MoFo Day Eleven: Brumbies and Damper.

  Pony, our seven year old, is reading aloud the Silver Brumby books to her brothers- remember those? M and I read them when we were about her age and they've stayed with us. The books are about the lives of wild horses in Australia and the way they are written is very natural i.e the horses do not have special or magical powers, and are driven by natural needs: food, water, safety, companionship etc. There is a lot of information about the tough lives of the wild horses and the dangers they face, not least from humans, and also a lot about the Australian countryside and native wildlife. It was reading books like that, I think, that really helped make me feel close to animals, or, conversely, I felt close to animals, that is why I enjoyed the book.
     I have always felt very passionately about animals, from long before I knew about vegetarians and vegans or animal rights. I always felt a great affinity with animals and although I was very moved by reading for the first time, the wise words of Jeremy Bentham ''..a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? '' 
 But I think the wonderful words of  American writer and naturalist Henry Beston describe my view of animals  even more powerfully:
 ''We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. ''


  That view of animals fitted so well with the way I had always wordlessly felt about animals and it encapsulates why I am vegan, and why we are now bringing up our children as vegans. Which brings me to today: I made damper today because I first read about damper in the Silver Brumby books and, for some reason, always wanted to try it! I finally got round to making it a few years ago and it was a huge success- everyone loved it, and it became a very useful snack, and since it could be rustled up in about half an hour, it was great when we didn't have time to make bread or had forgotten to bake!

 A swagman. (wikipedia)

  Damper is a traditional Australian soda bread, prepared by 'swagmen', travelling casual workers, who travelled about carrying their bedroll ('swag') as they looked for work. The basic ingredients were wheat flour, water, salt, and sometimes milk. Baking soda was used as a leavening agent, and the damper was cooked in the ashes of a campfire.
  Today, I made damper with 250g self raising flour, about 25g Pure margarine (I read that damper sometimes had a small amount of fat in it), about half a teaspoon of salt, and 175ml of soya milk. I mixed it all up, and then cut the traditional slashes forming a cross on the top of the loaf, and cooked it at about 190* for about 25 minutes until it was turning golden and sounded hollow when tapped underneath. I glazed it with Pure margarine, using a pastry brush when it came out and that made it even more golden.
  Because of the slashes on the top, the damper can be broken into chunks very easily so it is especially nice to eat with soup, as we did today. The only thing which put a damper on the meal (did you see what I did there..?) was the fact that Pony has suddenly decided that she doesn't like it..