The Elegant Sufficiency

A Surry Hills Girl

Just finished reading Ruth Park's The Harp in the South (the title apparently refers to Irish immigrants in Australia), which is set in my once desperately poor Sydney neighborhood — Surry Hills. Love to walk city streets here, anywhere, and try and catch in my head how they might have been in the past. (The Herald's 100 Years of Herald Photography has been quite brilliantly helpful in that...) In Surry Hills, the remnants of old signage (love the Paramount movies sign on the Deco building in Brisbane Street), the crooked narrow streets lined with mean terraces, the old factories (now apartment conversions, of course), and the corner pubs, all tell a story. But Ruth Park does it better. I won't be able to walk these streets now without seeing ghostly, grubby barefoot urchins disappearing around corners, hat-wearing drunks weaving their paths home after the Six O'Clock Swill, and frumpy, weary housewives in aprons sweeping frontsteps.
Hilarious too, to read of the "Surry Hills girl". Says the pawnbroker Joseph Mendel to Hughie, when the drunk father attempts to seek some redress for the loss of his (pregnant) daughter Roie's honour:

"You are perhaps aware that a Surry Hills girl finds it difficult to obtain a position in the city. She may be educated; she may be more highly moral that similar young ladies in more prosperous suburbs, but her address is against her. Most Sydney people persist, somewhat biasedly, perhaps, in thinking of Surry Hills in terms of brothels, razor-gangs, tenements, and fried fish shops."

Have been wondering what that red light in the building across from me is... (have been told that my neighborhood is home to swingers groups and sex clubs...) And love too, Park's prose on the family's Christmas pudding.

"Now Hughie had, long ago, been a shearers' cook, and could make a curry hot, sweet and luscious, with surprising bits of chopped-up date, green peaches, and sliced banana floating mysteriously in it. And he could make soup, and brownie, and the curiously named sea pie, which is nothing more than a stew with an oversize dumpling roofing it. But, best of all, he could make a boiled pudding, dark as midnight and rich as Persia, and containing so many dates, prunes, cherries, sultanas, and currants, that, as Hughie himself modestly said: 'You couldn't spit between them'."

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Daylight saving ended overnight Saturday in these parts, shutting down summer and its restorative evening light. Leave the office tonight in damp gloom after my least-favourite day of the magazine’s monthly cycle; the day when we proof-read the “positionals” — PDFs of the completed magazine. The third or fourth time I’ve read much of the text. Tedious beyond belief. Energy-sapping. Tragic that the day’s highlight is to swoop on typos, red pen in hand.
Old people on the train, trumpeting such. “Let the old people sit down,” one cackles, as I make way. Bloody hell — could that be me one day? Too long since I felt carefree.
Am needy for something hopeful, light-hearted, optimistic. So, for you and for me — 10 reasons to be cheerful. Feel free to supplement my list.

1. My ice-cream maker still works. Thought it had died but it remains faithful, churning out this fabulous strawberry sorbet for me on the weekend. Must remember always to have the mix chilled when it goes into the machine — that, I think, helped it do its important work. The recipe was from Ices: The Definitive Guide, by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (Grub Street, 1995). 450g fresh strawberries, 375ml sugar syrup, juice of two lemons, strained, 1 egg white. Blend strawberries with a little sugar syrup. Strain away seeds if you prefer. Blend in remaining syrup and lemon juice. Stir. Chill. Churn. Ten minutes after you’ve started, add lightly whisked egg white. Am looking forward to making basil-flavoured lemon sorbet with the last of my summer basil, and lime sorbet.
2. An exquisite colour spectrum. When I converted the image above to a “GIF” file for use on a web page, the “colour table” in my Mac broke it down into the most exquisite colour spectrum — turquoises and aquamarines and pinks and oranges and reds. Confirms my thinking that reupholstering Aunty Amy's unsprunged, faded 1930s dining chairs (in 10 years when I can afford to do so) in a racy turquoise/aquamarine colour might just work with some of the existing red-hued interior features of my decor.
3. Lilies. With the weather as it is, the yet-to-open lilies I bought at Fox Studios Entertainment Quarter markets on the weekend might yet linger healthily for weeks.
4. A new crop of thoughtful, dynamic, expressive food writers might soon be born. Over three Saturdays in May, my friend John Newton will take a UTS-accredited food writing course at the NSW Writers’ Centre designed to show students a range of food writing and to introduce them to “the other branches of food writing that go beyond taste and flavour to politics and the environment”. (The far more interesting — and increasingly important — side of food writing.) Writers’ Centre members $330; non-members $360. No surprise that there’s a great recommended reading list, including Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Waverley Root’s The Food of France and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.
5. Early-morning starts. Now that the light has left the evening, but returned to the morning, I’ll be able to really seriously contemplate getting up to go to OzPaddle’s 5.50am kayak fitness training at Rose Bay. (On second thoughts, maybe that’s not a reason to feel cheerful…)
6. Blue cheese. The uninspiring-looking Kavil crispbread my mother bought last time she visited is still fresh and tastes just fine with a little St Augur blue.
7. Just a small cut. It’s only a little operation I have to have next week and the surgeon says it’s curable.
8. A mother's love. My loving, hoarding mother, who will arrive next week to serve me soup and mop my brow, continues in her op-shop quest to find me old cookbooks and her last find — The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook (I reckon it’s from the early ’50s, a very different beast to today’s WW offerings, and was under the direction of someone called “Leila C. Howard” — is that a clue for anyone?) — is a treasure. And thankfully I’m not relying on it to make ice-cream, as its “Homemade Ice-Cream” recipe calls for dry powdered milk, gelatine, butter and flavouring.
9. Creamy pasta. I fully intend to go to the kitchen now and cook myself my favourite comfort food — Marcella Hazan’s spaghetti carbonara — and I’m not even going to think about calories.
10. Eel. I’ve got smoked eel in the fridge.

•    Catch Radio National’s The Media Report on Thursday morning (8.30am), to hear me interviewed by host Antony Funnell for a program that “explores the symbiotic relationship between food and the media”. Podcasts too if you can’t be near your radio.

John Newton's 10 Totally Unrelated Terrific Books

Brilliant meal last week with old friend John Newton, one of Australia's finest and most thoughtful food writers and author of books including Beppi's: A LIfe in Three Courses. We ate at Pello in Stanley Street, East Sydney — about the best restaurant meal I’ve had since touching down last year, and some of the best company.
We talked books: I lamented how little time I get to read anything other than newspapers, magazines and stuff online. John, I'm sure wisely, largely avoids all that to keep his nose firmly buried in books. I demanded names, and today he obliged with his list of “Ten Totally Unrelated Terrific Books”, in no particular order:

1. Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, by Benito Pérez Galdós: “Sometimes called the Spanish Dickens, if you like sprawling 19th Century novels.”
2. What I Loved: A Novel, by Siri Hustvedt: “Siri Hustvedt has written a novel of ideas, in which she tackles questions of how much of what we perceive is personal, how much shared, how much is fixed for all time and how much is liable to shift. What I Loved is a ferociously clever book that, for the first third, I thought I disliked.”
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: “This is my 20-year-old daughter’s favourite writer; a wonderful tale of comics and their makers in early and mid 20th Century New York.”
4. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal: “The story of the intellectual, artistic and scientific achievements of the Arabs in Spain between 1711 and 1492 – if you don’t want to get on a plane and go immediately to Granada and Toledo and Seville and Córdoba after reading this, you’re an incurable Franco/Italophile.”
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: “If you've read it already you can move on to his others — Second Nature, The Botany of Desire and the new one that I have yet to read, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.”
6. Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, by John Dickie: “Interesting but polemical history of Italian food. Well worth the reading.”
7. A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, by Paul Richardson: “One man wanders around Spain eating and talking about food with the Spaniards. As much about la cocina de siempre (the food of always) as la nueva cocina.”
8. Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben: “An absolute must; an exploration of why we can’t go on growing like this, and a way forward.”
9. Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith: “A history of the flawed science and political and corporate manipulations of  genetic engineering.”
10. Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, by Javier Marías: “If you like page turners, fuggedaboutit! This leisurely writer turns ideas over slowly and examines them for pages on end in this book with its famous beginning. In fact I’m going to read it again."

