The 1000-day Christmas ham and other summer food menu memories

Where's the condensed milk? Summer doesn't taste like it used to. Photo/Doug Sherring

When the days get longer, open a can of condensed milk. Kim Knight reflects on a summer soaked in salad dressing.

In 1982, summer had three components: lettuce (chopped), carrot (grated) and cheese (also grated). Onion tried its best to be interesting, slowly fermenting in a shallow bowl of DYC malt vinegar in the back of the fridge, but mostly we took our vinegar tempered with condensed milk.

Summer was slathered in mayonnaise.

The Agee preserving jar of Highlander salad dressing never ran out because we just topped it up with a new can of condensed milk, the same amount of vinegar and a pinch of powdered mustard. Screw on the seal and shake vigorously. It was the first recipe I learnt by heart. Neverending mayonnaise. Best spooned on to the dinnertime sandwich of my own invention - one slice of white bread folded around cold salad and hot mashed potato.

Summer was stuffed inside a sandwich. Ripe tomatoes, crumbly cheese and relish that slopped and stained my T-shirt yellow. Sometimes, we had corn fritters for lunch. Dad put his between two slices of bread and a swipe of Marmite. It was a sandwich by any other name and umami before food snobs took that word and used it too many times.

If you close your eyes, can your tongue tell what season it's eating?

Summer is burned at the edges. The blistered fat of a lamb chop, the carbonic disintegration of onions left on the barbecue too long. Steak is for grown-ups only and sausages have not yet evolved to have cheese in their centre or "gluten free" on the label.

The ham sits in the fridge for at least a week before it's cut. Delayed gratification in a vacuum-sealed bag. The first slice is taken on Christmas Eve and I acquire a taste for the texture of the rind - both gummy and bouncy, a characteristic I will later associate with squid. Even later, I will learn this texture is called "QQ" in Taiwanese cuisine. In 1982, I don't have a passport. My food words are monosyllabic. Yum. More.

The Ham will be eaten with salad (chopped, grated and grated) on Christmas Day, and then again, every day, for the next 1000 days or at least until it is finished. We are a succinct family unit - Mum, Dad and two kids - but in summer there are always extras to feed.

An older cousin visits with his girlfriend. She wears a bikini to the beach and complains the river's too cold for swimming. He is bonding with his family, but I can tell she doesn't really like us. They have arrived in the middle of The Ham. It's at that stage where there is a bit of jelly and ooze apparent near the bone. It sits on the bottom shelf of the fridge wrapped in an old pillowcase that, apparently, stops the meat from sweating. The Ham is being allowed to "breathe", which is slightly alarming because The Ham should be dead. The entire fridge smells of The Ham's exhalations.

There are ham sandwiches for lunch on the first day of my cousin-and-his-girlfriend's visit and then again on the second. On the third day, they don't show up for lunch. We meet them down by the river and she reports they've eaten a pie at the tearooms. "What did you have?" she asks. "Ham sandwiches?" She smirks at my cousin and I know she is being a B.I.T.C.H. I hold her gaze until she feels it. "Tuna salad," I say, going into bat for my mum with another summer of 82 special. Pasta seashells, combined with red onion, parsley, hard-boiled eggs, tinned fish and condensed milk mayonnaise. Summer is sweet and sharp and figuring out where your allegiances lie.

Of course we ate corn, strawberries and fresh-from-the-garden radishes. Of course, we collected mussels from the rocks and boiled new potatoes with mint. Apricots were bigger, nectarines were juicier and the tomatoes were eventually turned into relish. Cherries. Podded peas. Baby carrots. Crisp cucumber. I didn't know we were eating summer. In 1982, we were just eating what was in front of us.

On the fourth and final day of my cousin's visit, Mum unwraps The Ham and gives it a good sniff. Tomorrow, she'll probably have to start cutting it into chunks and putting it on a scone-dough pizza with tinned pineapple and spaghetti. Soon we'll be down to the bone and she'll put that in the freezer for soup because winter will be here before you know it. But today, it is summer. And there are sandwiches for lunch.