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'."

A History of Eating

Now here's a fascinating thing — a food timeline compiled by Lynne Olver, an American food historian, reference librarian and former New York Times librarian of the year who has a passion for food history.
Did you know that almonds were one of the first foodstuffs to appear — in about 10,000BC? That cows were domesticated in 6,500BC? That wine appeared in 6,000BC — about 4,000 years after beer? That "until about 2200BC the Egyptians perservered with attempts to domesticate a number of animals like the ibex, oryx, antelope and gazelle, and then, abandoning this fruitless occupation, turned to the more entertaining pursuits of hunting in the marshland preserves, collecting exotic vegetables like wild celery, papyrus stalks and lotus roots, trapping birds and going fishing". That french toast, omelettes and foie gras were around in the first century AD and sushi arrived in the following century? That fruit salad and Tabasco sauce made their entrances in 1863 and 1868 respectively? And that 2007 was the year we were blessed with Kool-Aid pickles?
Hours of amusement here. Perhaps it's time for a Food Lover's Trivial Pursuit?

'I Had a Slice of Spaniel'

Another brilliant offering from Delanceyplace.com, which I mentioned two posts ago. When they offer up food-related snippets, they're always about the intersection of food and history or food and society — the sort of food writing I find fascinating. And they have an unerring ability to pick excerpts with brilliantly sly humour and whimsy.

From Delanceyplace.com:

"In today's excerpt--the Siege of Paris or L'Annee Terrible: the overthrow and humiliation of Paris in 1870 by Bismarck after France declares war on Prussia. France, still limping from the excesses of Napoleon, shows enough hubris to declare war on Prussia over a mere diplomatic incident--the proposed placement of a German prince on the Spanish throne ('The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette'). Bismarck judged rightly that a war on France would enable him to bond together the loose structure of the German federation into a truly unified nation. Bismarck won after a siege that brought Parisians to the cruel brink of starvation, and he extracted as reparations Alsace, Lorraine and five billion francs--a price which led bitterly to both World Wars. Upon the German's departure, France imploded into a civil war that left 25,000 Parisians dead--more than in the Terror itself:

"By early October [1870] even bourgeois Paris had turned to horsemeat. ... As hunger tightened its grip, so many a splendid champion of the turf came to a well-spiced end in the casserole. Among them were two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis Napoleon at the time of the Great Exposition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. It was mid-November, however, that supplies of fresh meat were exhausted--and it was then that Parisians invented the exotic menus with which the siege will always be linked. The signs 'Feline and Canine Butchers' made their first appearance. To begin with, dog-loving Parisians objected fiercely to slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption, but soon necessity overcame their fastidiousness. By mid-December [columnist] Henry Labouchere ... was telling his readers, 'I had a slice of spaniel the other day,' adding that it made him 'feel like a cannibal.' A week later he reported that he had encountered a man who was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day, 'surrounded with mice, like sausages.' ...
"And then it was rats. Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. ... The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish--hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club, which featured such delicacies as salmis de rats and rat pie.
"As the weeks passed, Parisian diets grew even more outlandish as the zoos started to offer up their animals. ... By early January, [a young Englishman named Tommy Bowles] was noting, 'I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written ... horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.' His was not the only palate that became more discriminating: there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats. ... A lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically proved to be a wolf. ...
"Oddly enough, there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol."
Alistaire Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Pan Books, Copyright 2002 by Alistair Horne, pp. 295-297. "

Did You Know...

Did you know...

Billie Holiday’s famous, haunting song Strange Fruit was about lynchings in America’s Deep South? (I had no idea…) According to David Margolick’s book, Strange Fruit (Harper Collins, 2001) Holliday first sang Strange Fruit at Cafe Society in New York. Extraordinary YouTube video of Holiday singing the song here and lyrics here:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

“There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished,' she later wrote in her autobiography. 'Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.' The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as Strange Fruit became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform."

Did you know...

Coffee seems to have been a Yemeni invention, according to Tom Standage in his A History of the World in Six Glasses (Walker, 2005):