NB: Sad to read today in Scott Bolles' Short Black column in Good Living that Pello chef/owner Thomas Johns has put the restaurant on the market. I get a strong sense he wasn’t supported by Sydney’s fickle and fashion-conscious diners. Their loss.

Page Turners, Or Not

I lied.
A few posts back I said that it was a rare cookbook that enticed me enough to spend money these days.
Yet this month, two new Australian cookbooks have captivated me. (Australians among you probably have already pored through them hungrily … they’ve been out since before Christmas…) How lucky am I: in the mail this month I received a copy of Greg and Lucy Malouf’s wonderful Turquoise. (Thanks Greg…) Sub-titled "A chef’s travels in Turkey”, it’s a rare and beautiful thing. Lisa Cohen’s in situ photography (below) and William Meppem’s pics of Greg’s dishes, Lucy’s engrossing travelogue and, of course, his recipes, come together in a stunning package.

Photographs: Lisa Cohen, Turquoise (Hardie Grant Books, 2007)

Greg is a genius, a national treasure. Born in Australia of Lebanese heritage, he has spent his cooking career discovering and interpreting the food of his ancestors and the food of the Middle East. Through his Melbourne restaurants (O’Connell’s and MoMo) and books co-authored with my good friend Lucy (Arabesque, Moorish, Saha, Turquoise, all published by published by Hardie Grant Books), he has introduced these flavours to Australians and trained a generation of chefs.
From Turquoise, I’ll be trying: these crunchy zucchini flowers stuffed with haloumi, mint and ginger; spicy fried calamari with whipped avocado, yoghurt and herb sauce; sultana yoghurt cake; and pomegranate and vodka sorbet.
The thing is, every Malouf book adds something new to the canon of food literature — there’s no regurgitating or rehashing; instead, you’ll find Greg’s original recipes, the vicarious travel and discovery of a new place, Lucy’s lovely words, and, always, terrific photography. (I’ve heard a rumour about what their next offering might be, but I think I may be sworn to secrecy…)

Photograph: William Meppem, Turquoise (Hardie Grant Books, 2007)

And Turquoise isn’t the only Australian food book to have captivated me in the past few weeks: I’ve always loved Karen Martini’s recipes and her new book, Cooking at Home, is yet another treasure. Her recipes in the Sunday Life magazine are always fabulous and figure prominently in my collection of clippings.
But following the lead of a bevy of her cooking colleagues, Martini — or her publishers — has decided that her best marketing asset is herself. As with her first book, Where the Heart Is, there she is on the cover, generous smile and generous cleavage, handsome partner and baby in the background. Is this what food porn is really all about? (I’m endlessly fascinated by the photographs that accompany Martini’s Sunday Life column: let me count the ways to look coquettish…)
Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Alice Waters, Stephanie Alexander, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, Patricia Wells … some of the greatest cookbook authors of our time have mostly remained faceless, ethereally drifting through the pages of their books, comforting, shadowy, modest presences.
And then there are the others. Karen, Nigella, Jamie, Kylie, Bill and their ilk. For amusement, if you ever have a few moments to spare in a bookshop, flick through Bill’s latest release, Holiday. Count how many photographs there are of Bill and his teeth. From memory, it’s in the double digits. I couldn’t care how wonderful his recipes might be, if I ever see another photograph of Bill and his teeth I’ll throw up into his picnic basket.
It’s not as if we need any more celebrities in our lives, or more published material to tell us how woefully inadequate and unglamorous our lives are, how plain our friends, how unsatisfactory our home décor, how limited our fashion sense. Countless magazines — even the one I work for — do that very successfully on a monthly basis. (Shall I tell you how much styling goes on to achieve those images you see?)
I like modesty, I like self-effacement — vastly underrated qualities that they are — and there’s something just a bit off about the celebrity-glamour thing overtaking the most fundamental area of our lives — food. Making the food look divine is one thing, but do the people who minutes before the photo shoot might have had their hand up an organic chicken’s bum need to look divine too?
Too much more of this and I might be re-revising my opinion and declaring again that the century of the recipe book is over. English author Michael Booth's thoughts on this dovetail rather nicely into my own. In an article in The Independent a couple of weeks back he wrote about his cookbook bonfire (a pre-meditated marketing stunt?) in which he burnt his every cookbook, his every clipped recipe, in his backyard. His reason? Recipes don’t work, we don’t need them, he reckons. He adds: “Meanwhile, rubbing your failure in your face are the glossy, art-directed photographs that make up half the pages in food books these days. If they were honest, the first line of most recipes would be: ‘First, take your food stylist and renowned studio photographer...’ ”
Booth continues: “Imagine, if we could be free from the tyranny of the TV chef and learn to cook by ourselves without their help. We could skip gaily through our local farmers' market or supermarket, choosing whatever is in season, on special offer or just takes our fancy and, once at home, create our own meals.”
I like his thoughts (never mind his wit) but surely they’re not going to help him sell any books?

For those of you in Melbourne, I’ll be at the Out of the Frying Pan talk-fest on Monday (dear Melbourne, I'm coming home...). I’m moderating the panel on Recipe Writing (they might want to find another moderator after they read this) and a panelist on Web 2.0: How to Blog and How Not to Blog. For details, go here.

Who Needs a Cookbook?

This post could go in one of several directions.
1. It could explore my timid return to the fish markets at Pyrmont.
2. It could talk about the fact that, against all expectations, salted little capers have use-by dates.
3. It could be yet another grumble about the profoundly dissatisfying state of 21st century tomatoes.
4. Or, it could be an exposition on my belief that the century of the recipe book is over.
(It could even be an album review: Listening, and loving, right now, Missy Higgins’s 2007, On a Clear Night, especially the track Sugarcane. On to fourth replay now.)
But to Point 1: Ventured back to Pyrmont during my lunch hour last week. Discovered a reasonable sushi train with fabulous unagi (grilled eel) sushi. At another outlet, an $11 takeaway container of uni (sea urchin roe). I’m going back for that. I'm helpless in the face of it. Fled De Costi Seafoods after being asked, for a 10th time by yet another sales assistant, whether I needed help. Although very dazzled by their range of squid/calamari/cuttlefish/octopus.
Finally settled on a whole flounder at, I think, Peter’s Seafoods. It was caught in New Zealand waters, and that bothers me, but I set my environmental/air miles concerns to one side, as I wanted something on the bone, not a fillet, to feed one, and that seemed the best option.
No idea what to do with a whole flounder but I’m finding my confidence with fish. Heat+Flesh=Result. I’m looking at the thickness of the fillet or the size of the fish and drawing logical conclusions. That worked on Christmas Day with a whole ocean trout and, last night, like a dream, with my flounder.
Which leads to Points 2 and 3, which can be dealt with quickly. Pulling a little plastic container of capers out of the pantry — Zuccato Capperi Al Sale (product of Italy), it was clear pretty quickly that they don’t last forever, as perhaps I think I imagined they might. Hard little pellets they were, although nothing a little water couldn’t fix. And I ignored the use-by date. What? 2006? That couldn’t possibly be right! I can’t possibly be turning into my mother?!
As for the tomatoes. … well, what more needs to be said. Seems to me that, in this city, unless you have the time to travel half way across town to an overpriced fruit and vegetable merchant, or you’re a restaurant chef with access to the best suppliers, you’ll struggle to find a decent tomato. I’m increasingly using cherry tomatoes, or those little grape tomatoes, as I did with my flounder. Perhaps the tomato story is the same in every city?
Point 4 though, is the one worth spending some time on.  My confidence with fish may be increasing, but I still needed some inspiration. And, on the day I came home with a whole flounder, poor sad ugly little thing it was, my books were still in boxes, waiting for new shelves to be delivered. In any case, it would have taken me half an hour or more to wade through umpteen book indexes looking for flounder ideas. Two minutes on Google turned this up (but I really didn’t need the butter); three minutes and I’d come upon this — Michael Lomonaco of Porter House New York demonstrating a recipe for whole roasted flounder (he calls it “fluke”) with caper and tomato dressing (I guess the olive oil could do as much damage?).
Took me about 10 minutes to pull it all together with a little green salad at the side. Just brilliant. And the fish was superb, coming away from the bone without a murmur.
Given the resources online — especially those from many of you — and given my already considerable collection of food books, and clipped recipes, it’s a rare cookbook that entices me enough to spend money these days. It needs to offer something very special, a very clear point of difference: I’d hoped to find it in Kylie Kwong’s latest, My China, but was disappointed by the lightweight text. Movida: Spanish Culinary Adventures has caught my interest more; partly because I love the restaurant, partly because the recipes are so very appealing and accessible, partly because each recipe is prefaced with a small introduction that explains an element of the dish, or an associated tradition or memory. Beyond Nose to Tail, by British chef Fergus Henderson, has that X factor thanks to its considerable eccentricity and humour (“toss with conviction” is the suggestion in one recipe). And, offal lover that I am, it’s impossible not to be persuaded by recipes such as Confit Pig’s Cheek and Dandelion, and Chicken and Ox Tongue Pie.
But all that said, I find it fairly easy these days to avoid cookbook purchases. Am I the only one to feel this way? What new releases have lured you to part with $$?
Meanwhile, I’d love to be in a position to build on my semi-regular "Recipe Scout" — and to find a way to more effectively search it. I’m working on it.

