One of my favourite novels, Anna Karenina, starts – “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’d add that each eccentric family is eccentric in its own way.
Of course, I’m perfect, and perfectly normal, but the members of my family? They’re certifiable. I think the sommelier brother who likes to take a suckling pig on holidays has been persuaded not to this year. Controlling my mother’s obsessive-compulsive hoarding is a much greater challenge. Mum doesn’t know this, but on my last visit home I stashed in my luggage three of her 10 potato mashers. Not for me, but to offload at a charity shop, which is where she probably found them in the first place. Cooking in her kitchen gives me nightmares for weeks after. Ten potato mashers (I swear), and not one good one among them. Fifteen vegetable peelers, all blunt. Thirty-five knives, all even blunter. And the pantry and the deep-freeze? That’s a story for my father to tell:
"As soon as we built our house in the mountain city, 40 years ago, my wife started a planned program of food storage. You had to be prepared for things like terrorism and floods and bushfires, or visitors, or a sudden urge to try an intriguing new recipe requiring exotic ingredients. The pantry and assorted cupboards bulge with canned, bottled and packaged foods, herbs, spices and sauces. Every so often there is a muffled explosion as foods long past their use-by date suffer chemical reactions and detonate, rather like the homemade ginger beer I bottled years ago. The pantry also produces various forms of wildlife – breeding fiercely in packs of flour or rice or other unidentifiable dry goods. I hesitate to go into the pantry, but when I do it reminds me of back alleys in Penang or Malacca or the market stalls of Shanghai or Singapore. It was always an embarrassment to return to Australia from a trip to Asia. The television program Border Protection reminds me of our regular inquisitions at Customs. From the dark depths of shops I was afraid to enter, my wife bought a range of exotic ingredients. We always declared them – the smell sent all the sniffer dogs into a frenzy – and I hear that stories of our strange buying habits are still the subject of much hilarity in the lunch rooms of customs officers all round Australia.
My wife has an equally strange strategy for storing meat. Whenever meat is on special at the supermarket she grabs it with great glee and bears it home in triumph, a bit like I expect our ancestors did with their meat a few thousand years ago. Into the freezers it goes, but the thing with this strategy is, we never actually use it. The thrill is all in the kill, not the eating. So once in a decade we go through the freezers and throw most of it out. You can save a lot of money buying specials, my wife says, defending her eccentricities. You didn’t grow up in the Depression like I did, she tells our daughter, who grows ever-more alarmed by her mother’s behaviour.
But global warming and the drought have created a storage problem for us that my wife didn’t prepare for – a water crisis. The town’s dams are below 20 per cent capacity. What to do? There’s a bit of a creek at the bottom of the backyard – the kids played there when they were small and they would follow it to a sheer cliff face in the adjoining range-side park. To young eyes the dribble of dirty water down the cliff qualified as a mighty waterfall. It was better we didn’t know what antics they got up to around that cliff, but they survived. (I’d like to see my little girl, the writer of this blog, scramble up that cliff face now as I know she did then.) The quality of water in the creek was most dubious, but I won’t be in the least surprised if my wife finds a way to store it."* Illustration by Robin Cowcher