"The custom of drinking coffee seems to have first become popular in Yemen in the mid-15th century. While coffee berries may have been chewed for their invigorating effects before this date, the practice of making them into a drink seems to be a Yemeni innovation, often attributed to Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a scholar and member of the mystical Sufi order of Islam, who died around 1470. By this time, coffee had undoubtedly been adopted by Sufis who used it to ward off sleep during nocturnal religious ceremonies in which participants reached out to God through repetitive chanting and swaying.
"Coffee shook off its original religious associations and became a social drink, sold by the cup on the street, in the market square, and then in dedicated coffeehouses. It was embraced as a legal alternative to alcohol by many Muslims. Coffeehouses, unlike the illicit taverns that sold alcohol, were places where respectable people could afford to be seen. But coffee's legal status was ambiguous. Some Muslim scholars objected that it was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same prohibition as wine and other alcoholic drinks, which the prophet Muhammad had prohibited. ... [A ban against coffee was therefore enacted by a local governor, Kha'ir Beg, and] was proclaimed throughout Mecca, coffee was seized and burned in the streets, and coffee vendors and some of their customers were beaten as punishment. Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha'ir Beg's ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again ... [since] coffee clearly failed to produce any intoxicating effects in the drinker ... [and] in fact, it did quite the opposite. ...
"By the early seventeenth century, visiting Europeans were commenting on the widespread popularity of coffeehouses in the Arab world, and their role as meeting places and sources of news. ... They were also popular venues for chess and backgammon, which were regarded as morally dubious. ... George Sandys, an English traveler who visited Egypt and Palestine in 1610, observed that 'although they be destitute of Taverns, yet they have their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There they sit chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drink called Coffa in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.' "

Did you know...

A spice is not an herb … “herbs are leafy, whereas spices are obtained from other parts of the plant: bark, root, flower bud, gums and resins, seed, fruit, or stigma,” writes Jack Turner in Spice: The History of Temptation (Vintage, 2005).

“Herbs tend to grow in temperate climates, spices in the tropics. Historically, the implication was that a spice was far less readily obtainable than an herb--and far more expensive. ...
"Chemically, the qualities that make a spice a spice are its rare essential oils and oleoresins, highly volatile compounds that impart to spices their flavor, aroma, and preservative properties…
Briefly, the chemistry of spices — what in the final analysis makes a spice a spice — is, in evolutionary terms, what quills are to the porcupine or the shell to the tortoise. In its natural state cinnamon is an elegant form of armor; the seductive aroma of nutmeg is, to certain insects, a bundle of toxins. The elemental irony of their history is that the attractiveness of spices is (from the plant's perspective) a form of Darwinian backfiring. What makes a spice so appealing to humans is, to other members of the animal kingdom, repulsive.
"By any measure the most exceptional of the spices, and far and away the most historically significant, is pepper. The spice is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a perennial climbing vine native to India's Malabar Coast. ... Black pepper, the most popular variety, is picked while unripe. ... White pepper is the same fruit left longer on the vine."

Did you know:

“The Indians introduced the colonists not only to new foods, but to more interesting ways of preparing them,” according to Bill Bryson in Made in America Made in America (Perennial, 1995).

“Succotash, clam chowder, hominy, corn pone, cranberry sauce, johnny cakes, even Boston-baked beans and Brunswick stew were all Indian dishes. In Virginia, it was the Indians, not the white settlers, who invented the Smithfield ham. Even with the constant advice and intervention of the Indians, the Puritans stuck to a diet that was for the most part resolutely bland. Meat and vegetables were boiled without pity, deprived of seasonings, and served lukewarm. Peas, once they got the hang of growing them, were eaten at almost every meal, and often served cold. The principal repast was taken at midday and called dinner. Supper, a word related to soup, was often just that — a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread — and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, snack meant the bite of a dog. ...
"By the time of the Revolution, the main meal was taken between 2 and 4 p.m. A typical meal might consist of salted beef with potatoes and peas, followed by baked or fried eggs, fish, and salad, with a variety of sweets, puddings, cheeses, and pastries to finish, all washed down with quantities of alcohol that would leave most of us today unable to rise from the table — or at least rise and stay risen. Meat was consumed in quantities that left European observers slack-jawed with astonishment. By the early 1800s the average American was eating almost 180 pounds of meat a year, 48 pounds more than people would consume a century later, but fresh meat remained largely unknown because of the difficulty keeping it fresh. Even city people often had chickens in the yard and a hog or two left to scavenge in the street. Until well into the nineteenth century, visitors to New York remarked on the hazard to traffic presented by wandering hogs along Broadway. Even in the more temperate North, beef and pork would go bad in a day in summer, chicken even quicker, and milk would curdle in as little as an hour. And even among the better classes, spoiled food was a daily hazard. One guest at a dinner party given by the Washingtons noted with a certain vicious relish that the General discreetly pushed his plate of sherry trifle to one side when he discovered that the cream was distinctly iffy but that the less discerning Martha continued shoveling it in with gusto. Ice cream was a safer operation. It was first mentioned in America in the 1740s when a guest at a banquet given by the governor of Maryland wrote about this novelty, which, he noted, 'eat most deliciously.' "

I’ve had all these fascinating bits of information land in my inbox over the past few months thanks to Delanceyplace, “a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote” from a non-fiction work that the Delanceyplace editors “view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context”.
Food information is in the minority, but most of the daily emails are just as interesting, containing the sort of stuff that will make you sound extraordinarily well-read and rounded at your next dinner party. You'll find details about how to organise your free subscription here.