The Flesh Is Weak

Back at the State Library today to put my head down and at least attempt to focus on writing an article, meeting a deadline. Even a trip to the bathroom requires packing up the laptop and several flights of stairs. So I stay put for most of the day, breaking for some poor dim sum in Chinatown, and later for coffee and a brownie and the newspaper at Mr Tulk.
The words come out, falteringly, and I’m not thrilled about them yet, but there are many hundreds more of them now than there would have been if I’d worked from home where there are compelling distractions like washing and housework.
But the State Library has its own distractions. Completely by accident I find a spot on the gallery level of the Redmond Barry Reading Room. After I’ve opened the laptop, plugged it in, arranged my things, can you believe the books I discover I’m surrounded by!? For heaven’s sake, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Who could resist the temptation of these titles in Section F391 of the State Library of Victoria:

• The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy
• The Art of the Shoe
• Support and Seduction: A History of Corsets and Bras
• Absinthe
• The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk
• Men in Skirts
• Tea of the Sages, the Art of the Sencha
• The Art of Arabian Costume
• China Chic: East Meets West
• Costume, Textiles and Jewellery of India: Traditions in Rajasthan
• Everyday Fashion of the ’40s as Pictured in Sears Catalogs
• Fashion Photographs: 1900-1920
• Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d
• Japanese Costume and the Makers of its Elegant Tradition
• Corsets and Crinolines
• Great Grandmother’s Clothes
• Perfume
• Women’s Hats
• Masters of Tattoo
• A Century of Bags
• A Century of Lingerie
• You Eat What You Are: People, Culture and Food Traditions

Hometown Reflections

Asked about my hometown, Toowoomba, my glib reply is that it's the Australian capital of evangelical Christian churches and incest. The Deep South of Australia's north.
There are no shortage of places to go in Toowoomba on a Sunday if you like to wave your arms in the air and submit to healing hands: I recall attending one such service as a cadet reporter on the local newspaper assigned to interview a visiting preacher. I was about as horrified by the spectacle as I was by some of the car crashes I was sent to cover. In the late '80s, the right-wing Logos Foundation moved its headquarters to town (the church's charismatic pastor was eventually felled by a delicious adultery scandal) and more recently and perhaps more famously, the magnificently named Magnificat Meal Movement made the hamlet of Helidon, just outside Toowoomba, home. (The founder of MMM also had her problems: a Catholic bishop who labelled the movement a 'cult' and a loquacious ex-husband who described her as a 'fake' and whose mutterings about a 'doomsday burning' resulted in the MMM headquarters being surrounded by police and journalists on the 9th of September, 1999. Nothing happened.)
In my days in the offices of The Toowoomba Chronicle (where computers had just started to take over and 'compositors' — formerly printers — waxed the backs of bromide paper bearing the typeset articles before sticking them to art board), endless press releases whirred and clacked their way out of the wire machine announcing everything from the movements of local members of parliament, to charity fundraisers, local sports fixture results and government statistics showing Toowoomba's alarmingly high incest rates. I don't know whether the figures still rate among the nation's highest, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I have been thinking about my hometown because it has again made national headlines. This time, two baby brothers, four and 18 months, are dead. The crime scene, a house in an area on the wrong side of the tracks. Not the first time Toowoomba has been in the headlines for such a terrible thing.

Tacos and Chinese Takeout
Segueing to another, lighter topic: one thing Toowoomba has never made headline news for is its food (except perhaps for Weis's restaurant, famous for its all-you-can-eat seafood smorgasbord, the place for special celebrations and, oddly, where I first tried frogs' legs). Mum always talked about opening a restaurant in the town, a curry restaurant (early in her married life she found a couple of very authentic Indian cookbooks which still inform her cooking — and her musty cluttered pantry); I wonder if her musings about such a business venture were not a reaction to our occasional meals at the Mexican Cantina in Margaret Street. Or takeout from the Westlake Chinese Restaurant.
My collection of vintage cookbooks (which I can largely thank Mum's op-shop-foraging habit for) includes two Toowoomba "cookbooks", one featuring "Chronicle Prize Winning Recipes in conjunction with the Royal Agricultural Society and Toowoomba Master Butchers", the other a booklet "compiled by the Parent-Teacher Association, St Stephen's Presbyterian Church Toowoomba." Neither is going to enhance the town's food reputation, but still, they offer a fascinating snapshot into a time and a place.
Bit hard to work out the booklets' exact ages — nothing so sensible as a date appears on either — but from the Chronicle cover's minty-green kitchen with its bakelite canisters, Sunbeam Mixmaster and perfectly coiffed housewife (above), you'd have to think it was the late '50s or early '60s. Can you imagine how very chic that woman and her kitchen must have seemed in a provincial Australian town of that era? And how chic the food must have looked — the first recipe in the book is Spiced Pork Chops with Prune Filled Apple Rings (from Mrs G. Smiles, Dalby). But while the prize-winning housewives whose recipes appear in the book might have been dabbling with some new and exotic flavours (I wonder what the Vue de Monde chefs would make of Lamb Cutlets with Bananas, or Tornado a la Roseni), there are some markers here of a dying era. The booklet's preface lists four "classes" in the cooking competition, the last being "Meat Recipe for a Breakfast for 4".  It wasn't unusual for my brother and I to get lamb chops for breakfast (Mum insisted we have a full cooked breakfast every day) and in Australian rural areas mixed-grill breakfasts were the norm, but how many Australians these days sit down to a meaty breakfast routinely?

