u/1000andonenites

Sardines are having a moment, at least on my algorithms, and I am constantly being assured of how amazing they are for me. If I want glowing skin, great eyesight, strong bones, and excellent brain functioning, then I absolutely need to be eating more sardines.

Tinned fish was never considered a yummy ingredient in our household, and "sardines on toast" was a makeshift meal I would have when I didn't have time or inclination to cook anything. My digestive system would smell of the damn things for hours if not days later (sorry tmi I know).

But I have to say, a simple recipe I tried which was basically sauteed chopped tomato and garlic mixed up with sardines and served with rice was quite nice, and the gastric after-effects not so noticeable.

I think I'm ready for more ways of eating sardines, please share!

After all, who doesn't want glowing skin, strong bones, and excellent brains?

In fairness, this un-famous, un-noteworthy book taught me far more than just about sheep farming in Australia during Victorian times- I learned about the serving class and the colonizer class, and also about love.

I think this was the first book I read which took place in Australia- all I knew about Australia before reading it was Magwitch and the convicts. This book taught me that Britain didn't just send its convicts to Australia, but more generally the unwanted, the poor and the friendless. It also solidified my hatred of rich people. (yesallrichpeople)

Tori was an orphan who used her father's last five guineas to buy herself a passage to Australia, to escape a life of drudgery in smoky horrible London by going to a life of drudgery on an Australian sheep farm, owned by a fairly horrible but not downright villainous English family. The mother and daughter aspire to British genteel upper-class life by painting and playing the piano ("Louisa, you haven't practiced your arpeggios today!") in the bush, while everyone else works very, very hard to manage the sheep and the dingoes and the laundry. The mother sighs. She misses the butterflies in her old English garden, she tells Tori.

Christmas is in hot summer, and Tori faints during the servants' Christmas.

The mother gifts Tori Louisa's old cotton dresses ("sprigged muslin") which are cool, because until she fainted, Tori had to work in the two hot wool dresses she had from London. This causes Louisa to hate Tori, even though she never wore the old dresses. Her mother tells her they have to be kind to servants.

Through a weird series of events, Tori meets, and subsequently falls in love with a neighbouring man, Jake, a rough man with a baby and no wife. She takes leftovers from the big house in a basket to visit them, and they eat together. Jake admires Tori's mouse-brown hair, which glitters in the sunlight, the first time in her life than anyone has admired her. The other servant-girl had "fluffy yellow hair" and was plump, and "carried on" with the master's son Harry on her day off, while the piano-playing, sulky, bitchy Louisa had glossy black "ringlets".

Anyway, the baby dies from a venomous bite, after a very prolonged suffering. Tori and Jake comfort each other, and then run off together, sticking it to the man.

The cover of my old paperback showed a girl in a bright pink dress holding a basket, her brown hair piled up in a bun, facing away, towards a log cabin in a very strange forest. There may or may not have been a spider on the cover?

Anyway, I am watching Australian Ghosts these days, and it resurfaced memories of this old book which I last (re)read perhaps thirty years ago, and never heard about or saw anywhere since. What a strange melange of class warfare, colonialism, and romance to fill a teenager's brain with!

UPDATE: Her name is TAVY, short for Octavia, not TORI, short for Victoria. Oh my brain!