Apron Strings

Staying with my parents in Queensland briefly, before the frenzy of my move to Sydney. Muddling through their chaos, checking their affairs are in order, helping Mum tackle the cleaning she seems to be neglecting (she refuses to get a cleaner), getting in a state about my Dad’s latest visit to the oncologist, cooking a dinner for my mother’s friends — “We never see anyone,” she complains. “Your father would have me a hermit.” (Duck rice paper rolls, roast Spanish lamb, brilliant fragrant rice, salads, marmalade steamed pudding … some recipes to share soon … sun had gone down by the time the dishes were ready, so no photography, and besides, I had got myself in a slightly panicked muddle in the kitchen by that stage.)
My mother’s cluttering, hoarding eccentricities are everywhere. My Dad’s anxieties and nervous tics emerge as I try to organise, tidy, sort. Perhaps I should just let them be and not nag and pester and try to organise.
Through the stress though, at least they still give me the odd laugh.
Quote from my Dad as I carry a couple of rolls of toilet paper up the stairs to the guest bathroom: “You’re not in China now.”
Quote from my Mum as she watches The Einstein Factor, an Australian quiz show where the “special subject” of one contestant is “Australian Prime Ministers”: “Your Grandmother’s aunt wanted to marry Billy Hughes (the Australian Labor Prime Minister who split from the Labor Party over the issue of conscription during World War I). But her father said he was an umbrella maker and would never amount to anything.”
And I should not be so critical of my mother’s hoarding tendencies: in the past few weeks in Melbourne, as I have tried to sort and ruthlessly discard in preparation for what no doubt will be a much smaller Sydney apartment, I have struck my own eccentric hoarding behaviour.

Immortalising an Apron

This apron for example. A lovely thing. Mum thinks my Great Aunt Amy embroidered it — clearly in the ’30s, judging by its style. But it’s half finished, and soiled terribly. I’m wondering what to do with it. I’d even clipped a page from some DIY magazine, which suggested I “immortalise the uniform from your first after-school job” in a frame.
I tried to arrange the apron as though it were in a frame. It looked stupid. I’ve given up on the idea. But how could I throw such a lovely thing out? Any ideas what to do with it?
And I’ve been trying to reduce a pile of old recipes. Since my early 20s I have been collecting recipes. For a long time, I glued every one I fancied onto a piece of paper, slipped the paper into a plastic sleeve and put the sleeve in a ring-bound folder. A waste of time really, as most recipes never got cooked and now, looking at them, they’re awfully out-of-date. But going through the ring-bound folders in the past couple of weeks has been as revealing as poring through a photo album. Markers of my life.
So many recipes from my Mum, probably the first recipes I ever was aware of, ever collected: Her pork sparerib recipe (with five-spice powder and marmalade and which I’m very keen to try now); her salmon log (with canned salmon and cream cheese, which I’m not so keen to put to the test); her chicken liver pate (which might be OK with some adjustments); her green goddess dip (cottage cheese, anchovy paste, Worcestershire sauce etc — might be good, even today, with crudités); her cucumbers in sour cream (she served them as a sambal every time she cooked one of her great curries); her marinated lamb kebabs (love these — olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, cumin, parsley); and her steak Diane (I cooked this, along with prawn cocktail and lemon crepes, for my first dinner party when I was a third-year university student living in the most ramshackle share house.)
Then there are the recipes that came from my university girlfriends who shared my interest in “food”. Bizarrely, a “cheese soup” (basically, a vegetable soup with some matured cheddar cheese tossed in) from my friend Toni, and Oysters Czarina from my friend Melissa.

The Start of a Food Writing Career

Recipes from the first cooking demonstration I went to are in the pile: as a fledgling food writer, I watched Cherry Ripe, the Australian food writer who is much quieter these days, make smoked salmon and avocado parcels and a pasta dish: she told her audience that you should cook pasta in water bubbling “like Rossini”. Even now, l barbiere di Siviglia pops into my head when I cook pasta.)
Then, burdening my ring-bound folders of recipes, are the umpteen dishes with cream sauces (tarragon cream chicken, veal and herb cream sauce, camembert chicken in tomato basil sauce, chicken sautéed with basil cream sauce) and hot avocado dishes (chicken with smoked salmon and avocado). Did I really cut all these recipes out thinking they might be good?
And my personal history as seen in pages of recipes continues: like all good young Australians, I crossed the world to live for a couple of years in London and misbehave. Perhaps I didn’t misbehave as much as many … I kept on clipping recipes, and then I did a Cordon Bleu course.
That ring-binder has Sophie Grigson recipes clipped from the Evening Standard (fresh tuna patties, and pasta with rich mushroom sauce) and Alastair Little recipes from some weekend magazine (grilled mackerel teriyaki with Japanese rice). Grigson, daughter of the famous Jane, moved her column, in an extended form, to The Independent, where I worked as a sub-editor; I still have a clipping of the junior Grigson’s Independent column on guinea fowl, with recipes including pot-roast guinea fowl with onions and thyme, poached guinea fowl with basil and tomato vinaigrette, and guinea fowl cooked with green peppercorns. Never cooked one of them.
And I remember a cooking writer at The Independent called Emily Green (I think), who went through a stage of baking like crazy and bringing the product of her oven into the newsroom. So, written on Independent letterhead (an eagle coming in to land with a newspaper in its claws), are her recipes for bacon bread and white bread and in my head, memories of the sub-editing hoards gathering around her baked offerings on a spare desk. (Memories also, of the most rigorous standards of writing and editing.)
Then there are the recipes collected during my time “studying” at Le Cordon Bleu: lots of reductions and sauces and vinaigrettes and so forth, and some recipes from guest chefs who visited the school, including the exec chef from the Ritz Hotel who cooked sea bass with potato scales and crab salad Antoinette.
I’m not struggling in the least with my decision to throw 99.9% of my recipe binder’s clippings into the recycling bin with the Saturday papers, but Great Aunt Amy’s half-embroidered apron? That’s a different story. What am I going to do with it?