Personal Reference Points
The other booklet from the St Stephen's Parent-Teacher Association (price 2/6) strikes me as being a fair bit older. On the inside cover is an ad for a local motor dealer, Gordon Motors, singing the virtues of Humber Hawks, Snipes and Pullmans and "the new Hillman Minx" — "inspect and drive 'the world's most successful light car' claimed to be the greatest achievement in design and construction". I'm wondering if the booklet isn't from the early '30s, which is when the Minx seems to have been first released; the fact that telephone numbers in the ads are only two, three or four digits, and the language, too, suggest that vintage. (In an ad for W.A. Noble & Gegg Pharmaceutical and Veterinary Chemists: "the pharmacist has a 'key to a cabinet' in which he guards stocks of narcotic drugs — opium, morphine, codein (sic), and others — prescribed by Doctor to provide relief from torments of insufferable pain.")
There are more personal reference points for me in this seemingly commonplace cooking booklet: in an ad for The Bootery ("Footwear for the Family"), which I'm sure is where my mother bought our sensible school shoes decades on; in another for T.S. Burstow ("Furniture and Furnishings" and "Funeral Directors"), the funeral home that buried my grandmothers; F.W. Howard Newsagent, Stationer and Bookseller — I'm sure that's where I picked up copies of Rolling Stone magazine and, later as my interests shifted, Vogue Entertaining and Travel.
There's one for Pigott & Co. ("The City Emporiums"), where my Dad's cousin worked and where my brother only last weekend claimed he had a tantrum over a lost toy car; John McKinney (Toowoomba's Quality Store), where Mum bought me my first string of pearls (which I later lost at a rock concert: I guess I wasn't much of a rock chick); and the booklet was printed by Downs Printing Company, which I think is where my father had most of his election material — leaflets, how-to-vote cards — printed.

Chokos and a Cookie Recipe
And the recipes in the St Stephen's Parent-Teacher Association booklet? Perhaps most evocative for me are those using what Australians call chokos. (Apparently, the Spanish name for this vegetable is chayote.) A choko vine suffocated the leaning wooden fence separating my Nana's driveway where she parked her little green VW Beetle, from the next-door neighbour's place. I remember grumbling when Mum served chokos up at dinner, although I wasn't so unhappy when they were younger and had delicate, sweet seeds in their centre which were great drenched in butter and pepper. I haven't seen a choko in a market or grocer for such a long time; if I could find some, I might be tempted to try out the booklet's Choko and Pineapple Jam or one of two plain Choko jam recipes it offers.
Extraordinary how such a little thing can bring back such a flood of memories and how it can say so much about the continuum of small-town life. Sadly though, it hasn't inspired me to rush into the kitchen. The recipes are largely of their time (Savoury Mutton, Mock Chicken, Potted Rump Steak, Raspberry Tapioca) and I had to comb them a few times before I found one that appealed. Under "Special Lard Recipes" I came upon a recipe for some spiced Oatmeal Cookies. Substituting butter for the lard, I found an antidote to the less savoury side of my hometown.

Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup cake flour (I assumed plain flour)
1tsp baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp allspice
½ cup sugar
1/3 cup lard (I used butter)
3tbsp milk
1 egg
½ cup chopped nuts (I used a mixture of walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds)
½ cup raisins
1 cup dry rolled oats

Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder, salt and spices, and sift together three times.
Cream sugar and butter. Add 1tbsp of the milk and the egg and beat well. Add nuts, raisins, rolled oats and the remaining milk and stir. Add the flour and stir well. Drop by teaspoonfuls on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 10-12 minutes.
Allow to cool completely before storing in an airtight container.

Reasons to Leave the Car At Home

Ashamed to say it, but once, I had a car/driving addiction. Catching public transport to work? Unthinkable! Peak-hour traffic? Didn’t bother me. Happily paid extortionate prices for city car-parking and, later, crowed quietly over the car park that came with a more senior position. But I’m happy to announce that those days are behind me. Part-time now, and without a fancy-schmancy title (thank heavens), there’s no car-park provided in my contract. I don’t want to pay the ever-more extortionate prices the car-parking moguls charge and besides, a tram runs right past my front door. And, while I hate how filthy they are (on most tram trips I have my mother’s school-marm-shrill voice ringing in my head – “Get your feet off the seats!”), I’ve come to love the chance the trips give me to be a mighty sticky-beak. I eavesdrop shamelessly, pick up fashion ideas (or not!), stow away snippets of conversation for that novel in my head, get about my only exposure to 21st century teenagers, and wonder at the world. And the other brilliant tram discovery? If I’m not being a sticky-beak, I’m reading – more, in fact, than I have in years. That ramble was by way of introducing the current book in my bag – Kiran Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Faber and Faber, 1998). Has languished unread on my shelves for a long time but I think now I might charge through it. Take this delicious description of the pacing, uncomfortable days of Kulfi, as she waits through a crippling drought for the birth of her son Sampath:

“Her stomach grew larger, her dreams of eating more extravagant. The house seemed to shrink. All about her the summer stretched white-hot into an infinite distance. Finally, in desperation for another landscape, she found a box of old crayons in the back of a cupboard and, with a feeling bordering on hysteria, she began to draw on the dirty, stained walls of the house. … She drew a pond, dark but leaping with colourful fish. A field of bright pineapples and pale, dangling snake-gourd. Big lumbering jackfruit in a jackfruit tree and a scratching bunch of chickens. As her husband and mother-in-law retreated in horror, not daring to upset her or the baby still inside her, she drew a parade of cooks beheading goats. Others running to a marketplace overflowing with things to bargain over. Some standing over steaming pots with ladles or pounding whole spices on a grinding stone. … She began to draw fruit she did not know; spices yet to be discovered in hidden pods or sequestered in the heart of unknown flowers. She drew dishes that she had never eaten: a black buck suspended over a fire with a row of ingredients destined to transform it into magnificence; a peacock cavorting among cloves of garlic; a boar entangled in a jungle of papaya trees. Onions grew large beneath her feet; creepers burst from the floorboards; fish swam beneath the doors.”

The Wonder of Sea Urchin

Ask me what my favourite foods are, and the list would look something like this, depending on the season, the time of the month, the day of the week:

1. Sea urchin
2. Mangosteen
3. Sea urchin
4. Good bread with French butter
5. Sea urchin

I can’t remember my first taste of this delicacy; it could have been at St Kilda’s Cafe Di Stasio where it would have been served with a fine, thin pasta, or maybe it was at the Japanese restaurant Koko. Either way, it was a revelation: creamy, unctuous, slippery, sensual, rich with the taste of the sea. (Rubber Slippers in Italy offers a lovely sea urchin pasta recipe and photographs that are far superior to my poor illustration.)
In Hong Kong, I had a favourite Japanese restaurant in the Taikoo Shing district, the excellent Sushi Toki (Shop G1015, G/F, Yiu Sing Mansion, Phase 10, 14 Taikoo Shing Rd, Tai Koo Shing. Phone: 2186 6969). There were many wonderful sessions propped up at Sushi Toki’s sushi bar with a dear old Japanese-speaking friend, downing chilled sake, nigiri uni (is that the correct way to describe sea urchin on sushi rice wrapped in crisp, toasted nori?), horse mackerel sushi with ginger and, I have to be honest, the sinful toro and o-toro and chu-toro (bluefin tuna belly).
I ask for uni anytime I’m ever at a Japanese restaurant in Melbourne, but it’s rarely available. Not sure what its sustainability status is here, but it certainly has been over-harvested in Japan, which consumes 85% of the world’s yield. I found that fact in an interesting recent article in Macquarie University News. It reveals that two Macquarie marine scientists have received close to a million dollars to develop the “world's first commercial closed-system aquaculture system for the production of sea urchin roe from Tripneustes gratilla – the Lamington Urchin.
So what set me off on this meandering posting path? The discovery yesterday, while searching for something else, of this evocative passage in the fish chapter of Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food (Penguin, 1970) that left me trembling and giddy with excitement. I can feel the salt on my skin and the warmth of the Egyptian sun. I had to share the sensation.

