struggled. “Although we each had dishes that we made well—I made cheese soufflé, Bearnaise sauce, and old English syllabub, Site made jam tartlets and could pickle herrings—we were neither of us adept at producing what I believe is termed ‘a balanced meal.’ To assemble a joint, a vegetable such as carrots, or brussels sprouts, potatoes, and a pudding afterwards, we would suffer from the fact that we did not know exactly how long these various things took to cook. The brussels sprouts would be reduced to a soggy mess, while the carrots were still hard.”
Since most of Agatha’s food memories are very distinctly English, I couldn’t resist zeroing in on something a bit more exotic this time around. Here’s a beef stew that I think even she would have appreciated. Especially if it was followed by a dessert of ice-cream bananas.
Hawaiian Beef Stew
2 lbs (900 g) stew beef, cubed
½ lb (225 g) onions, chopped
½ lb (225 g) carrots, chopped
½ lb (225 g) celery, chopped
1 lb (450 g) potatoes, chopped
4 Tbsp tomato paste
2 c (500 mL) canned diced tomatoes
1 tsp salt
½ pepper
3 Tbsp soy sauce
3 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
cooked rice, for serving
Place the beef in a big pot or Dutch over with water to cover. Bring to a boil over high heat. As it approaches the boil, skim off the scum that rises to the surface and discard. (It’s not harmful, it just makes the liquid cloudy.) Lower the heat as low as your stove will go, cover, and simmer at least 1 hour and up to 2 hours until you can break the beef cubes apart with a fork fairly easily.
Add all the other ingredients, bring back to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer 30 minutes to an hour until the meat is as soft as you like and the liquid has thickened to your preferred thickness. Ideally, let it cool and then sit overnight in the fridge before reheating and serving over rice.
As far as I know this is not a Hawaiian move, but I would enjoy chopped cilantro sprinkled on this.