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.

Trapped in Time

A good friend recently visited this museum in Maryborough on the Queensland coast. It preserves a former general store — Brennan and Geraghty's Store — which closed in 1972 but looks as though it was frozen, Pompei-like, many decades earlier. It’s unlikely that too many of us will get there, but thought it worth sharing her photograph … fascinating snapshot of an era. The shelves show products including Granose biscuits; Vita-Brits, Crispies and Weet-Bix cereals; Chamberlain’s Headache Aspirin; and Kiwi Shoe Polish. Bit hard to make out the rest. As for a date when it was frozen in time? There’s a “Yate’s Annual” hanging in the bottom right corner of the photograph dated 1939.

A Maiden Voyage

More deadlines, head down, trying to map out umpteen projects for the remainder of the year. So I’m going to let my father take the floor again for this post, in which he reminisces about his voyage from Australia to England in the days when air travel was out of the reach of most travellers. And a wonderful excuse to show you these glorious, glorious illustrations and old menus.

A Maiden Voyage
by Peter Wood

I was very posh. There I was in Dad’s 1930s’ dinner suit, joining other dinner-suited gentlemen and elegant women in evening finery in the first-class dining room on the P&O liner S.S. Canberra en route from Sydney to Southampton via the Suez Canal in the early ’60s.
Friends more experienced in overseas travel than I had persuaded me to sail on what was called a P&O “boomerang” fare that allowed a reduced first-class fare in the off-season. Tourist class, where I’m sure I would have felt more comfortable, was for the hoi polloi. First class was very, very posh. Thank goodness Mum had taught me respectable table manners.
But my wardrobe was not equipped for such a passage — it was very meagre and unfashionable and P&O stipulated formal dress for first-class passengers in the dining room. I remembered Dad’s dinner suit with its fashionably broad, pointed shiny lapels. Mum had kept it after he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1958 while the Queensland Leader of the Opposition. I had memories of Dad heading out in it — to his Masonic Lodge meetings or to formal balls.
Looking around the Canberra’s elegant dining room on my first night aboard, I came to see that my posh single-breasted dinner suit, older than I, was very much out of date. I was an unsophisticated 26-year-old from a country town and fashion wasn’t to be my only discovery on that long voyage.
The first-class dining room’s menu was another learning experience for me. I had not actually looked at very many menus in my life. Beyond home-cooked meals, my gastronomic education began with pies from the horse-drawn cart at primary school, progressed to army food during National Service, and thence to Nick’s steak and the works in Brisbane, where quantity was the priority (the works were as much spaghetti, chips and other bits and pieces as would fit on a large plate.)

An Incomprehensible Menu

I would have struggled to understand the Canberra’s daily-changing menus even if they had been in English. Even after a lifetime since of restaurant meals, I’m still struggling to understand it. (Can anyone tell me what “crane” is, as in “Smoked Trout with Crane”?)  You can just imagine what I made of “Crème Chevreuse”, “Duckling à la Suédoise” and “Bouchée Dubarry”.
From memory, I think I stuck to a suggested set menu. That needed enough explanation for my uncultured mind. And the wine? For one shilling and ninepence I could have a glass of 1955 “Rhone—Hermitage” red, or for two shillings and one penny (one penny??), a “Hock—Rüdesheimer Superior”. I wonder what my sommelier son might make of those. But in those days I was too much of a prude and didn’t drink. Alcohol aside, throughout the voyage I tried everything I could and my knowledge expanded, as did my waistline.
Our table steward was a pleasant young Englishman from Liverpool, although for a reason I never discovered, most stewards were Indian, from Goa. Each steward had only one table of eight to attend to; each would take an order of up to three courses, not including dessert, from each of eight diners and return to serve each plate to the correct person, all without taking notes.
I later discovered that the steward had a dual identity. As I waited to disembark at Naples to go to Pompeii, I was standing with the Canberra’s entertainment officer. She pointed out an attractive young woman descending the gangway and asked what I thought of her. I replied that the young woman was indeed a remarkably good-looking young lady. The entertainment officer laughed. “That’s your table steward,” she said.