"Hunting for ritza (sea urchins) is a favourite pastime in Alexandria. It is a pleasure to swim out to the rocks, dive into the sea and discover hosts of dark purple and black, spiky jewel-like balls clinging fast to the rocks, a triumph to wrench them away, and a delight to cut a piece off the top, squeeze a little lemon over the soft, salmon-coloured flesh, scoop it out with some bread, and savour the subtle iodized taste, lulled by the rhythm of the sea."

A Fine Mussel Soup

I like my mussels rough around the edges. Butch and hairy and crusty as though they’ve been away from civilisation for too long like an offshore oil rig worker or a merchant seaman. There’s some considerable satisfaction to be had in giving them an extreme makeover. Manhandling them into the sink, tugging out their beards, scrubbing away the grit and dirt until they gleam in all their blue-shelled Sunday best. These mussels? They came looking like they’d never done a day’s work in their life. Took me a while to work out why, then it clicked: I’d bought them at Melbourne’s Prahran Markets south of the river instead of my normal Queen Victoria Market on the northside. (Melbourne’s north-south demarcation is a curious thing worth a story on another day.) Prahran Markets are a pair of Manolo Blahniks to Queen Vic’s Blundstone boots. The ladies and gentlemen south of the river clearly have soft hands, squeamish tendencies and don’t like to dirty their shiny European kitchens. My mussels were disappointingly clean-shaven and twice the price (about $8 a kilogram instead of $4 to $5) because Claringbold's had done most of the hard work for me.
Didn’t affect the taste though: mussels are still one of the most brilliant and underrated of seafoods. I love their voluptuous-slippery texture, their sweet-salty fleshiness, their briny aroma. They stack up on the sustainable seafood front too, according to my Sustainable Fish Finder. And, very conveniently, they’re also acceptable when it comes to points. WeightWatchers points. My trainer’s on my back and my wardrobe is looking scrappy and I refuse to invest a brass razoo on anything new for winter until the size on a label is one I can say out loud without blushing. So I’m counting points and clocking up miles going nowhere on an exercise bike and again focusing my mind on dishes that deliver on flavour but not on too much else. So, another ES Light dish, this time inspired by one from Elizabeth David’s delectable Italian Food.
I have an illustrated edition, first published in 1987 (Ebury Press), and it’s seductive from still-lifed cover to cover. David devotes a chapter to fish soups and, like every other chapter in the book, it’s illustrated with appropriate works of art: Giuseppe Recco’s “Marine Landscape with Fish and Oysters” (1634-95); Vincenzo Campi’s “The Fish Seller” (1536-91); a fishing detail from a Roman mosaic.
The recipe below is based on her Zuppa di Cozze. In terms of the issue of recipe copyright, I reckon this is one that I’ll get away with. David is endearingly vague and free-form when it comes to quantities and direction, so what follows is my interpretation. And I’ll be at the Vic Markets this week to pick up some butch mussels to try out either Stephanie Alexander’s suggestion in The Cook’s Companion (Viking, 1996) of a mussel salad – shelled steamed mussels, boiled waxy potatoes, parsley, spring onions and a mustardy vinaigrette on salad leaves; or Peter Gordon’s salad in Salads (Quadrille Publishing, 2005) – potatoes, broad beans, mussels, red onions, hijiki seaweed and watercress with a saffron-cumin dressing.

(The Fish Seller, top)

Mussel Soup
(Serves 2)

5 pints of mussels, debearded and washed
1tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stick of celery, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
pepper
250ml white wine
720ml bottle of tomato sugo
1tbsp thyme or marjoram
¼ cup basil
twist of lemon peel
dried chilli flakes to taste
¼ cup parsley, chopped

Heat the olive oil in the bottom of a deep heavy-based saucepan. Add the onion and fry over a medium heat until it starts to brown. Add the celery, sliced garlic and a good grind of black pepper. Fry for about two minutes then add the white wine. Fry off for a couple of minutes, then add the tomato sugo. Add thyme or marjoram, basil, lemon peel and chilli.  Bring to the boil, then turn down to a low simmer. You can prepare this soup base a day or more ahead. Just before you are ready to serve, add the mussels to the simmering soup, cover and cook. They are cooked when they open: remove each mussel as it opens and set aside. To serve, remove half the mussels from their shells and return to the soup. Return the remainder of mussels in their shells to the soup. Add the parsley at the last minute.

The Teatowel Affair

It’s not often that a teatowel speaks to you.
So, I've left the apartment for half an hour, set aside the tedious transcribing of five interview tapes – to visit the Pleasuredome that is Books for Cooks in Gertrude Street in search of inspiration for a one-year-old niece’s birthday cake, and then to pick up 250 grams of blanched almonds for a cold Spanish soup.
An hour later I’m home, a hundred bucks poorer, carrying one funky teatowel, two cookbooks, 500 grams of blanched almonds, a litre of organic full-cream milk, a bunch of chives and one mangosteen.
I got sidetracked you see, lured in by the quirky Asian-ish charms of Sylvia Tai’s Shop Sui (227 Gertrude Street) and by the hilarious Famous-Five-ish teatowel in Sylvia's window. A teatowel thrown across my path at a poignant moment perhaps, given my mission. And well, yes, now that you ask, it has crossed my mind, at least fleetingly.
And of course, I spent more dollars in the Pleasuredome. For a start, I’d had Ices: the Definitive Guide (by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir, Grub Street, 1995) on order. Then Tim, Books for Cooks’ gastrolit-maestro, weighed me down with a pile of children’s birthday cake books to flick through, including Anna von Marburg’s classic, Happy Birthday (too posh for this occasion). My head was momentarily turned by Debbie Brown’s Naughty Cakes and its big boobed numbers – the “Roly-Poly Stripogram” cake and its buxom madam bursting out of a box, “Jacuzzi Fun”, and “Pole Dancers” – but I doubt the one-year-old, or her parents, would appreciate them.
And so to the trusted Women's Weekly brand and its Kids’ Party Cakes – 120 recipes and patterns included. What should it be: Geraldine the Giraffe? Timothy Tigerrrrr? Castle of Darkness? Spaceship Scorpio? Spiky Echidna Ice-Cream Cake? With four days to go till baking day, I’m pondering my choice now. At this point, I can tell you this much: Marni’s First Birthday cake will be on the simpler side and a young-and-old crowd pleaser.
And it won’t have a loaded message like my new teatowel.

* Thanks to everyone for the cake tips; even with my Women’s Weekly recipes and patterns I’m going to plunder your suggestions for Saturday’s project. Mary-Helen… thanks for the link; RG and FL, your E. David tips have me thinking, but do you really think I’m going to making my own soft icing flowers and petals in multiple colours???; FL, I agree about the pleasure of the repetitive action, but oh my, there’s some room for error in there – I’m a total klutz; Jane… would you believe I’ve never made a sponge cake in my life, I’m ashamed to admit, and I think my family would lynch me if I bought a cake; John N.: gorgeous recipe, but I might save it for a grown-up affair; CAH… thanks for the offer of your heart-shaped tin… I might yet come calling for it!