On a Camel in a Suit

My dated dinner suit, combined with my painful shyness, made mealtimes socially awkward. I noted that most tables were noisy, but conversation at our table of eight was muted. We had two members of the crew at our table — the prim and proper ship’s second-in-command, resplendent in uniform and war medals, and that entertainment officer. Thank heavens for that: she was what one would expect an entertainment officer to be, noisy, colourful and an excellent talker and carried the conversation for the whole table. Although her enthusiasm must have flagged when she tried to provoke conversation from me.
And so, our gastronomic voyage continued, via Colombo, Bombay, Aden and the Suez Canal, where passengers left the ship to visit Cairo. I still have a photograph of myself on the back of a camel in front of the great pyramid, dressed in a SUIT — another part of being a first class passenger.  The ladies wore gloves and hats, but they didn’t get on the back of camels.
On board, the entertainment included organized programs in the evenings — bingo and balls, concerts and cinema. During the day there were games on deck, including the popular shuffleboard, in which we pushed a flat disc along the deck with a long paddle-like stick. And there was never a shortage of food: I made a pig of myself at morning and afternoon teas, astonishing arrays of biscuits, cakes, pastries and other goodies.
On one occasion, tiring of the stuffiness of first class, I crept off to tourist class. (First- and second-class passengers were not supposed to mix — amazing in these egalitarian days.) I found a dance room, selected a pretty face, and asked for a dance. Off we went but, to my consternation, I found the owner of the pretty face was also very pregnant. I don’t usually inspect dance partners for pregnancy. I completed the dance and retreated in confusion to first class where very few women were likely to be pregnant. It was back to bingo. My very moral upbringing showed.
Six weeks that voyage took. Nearing Southampton, I was having great difficulty squeezing into Dad’s dinner suit.

P.S. I bought an up-to-date dinner suit for my wedding to a Sydney girl I later met in London. It hasn’t been worn for a while: I wonder if my son might one day pull it out of the cupboard and give it a run.

Tongue Tied

Some of you are just going to HATE this post. I’m very sorry about that, but perhaps you should go away now and do some knitting or mow the lawn or whatever it is that you do and come back again tomorrow.
Because I’m going to rabbit on about a food subject, not for the first time, that is a bit difficult for most people.
Offal.
Or, more particularly, tongue.
There
I’ve said it.
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
For ages now, I’ve been trying to get some, um, oral history from Mum.
What did Grandma cook the first night Dad went to meet his future parents-in-law? (It was “sharp steak” … more on that another day.)
Which female ancestor was the one who smoked the pipe?
How did Great Grandmother Maud die?
Did Grandpa really have rabbit (that he’d trapped) and macaroni for breakfast?
How do you press an ox tongue?
Pressed ox tongue, brains in white sauce, lambs’ tongues in white sauce, tripe in tomato sauce, devilled kidneys, fried liver … they’re the stuff of my childhood. Offal was cheap, sold in every Australian supermarket in cling-wrap-covered white Styrofoam trays next to the rump steak and lamb chops; it came home with the groceries next to the Golden Circle unsweetened pineapple juice, the Fountain tomato sauce and the Praise mayonnaise. Offal was the stuff of myth and legend and apocryphal stories. (I remember a wonderful story I was told in Portugal about the origins of Oporto’s famous tripe dish. As I remember it, when Henry the Navigator was off raping and pillaging North Africa in the fifteenth century or so, all the city’s best provisions were borne away for the campaign… all that was left for those left behind was the tripe. I wish I had an equivalently evocative story for tongue.)
So when did offal become a rarity, only to be served at an occasional high-falutin’ restaurant to puffed-up diners mostly putting on a brave face? ("A fraudulent affectation," says Guardian writer Zoe Williams in an article on the subject.) It’s not hard to speculate in a pretentious food-writer’s-sort-of-a-fashion about how this happened… our increasing affluence; the stigma of offal as a meat for poor people; time-poor and poor cooks with no time or capacity to prepare it properly; the shift from rustic and wise butcher to sanitised supermarket; the shift from instruction manuals such as the Commonsense Cookery Book to glossy food magazines.
Those shiny happy titles don’t get their hands dirty with offal (after watching my mother peel her slobbering, curled ox tongue and cut away its “root” recently, I hardly blame them), but it’s a great pity because, quite apart from the fact that we’re losing a fine and (formerly?) frugal home-cooking tradition, offal is one of the most brilliant culinary experiences – both flavour-wise and texturally – and women through the ages – and the Japanese – have known this.