Botanical and Bookish Riches

New Year's Eve bears down: the family, a veranda, a barbecue, a sea breeze and, most likely, the same inadvisable amount of wine that has been consumed most nights in the past week or so (this morning's recycling pile includes, among other things, empties of Pizzini's Arneis and Rosetta plus a nice little Spanish tempranillo). And probably lights out before midnight. Much nicer than the annual delusion about the interesting man I might stumble upon in a sea of drunks, the Auld Lang Synes with mumbled verses and raucous choruses, the cheap sparkling, and the forlorn, early-morning solo waits in caterpillar taxi queues. 
I'd not like to give the impression that the holiday has been all sunshine – the weather has been foul, the Sunshine Beach surf typically threatening for a weak and idle swimmer such as myself, plus I've had a walloping head cold and more than one altercation with my mother – but by and large, things have been suitable. The cold even gave me the chance to finish Kate Grenville’s Man Booker prize-shortlisted The Secret River. (Moving on now to Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, an old recommendation from a friend who works at the Nature Conservancy and, according to Amazon, an “exquisite book of natural history and travel [that evolves] into a grand, Buddhist-tinged parable of our search for meaning.”)
On the subject of brilliant books, it was with a totally selfish amount of reluctance that I gave this one to a friend as a Christmas gift. I'm no gardener, but I couldn’t keep my hands off it. Botanical Riches, Stories of Botanical Exploration, has the most tactile dust jacket – a spot-glossed poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) – and 244 pages of divine botanical plates. Aitken’s book explores in vivid detail the discovery of plants in far off lands, from the dawn of time and the riches of Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and the Silk Road, to “scientific imperialism” in New Holland, the South Pacific and Central and South America. Stunning plates are accessorised with wonderful information. So, you will learn:

“Dionysus apparently, discovered the culture of the vine while still a youth. Nourished into manhood by nymphs, and surrounded by satyrs, centaurs and bacchantes, Dionysus taught the art of winemaking wherever he travelled, revelling in the productive and intoxicating powers of the grape.”

I’ll be following Dionysus’s revelling lead tomorrow evening. The warbling, transparent geckos here will have to fill in for the satyrs.

Botanical Riches, Stories of Botanical Exploration, by Richard Aitken (The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University, published in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2006)

The Pannacotta Solution

‘For God’s sake, how can I make my dinner parties a success?’ a nervous home cook begged me the other day. He was, he said, completely incapable of spontaneity and improvisation in the kitchen. His recipe dependency was absolute and, without fail, he found himself intensely focused on his recipes, and meticulous preparation, as guests arrived. I could tell the type: high-achieving, a perfectionist, the sort who can offer instruction in the seven classic tie knots and does iyengar yoga on Sundays. An eager-to-please S.N.A.G. whose ambition put him way out of his depth in the kitchen. I could feel his palpitating heart as his panic attacks took hold, as things started to spiral out-of-control, as his kitchen took on a chaotic life of its own.

First, I patiently explained to him the 10-step program for success in the kitchen, courtesy of Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints (Doubleday and Company Inc, 1966, with an introduction by Bob Hope):

• Don’t spend too much time planning meals. You don’t want a charge of premeditation.
• Use small plates and give little servings. It helps your morale if everything is cleaned up. I [Phyllis] serve my meals on coasters.
• Food tastes better if you eat outdoors. If possible, picnic 365 days a year.
• Serve coffee early in the meal and very hot. If a guest burns his tongue he won’t be able to taste anything.
• Add the word ‘supreme’ to everything you serve – hamburgers supreme, turkey necks supreme, toast supreme etc.
• Pick up a cookbook at a rummage sale so you have one that looks used.
• Wear glasses when you’re taking something out of the oven. They will steam up and you’ll have a few moments to brace yourself.
• Do not taste food while you’re cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.
• Discuss religion and politics at a dinner party so people get into heated arguments and don’t notice what they’re eating. They may also think the arguing caused their indigestion.
• During the meal, someone is bound to call your food something other than what it is. Don’t argue. If they’re eating spaghetti and say, ‘What delicious sauerkraut!” just say “Thank you.”

Then, after the nervous cook had listened intently to this advice, I felt obliged to help him in a practical way, to offer him at least one recipe that would become his loyal and trusted friend; a recipe that was not highly strung, demanding or temperamental, and which would not have a hissy fit if it were prepared ahead and then forgotten for a while.
I thought pannacotta. A savoury pannacotta with a simple little salad as a starter. My choice was validated when a chef friend told me that, in his kitchen, pannacottas were considered “apprentice proof”.
Mind you, it’s beyond me why this nervous cook asked for my advice about dinner parties; my friends know to have their starters before they arrive for dinner at my place, to bring rations to tide them over while I get lost in a steaming kitchen, and to expect their main course at midnight. And, if this nervous cook had seen my three efforts to get this recipe right, he would almost certainly have thought twice about the value of my advice.
On my first attempt, as winter wound down (this post has been a long time in the making, damn you’d better appreciate it), I adapted an online savoury pannacotta recipe I found to create a fresh horseradish and gruyere pannacotta. A fine result indeed, but for the fact that the recipe used eggs, plus 50% cream to 50% milk, and left my arteries and the bathroom scales gasping for breath.
For the second attempt, I found the recipe for a dish I discovered with wonder a few years back at clever Karen Martini's Melbourne Wine Room – a gorgonzola pannacotta with a salad of apple radicchio, walnuts and balsamic. I was blasé now, the first version had been such a breeze, but the evil kitchen gods were running amok. I followed the recipe to the letter and smugly set my little moulds in the fridge to set. Damn, I wish I’d taken a photograph of the unmoulded results the next morning. But I was too disgusted. The little custards flopped out of their dariole moulds with a three-tone stripe. Something I had done had caused the mixture to separate – into a pale, curious, pepper-flecked bottom layer; an unpleasant dirty-white jelly layer in the centre; and a mouldy-green, cheesy layer at the top.
But I was not going to be beaten by a wretched little Italian cooked cream.
I tried it again, working on the assumption that, in my blasé frame-of-mind, I had allowed the milk/cream mixture to reach too high a temperature which, somehow, had resulted in the separated, striped version. (If anyone has any better ideas as to why I stuffed up so, please tell me…)
At last, I could deliver on my promise to the nervous cook: this time, a trembling, pristine little thing flopped onto the plate. Rich, yes, but cut by the crispness and acidity in the salad, quite a bloody little wonder.

Gorgonzola Pannacotta with a Salad of Apple, Radicchio, Walnuts and Balsamic
Serves 4

Pannacotta
3 leaves gelatine, gold strength,
250ml milk
150ml pouring cream
140g gorgonzola (piccante), rind removed and finely chopped
sea salt and cracked pepper
1 head radicchio leaves, torn
4 sticks celery, sliced
2 granny smith apples, julienned
20 basil leaves
½ cup walnuts, toasted and chopped
120ml extra virgin olive oil
60ml balsamic vinegar

Soak gelatine in cold water until soft. Combine milk and cream in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove and add gorgonzola, whisking gently to combine. Season. Squeeze water from gelatine and add gelatine leaves to milk mixture. Stir until dissolved, then strain and pour into 4x100ml moulds or a loaf tin. Cover and refrigerate for 6 hours or until set.
To make the salad, combine all ingredients except oil and vinegar in a large bowl. Whisk oil and vinegar in a small bowl until smooth and pour over salad. Toss gently to combine.
To serve, unmould pannacotta onto serving plates. If set in a loaf tin, slice into 2cm-thick rectangles. Place on serving plates with salad at the side or on top.

* From Where the Heart Is, by Karen Martini (Penguin Lantern, 2006)

My notes on the recipe: Watch your milk and cream, it’ll boil fast. Don’t leave your gelatine in the water for too long before squeezing it out and adding to milk mixture (10 minutes should do it). I prefer to use cracked white pepper for this dish. Lightly oil your moulds or loaf tin. To remove pannacotta from the moulds so they remain pristine, try and avoid running a knife around the edges to release; instead, gently use your fingertips to press down around the top of the pannacotta to let air slip in around the sides. Tip it up then to unmould on to a plate. If it is still a little stubborn, put a finger up underneath, while still holding it upside down and continue gently pressing in the centre. This should allow you to release the pannacotta smoothly.
Don’t dress your salad until a minute or so before you are ready to serve, as the balsamic vinegar will discolour everything. And, when plating it, if you don’t want to discolour your pannacotta too much, try and keep the dressing away from it.
I cut my apples in quarters, cored each quarter, then sliced the quarters thinly and, in one of my three attempts, used pecans instead of walnuts.
You can make this recipe the day before – at a pinch, two days before. Unmould just before serving.