The 19th century: In The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion (1895), author Mrs Lance Rawson suggests choosing a thick tongue with a good smooth skin. “To remove the skin,” she advises, “plunge into cold water for a minute or two, and it will peel off easily.”

In the early 20th century: Things were getting a little more sophisticated. Fannie Merritt Farmer in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1907) suggests serving a braised tongue with a roux-based sauce of four cups of the water in which the tongue was cooked, Worcestershire sauce and stewed and strained tomatoes or, alternatively, breaded tongue with tomato sauce.

About 1948: Good Cookery, the Book of the Gloucestershire Training College writes: “A smoked tongue goes into cold water, a pickled tongue into lukewarm water. … If served hot, reheat it in stock and send to table covered with browned crumbs and with a good sauce. If served cold, glaze it and decorate it. If trussed, a frill is put around the root.”

In the 1950s: In the “Luncheon Dishes and Entrees” chapter of one of my favourite old cookbooks, the Hostess Cookbook (1952), the lady writer Helen M. Cox offers a recipe for “Hot Ox Tongue with Sauce Henri”. (Sauce Henri, apparently, is stock, meat extract or beef cube, with orange rind, blackcurrant or other dark jelly, mustard, flour, butter and sherry.) You should, says the author, garnish your tongue with ham rolls, prunes and sprigs of parsley.

By the Sixties: In Mediterranean Food (Penguin, 1965), Elizabeth David proposes Langue de Boeuf en Paupiettes: “Remove the horny part from an ox-tongue; blanch it in boiling water for 15 minutes and then cook in a casserole until the skin can be removed. When cold, cut in thin slices and cover each piece with a layer of meat stuffing; paint over with a knife dipped in beaten egg to unify the stuffing, roll the slices, put a small piece of bacon on each and tie up or pierce with a skewer. These should be toasted in front of the fire but can be cooked in the oven in a casserole. When they are almost cooked, sprinkle breadcrumbs over the paupiettes, and when they are a golden brown, serve with a sauce piquante.” (For such a sauce: “Fry a sliced onion in oil, butter or dripping, add a wineglass of vinegar and two cups of stock of whatever meat the sauce is to be served with. Add herbs, a clove of garlic, salt and pepper, and simmer until the sauce is a good consistency. A few minutes before serving, add a spoonful each of capers and chopped gherkins.”)

In the 21st century: Delia Smith is plumping for an ox-tongue revival, suggesting the tongue “needs to be well scrubbed with a stiff brush.” Meanwhile, Australia’s own Stefano de Pieri recommends braised ox tongue with star anise (“the use of offal is what makes Italian cuisine something special,” he says); Stephanie Alexander shares her idea for poached pickled ox tongue with roasted beetroot and salsa verde; a Balinese website I stumbled upon offers a recipe for ox tongue in sweet nutmeg sauce; and Northern Ireland’s Belle Isle School of Cookery cooks ox tongue with port jelly.

I asked my friend Greg Malouf, whose lambs tongue salad is one of my finest culinary memories, how he might prepare ox tongue. He was initially a bit disparaging – he hates cold tongue, he told me, it’s like polystyrene. (Ox-tongue-sandwich lovers such as myself might disagree.) It should be heated up in a pan over a low flame with a little lemon and olive oil, says Chef Malouf. Then he’d serve it sliced in a salad with Lebanese cucumber and a garlic, coriander and lemon dressing. All that lovely acidity cutting through the tongue’s richness.
So where do you start? You start by talking to your butcher and begging him or her to order a pickled tongue in for you. Then you might, bravely, attempt my Mum’s time-honoured recipe.



Mum’s Pressed Ox Tongue

1 pickled ox tongue
For a 1.5kg tongue:
¼ tsp dry mustard
4 cloves
¼ tsp peppercorns
1 dsp brown sugar
1 dsp brown vinegar
2 cloves garlic, crushed
enough water to cover tongue

Put all ingredients except tongue in a large saucepan and allow to heat up. Wash tongue. Put the tongue in the saucepan, making sure there’s sufficient water to cover the tongue, cover and bring to the boil. Simmer the tongue for three hours.
Remove the tongue from the liquid and cool until you can handle it. Peel the tongue and cut away the root.
Curl the tongue into a small stainless-steel bowl; sit the bowl on a plate (to take any overflow of juices), cover with an appropriately sized plate, and weight it down. Refrigerate overnight. The next day, upend the tongue onto a plate. It will keep for two or three days in the fridge.

Rites of Passage

Ming Dynasty funerary ware: Models of typical dishes

Before I moved back to Melbourne from Hong Kong in 2004, I entertained the ambitious, possibly delusional, idea of quitting my newspaper job and moving to China to write a book about regional Chinese food. Delusional because I speak no Mandarin; delusional because it’s such a mighty subject. (It was no less delusional to move back to Melbourne for a love affair, but that’s another story.)  In preparation for my task, I started to collect anything and everything I could find about the subject; cluttering my study still are mountains of files about Chinese food … books of course, but also reams of newspaper and magazine clippings, brochures, booklets, and scrapbooks and photographs from my own fairly limited travels in China.
I was always especially interested in Chinese folklore and tradition related to food, which I had imagined I would effortlessly and compellingly weave into my narrative. Were I still to harbour my delusional idea (and I suppose there’s still a kernel of thought about it in the back of my mind), I would have been very quick to print-out and file an email sent to me by Jane Wong, Melbourne food lover and dedicated respondent to my posts. Jane started off by telling me a little more about the way the southern Chinese cook pippies then, as an aside, told me about her plans for the weekend – her grandmother’s funeral in Hong Kong. She has given me permission to publish her email, which explains eloquently a hugely significant Chinese tradition … I think Jane might find the illustration above an interesting accompaniment to her lovely words. It’s a photograph of models of food dishes from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), funerary objects that were found in a tomb during an excavation in Jincheng, Shanxi province (noodle and black vinegar territory). I pulled it from a catalogue I picked up at an exhibition in Hong Kong called Fine Dining: Ancient Chinese Culinary Ware (presented in Hong Kong by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and the National Museum of China).
Jane writes:

A Weekend in Hong Kong

Steamed pippies, stir-fried in a light sauce of Xiaoxing wine, garlic, ginger, spring onion, chilli, a dash of light soy sauce, a little rock sugar, mandarin peel and some fermented black beans, is a southern Chinese dish. My dad is of Hong Kong origin and he said the servants used to make it when he was a kid. I have vivid memories of tucking into it on (the Hong Kong island of) Cheung Chau, and also hunkered on a low stool over a big bowl of them at a “dai-pai dong” stall in the street near my old offices in Tai Koo Shing. Clams and pippies are said to be good luck foods in China, as they resemble coins. Further north they stir-fry them with yellow bean paste, ginger, spring onion and master stock.
We’re actually off to HK this weekend for my grandmother’s funeral. For my partner, Robin, it will be a culture shock, having led a sheltered Anglo-centric life in Hampton. To top things off he will witness the strange oriental funeral rituals that westerners rarely see, featuring astrological divination and some quite bizarre Taoist ceremonies. After a number of days of rituals, it all culminates with the cremation ceremony. I dare say that Robin will feel it is hocus-pocus but I find the spirituality and the sense of community that is involved quite comforting. As my grandmother was 93, it will be a happy ceremony, celebrating her long life.
The funeral banquet starts with dessert – typically a sweet soup – so that only the sweetest words will pass from your lips about the deceased. I’m sure it will also feature some of my grandmother’s favourite dishes like smoked duck braised with taro and delicate sweet vinegar pork ribs. I remember that she used to have a strong aesthetic ethic, which not only governed her sartorial splendour but also extended to “not eating anything ugly”! She also had a penchant for fish sauce as a seasoning, having spent part of her childhood in Vietnam, which fortunately allowed her to be spared from the agonies of foot binding. And, as my grandmother’s ghost told me, in the afterlife she is going to begin a happy new adventure, where the burdens of the past will be erased and the sense of joy cancels all pain.
As for me, I’m hanging out for Chinese roast goose. It’s been five years since I was in HK last – for another funeral – and my family tell me the dining scene has since been scarred by SARS, bird flu and a number of food substitution rackets emanating from mainland China. It will be interesting to see – HK’s always evolving, fads come and go, new buildings pop up quickly and the pollution just seems to get worse.

Terrapin Soup Spoons and Toddy Ladles

At some point or other in the history of the western world, we’ve embraced utensils including:
• aspic slices;
• ice-cream hatchets;
• terrapin soup spoons;
• sardine spades;
• toddy ladles; and,
• cucumber servers.
Unbelievably, such an over-indulgence in flatware spurred Herbert Hoover, then US secretary of commerce, to decree in 1925 that American silver services could contain no more than 55 pieces. Perhaps he wasn’t a fan of terrapin soup.

In her front-note for the Spring 2006 edition of Gastronomica, editor Darra Goldstein writes of her experience co-curating the New York exhibition, Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table (155-2005), and of how “the tools of the table have, throughout history, shaped and expressed the universal ritual of eating”.
Beyond those pictured above, tools featured in the exhibition include some rather lovely “wave edge” asparagus tongs (1884); a silver-plated Christofle lobster fork (1925); and an amazing German knife and fork created from porcelain, silver, gilding and steel (circa 1737).
At the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (2 East 91st Street, New York) until October 29.