The Family Museum

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood home. Last night, sleepless, and with the backing vocals of post-Derby-Day drunks on the street below my apartment, I walked in my head through the old house. Underfoot, I felt the thick wool Berber carpet that my mother had put in once she and Dad had become more financially secure; combined with the home-made, orange-flowered curtains, a triumph of ’70s style. My little brother and I were never allowed to take food onto the carpet, so it still feels like new. There it is – that old creak when you step in a particular spot in the hallway outside the bathroom. And opening the old cupboards in the bathroom – a woody note against the clean-cotton-towel smell. The books in every room; still, the childhood favourites in my bedroom – The Wind in the Willows, Swallows and Amazons, The Magic Faraway Tree; and old plays (Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Ray Lawler) hoarded with stars in my eyes during teenage amateur theatre days.

A Hole in a Tree
Still in bare feet, I’m outside now and feeling the jab and prick of burrs and fallen eucalyptus twigs and stalky grass. I stop and crouch next to my favourite tree (camphor laurel? eucalypt?), next to the hole in its trunk. It’s just a hole now, a hole in a tree, but it has the same damp, earthy smell it had when it was the entrance to an Enid-Blyton-inspired fantasy world where ants and beetles and birds had names and personalities and took a skinny little red-headed girl on adventures in her head. And, on the same tree, decaying for decades, a mere fragment of rope hanging from the branch where Dad put a tyre swing for us.
It has been a wrenching two years of change for the family: My father’s involuntary ‘retirement’, a cruel type of retirement only an elected official faces. My return to Australia from overseas, then the traumatic collapse of a relationship, which was the reason for returning and turning my back on overseas opportunities. My ‘celebration’ of a milestone birthday, the sort of milestone that precipitates life crises. A career cul-de-sac. Then, the worst of all, the devastation of my father's cancer diagnosis. Blows, disappointments, fears, regrets, worry, emotion. As my parents age and weary and grapple with my father’s health, I have never felt more, reluctantly, a grown-up.

Dismantling the Family Museum
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood home. It’s a sprawling museum of a family’s life, and as cluttered as a Victorian museum – my parents are compulsive, pathological, terrifying collector-hoarders. Books (thousands of them), paintings, manchester, clothing, photographs, furniture (87 chairs, my father counted), beer steins (hundreds, don’t ask), billiard table, piano, suitcases, watches, saddle, shoes, fabric, glassware, cutlery, figurines, ornaments. We all know it’s time to dismantle the family museum, an inestimably large, daunting task that is just about beyond my parents’ capacity. A few, tentative, early steps have been taken. A parcel of land next to the house is to be auctioned in a week or two. My Enid Blyton tree, the tyre-swing tree, will have a new owner. (I hope they love it like I did.) And the smallest amount of progress is being made inside the house.
If there is to be a scrap of joy or humour to be found in this sad, slow, bitter task of disassembling, physically at least, a family’s life, it will be in the recovery and discovery of countless treasures. I know we’ll find the hats that my mother, the perfect politician’s wife, wore through the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the kaftans that succeeded them. In the dining room, sideboards are filled with delicious things – a heavy Chinese silk tablecloth reputed to have belonged to an ancestor involved with the Boxer Rebellion; a stunning, flower-edged dinner service from the ’30s; cruet sets and tea sets and platters and ladles and punch bowls. In the hall cupboard, I know there’s a box holding Great Aunt Amy's tissue-wrapped wedding dress from the ’20s.
Thank heavens for dear, childless Amy, who lived for many years in San Francisco and who bequeathed her possessions to my mother. This week, Dad mailed to me a parcel full of little booklets – free cookbooks from companies and organisations such as the Hardwick Stove Company (Cleveland Tennessee); Carvel Hall Cutlery; the College of Agriculture, University of California, Berkley; the Club Aluminum Company (Mission Street, San Francisco); Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; the Sperry Home Service (Sperry Drifted Snow Home Perfected Enriched Flour); Kilpatrick’s Bread; the Wine Advisory Board (Market Street, San Francisco). Amy must have sent away for every gift offer she saw.
If only she knew how much I appreciate her efforts, how much I’m going to enjoy discovering her life as my own shifts before me.

Sound Bites

The iPod was meant to be my company on the extremely (extremely) vigorous, daily, crack-of-dawn walks that were my New Year’s resolution 10 months ago. Of course the walks weren’t daily, and those walks there were, weren’t terribly vigorous, and another New Year’s Eve looms where I can make yet another resolution about a daily fitness regime that I’m unlikely to keep.
The iPod though, has been a fabulous thing nonetheless. For music, of course, but equally for podcasts, which I’ve downloaded from the BBC, NPR in the US, Australia’s wonderful Radio National and, more recently, from an unknown (in Australia at least) Chicago-based “food podcast network” called Eat Feed that I stumbled on. It was created by Anne Bramley, a clearly unusual woman who is finishing her PhD in English, specialising in Renaissance food and drink. From what I can gather from the podcasts I’ve heard, Eat Feed is run on a frayed shoestring by a team of enthusiasts, relies on donations, and is committed to good things such as sustainable eating and seasonality.
Thanks to Eat Feed, I know now, for example, that in North Carolina, the word “barbecue” is synonymous with barbecued pork – pork shoulder, pulled pork, the whole hog. Thanks to the same Eat Feed podcast on barbecues, I also know that in central Texas, barbecue means beef, perhaps beef brisket. Meanwhile in Owensboro, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River, the word “barbecue” pretty much equates to barbecued mutton. (I know now too, thanks to a search to check the spelling of Owensboro, that the town hosts the International Bar-B-Q Festival every May when “smoke from hickory-stoked fires blends with the aromas of sizzling chicken, bubbling burgoo and roasting mutton to complete the festival atmosphere…”)
One of the most interesting Eat Feed podcasts I’ve listened to so far though, has been one in which Bramley interviews William Grimes, The New York Times food writer who is working on a history of dining out in New York. Fascinating facts from Grimes:
• Historically, the waters of the marshlands and wetlands around New York teemed with oysters and an abundance of game – woodcock, snipe and plover – which were standard fare in restaurants of the time.
• Between about 1850 and 1860, the main types of restaurant in New York were oyster related – oyster cellars, oyster houses, oyster palaces. “Everyone was equal before the oyster,” Grimes says.

• The Fulton Market near Brooklyn Bridge had famous oyster restaurants which were frequented by foreign visitors, including Charles Dickens, who mentioned oysters, and oyster stalls, more than once in his novels:

“Kit, walking into an oyster-shop as bold as if he lived there, and not so much as looking at the counter or the man behind it, led his party into a box – a private box, fitted up with red curtains, white table-cloth, and cruet- stand complete – and ordered a fierce gentleman with whiskers, who acted as waiter and called him, him Christopher Nubbles, 'sir,' to bring three dozen of his largest-sized oysters, and to look sharp about it! … (he) presently came running back with the newest loaves, and the freshest butter, and the largest oysters, ever seen. … the greatest miracle of the night was little Jacob, who ate oysters as if he had been born and bred to the business – sprinkled the pepper and the vinegar with a discretion beyond his years – and afterwards built a grotto on the table with the shells.”
(The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens)

If the Eat Feed podcast on the research of William Grimes is upbeat and curious, an Australian Radio National podcast – also on the subject of oysters – is sobering, alarming.
In Radio Eye, "The Oyster Farmers" looks at the tradition of oyster farming on the beautiful Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. For 150 years, farmers have harvested the famous Sydney Rock Oysters in these waters, but now, a virus is killing the oysters – and the farmers’ livelihoods.
It’s no surprise to hear that they believe that the virus is a symptom of a river under stress.

Postscript 1: In my searches tonight, I’ve just come upon another relevant podcast: I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but NPR interviews Mark Kurlansky, the author of Cod, Salt and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, which apparently covers some of the New York-oyster territory that Grimes’s research has touched on.
Postscript 2: If you don’t have an iPod or other MP3 player, you can still download podcasts from websites and listen to them through your computer.

Marie Antoinette, the Movie

Terribly envious of my American friends, who will have a chance to see Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette long before it arrives in Australian multiplexes. For now, I'll have to console myself with stills from the film, and reviews, especially The New York Times's review, which says of the queen (and you have to admire a woman who appreciates shoes like that):

“She is profligate and self-indulgent, yes, impetuously ordering up shoes, parties and impromptu trips to Paris. She breaks with tradition by applauding at the opera, and then appears onstage herself. She takes a lover — a dashing Swedish nobleman — and turns Petit Trianon, a royal retreat that was a gift from her husband, into a kind of Versailles V.I.P. room, where she drinks, gardens, reads Rousseau and plays shepherdess. These activities have often been mocked — and were the source of scandal and outrage in the years before the revolution — but through Ms. Coppola’s eyes they are poignant as well as a bit silly.”

But I think it’s the still here, of the cakes … I mean, look at those cakes … that has me entranced. They remind me of colour plates (see below) from an old book that my book-collecting father passed on to me – Cassel’s Dictionary of Cookery. It’s all gold-embossed leather binding, marbled end papers and entrancing preface: “The art of cookery is every day receiving increased attention: and no wonder. Life is made all the brighter by satisfactory feeding; and he is a dull philospher who despises a good dinner.” I can’t find a publication date in this treasure, although it must be at least 120 years old – just a wealth of wisdom and social history, the dinkiest recipes (“beef udder may be gently simmered in broth or water”, page 1023), and wonderful black and white engravings and colour plates.
At some point, I may be silly enough to attempt to prepare the extravagant fruit jelly at the bottom left corner of the left-hand illustration below.

1948 Banana Cake

It was 1948. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated in New Delhi. The Cold War had begun with the Berlin Blockade. The State of Israel was established. In Australia, the pipe-smoking Ben Chifley was Prime Minister and the first Holden car, the beloved FX, had rolled off the assembly line. Australians were eating Maxam luncheon beef from a can, discovering the joys of The Hawkins, “America’s finest pressure cooker”, and sending in recipes by the thousands to The Australian Women’s Weekly ₤2000 Cookery Contest. The slim little volume that published the winning recipes sold for two shillings and featured on its cover a jug and glasses of punch, a bowl of daisies, and an odd brown-pink-and-green layered cake with a piped-cream-and-strawberry ornamentation.

A Novelty Cauliflower Cake
The ₤50 Champion Cake was a Snowflake Cake with Egg-Nog Filling. The poor Australian cook who devised the recipe and its not-unappealing filling of egg yolks, sugar, butter, lemon rind, chopped walnuts, citron peel, raisins and brandy wasn’t named.
Other cake recipes in the edition included a Novelty Cauliflower Cake (the ‘cauliflower’ being a swirl of meringue with green-coloured icing for ‘leaves’), a Jamaican Sultana Cake and the Tutti Frutti Cake. And then there were the savoury recipes, among them, a Creamed Lamb Shape, Curried Rabbit in Grapefruit Cases, and the Casserole Australis (a preparation not the for the faint-hearted of minced steak and diced kidneys with mushrooms, grated carrots and apple, onion, green pepper, celery and bacon, with a “fluffy scone” topping).

A Young Newspaperwoman
I go nuts for old cookbooks and my foraging mother (addicted, to a disturbing, compulsive degree, to garage sales, secondhand shops, charity shops) has instructions to watch out for anything pre-1965. I’m a sucker for their retro appeal (especially love the little black and white line drawings in this edition) and join the dots of stains and spills and thumbed edges to try to imagine who might have owned and cooked from them. My theory on the owner of The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest): she was a career woman, perhaps a young newspaperwoman assigned to the women’s pages in a smoky newsroom full of men. She had cheered when, in 1944, fellow Australian newspaperwoman (and later editor of the Weekly), Esme Fentson wrote the article “Who Will Do the Housework?”, predicting that when men came home from the war, women would want to “discard the duster and earn pay envelopes of our own.” She had sighed when her despairing mother had given her yet another cookbook in the hope that her daughter might start looking for a husband instead of a scoop. She had laughed uproariously when, the one and only time she flicked through that cookbook, she had come upon a recipe for a cake designed to resemble a cauliflower and another, a banana log with toffee chips, designed to resemble a tree trunk. And the reason I have this theory about the owner of my copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest)? There’s not a stain, spill or thumbed edge to be found on it.

A Banana Crisis
Despite Australia’s banana crisis (the continuing, devastating effects of a vicious cyclone on the North Queensland banana crop that has seen banana prices hit $12 a kilogram and more), I had bananas to burn. Long before the cyclone, someone had mentioned to me that bananas past their use-by-date freeze well. So my freezer was full of them. And how could I resist a recipe for a banana cake designed to resemble a tree trunk?
According to The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest), the cook of this banana cake should “rough the icing with a fork to represent bark”. Presumably the bark effect becomes even more pronounced with the addition of the toffee chips. Still, hard as it was, I fought the overwhelming temptation to make a cake that looks like a tree trunk. The truth was, I simply wanted to use up some bananas. And the result? Not especially memorable. I’m not sure whether it was because my conversions from imperial to metric were off (see below), or too late I forgot to adjust cooking temperature and time in accordance with the firepower of a modern, fan-forced oven, or perhaps it was just a so-so recipe. Whatever, I’m on the prowl now for a better banana cake recipe to use up that freezer-full of bananas. And it doesn’t have to resemble a tree trunk.

Your help will be greatly appreciated. Please send emergency banana cake recipes.

Banana Log with Toffee Chips

Cake:
4oz margarine or butter (113g)
4oz sugar (113g)
Pinch grated lemon rind
2 eggs
8oz self-raising flour (226g)
3 bananas
¼ pint milk (½ cup)
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
Icing:
3 dessertspoons butter
2 cups icing sugar
1 dessertspoon cocoa
Pinch salt
1 dessertspoon coffee essence
½ teaspoon vanilla
Toffee Chips:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Cake: cream shortening with sugar and lemon rind. Add beaten eggs. Lightly fold in sifted flour, then thoroughly mashed bananas. Lastly fold in soda dissolved in milk. Turn into greased log tin or loaf-tin, bake in moderate oven 50 to 55 minutes.
Allow to stand in a tin a few minutes before turning on to cake-cooler.
When quite cold, spread all over with icing, rough up with fork to represent bark; decorate with toffee chips.
Icing: Beat butter until soft and white, gradually add sifted icing sugar, salt and cocoa. Continue beating until well-mixed. Gradually add coffee essence and vanilla.
Toffee chips: Place sugar, water and lemon juice in saucepan, stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil, cook until a pale amber colour. Pour into buttered tin; when cold and set, break into pieces.

Shelter Dogs and Skinny Bitches

Bored of CSIRO? Does Atkins give you bad breath? Weak with hunger from WeightWatchers? Bookshop shelves everywhere are straining under the weight of a new crop of diet books.

• The Dog Diet: What My Dog Taught Me About Shedding Pounds, Licking Stress and Getting a New Leash on Life, by Patti Lawson (HCI, 2006): "A shelter dog changed my life," says the woman who now drives a Mercedes E320 convertible with 'Dog Diet' on her licence plates.

• Our Lady of Weight Loss: Miraculous and Motivational Musings from the Pa