Chooks and Sponge Cakes

I will forever be awed by the internet, and email, and their power and application. Equally awed that I ever managed without them. On a very personal level, email has allowed me to develop a relationship with my father that I don’t think would otherwise have been possible. He’s a man of deep emotions and intensity, but his reserve and quiet demeanour mostly conceal any hint of those qualities. But, as I’ve discovered in the past few years, he’s a wonderful writer. When I lived overseas, his (mostly) daily emails were sustaining – and most importantly started to reveal cracks in his reserve through which I could glimpse a great deal more. I started to prompt him to tell me stories about his life through his emails and, over time, have stored up such a trove of his rich and illuminating passages.
His words tell of the food of an Anglo-Saxon Australian childhood in the middle of the 20th century far better than mine ever could.



Dad writes:

Cookbooks were no part of the kitchens of my childhood. Perhaps mother had a ragged copy of the CWA cookbook somewhere, but I never saw it. Her menus were the result of long practice. Sunday midday dinner as always a roast – rib roast and vegies.  Shepherd’s Pie was a popular weekly event; stews were regular. Very special occasions saw chook on the dinner table. It was always “chook”, never chicken. That refinement came much later. At Lindsay Street Dad had built a fine chookyard. On special days the fattest chook was decapitated. We watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as the creature was eviscerated. An old galvanized-iron wash tub was brought out, filled with hot water and the chook immersed. The heat of the water made plucking easier. We never had any qualms about eating the roasted bird, but mother never, never ate chicken. I expect it was seeing the dreadful things we did to an innocent bird. Only when she was in the old persons’ home did she eat chicken, where she either had forgotten her objections, or she didn’t know what she was eating.

Lemon Delicious and Thrashed Sponge Cakes

We always had pudding after the Sunday roast – often steamed pudding, or jelly and custard, but my particular favourite was lemon delicious. As a special treat we might have ice-cream. It came in a slab-shaped cardboard carton that contained just enough for a thin sliver each. It had to be rushed home from Hawses shop on the corner of Hume Street. In the early days at Campbell Street, we had only an ice-chest and it could not keep the ice-cream frozen for long. When we moved to Lindsay Street we proudly installed a Snow Queen electric refrigerator.
After Dad came home from the War he did a little cooking. He liked to bake sponge cakes. He said they needed a special touch. It seemed to me that the special touch was 20 minutes of vigorous thrashing with a hand beater. Mixmasters came much later. Mother made sponges when the electric machine came along. She must have lacked the patience or the strength for the hand beater. But she did attend to the icing and our favourite was chocolate, with sibling rivalry to lick the basin. Sometimes it was a passionfruit icing as we had a prolific vine growing over the chookyard fence; or it might be a plain icing decorated with hundreds and thousands. Such excitement. Dad’s skills went beyond sponges. His other speciality was rissoles. These were not your ordinary rissoles. Dad’s special recipe included Worcestershire sauce and onions. But alas, Dad came back from the War with a stomach ulcer and the doctors ruled out Worcestershire Sauce and onions when the ulcer got worse. He was advised to have a diet strong in milk, cream, eggs and custards, and egg-nogs. All this was a recipe for a later fatal heart attack.

Hudson's Pie Cart

We never ate out, but then no other family did. We never went to cafes and there were no such establishments as restaurants. My nearest experience to eating out was the occasional luxury of being allowed to buy a hot pie from Hudson’s Pie Cart when it arrived outside the East State School. The cart was pulled by a gentle piebald and I would worry that it might catch on fire. There was a firebox in the cart, fed occasionally with kindling, heating the pies on the metal trays above. Years later, when Hudson’s pies had progressed to a utility truck, there was a local controversy when the health authorities prosecuted Mr Hudson for unhealthy pies. The contents were said to be very doubtful. Heaven knows what I ate, but I enjoyed them, and survived. Generally lunch was sandwiches, with Pecks Meat Paste, or Pecks Chicken Paste, or Vegemite or jam. They were all nearly inedible.
I remember the first time I ate out. It was at Nicks, in Elizabeth Street, Brisbane, near George Street. I remember Nicks whenever I pass that spot. It was a really classy place, and its speciality was steak and the works: a massive T-bone steak and a plate piled with potato chips, spaghetti (I had thought spaghetti only came from Heinz cans) and anything else that could be crowded on to the plate. Just next door was the Theatre Royal, a very risqué vaudeville house. Its posters provocatively invited me inside where I could gaze upon near-naked ladies on the stage. I desperately wanted to go in, but lacked the courage. Sadly, within a few years, the theatre closed and I missed my chance.
My real culinary education started when I went on the P&O Canberra from Sydney to Southampton, travelling first class. Six weeks of elegant dining, wearing Dad’s dinner suit, morning and afternoon teas (minus dinner suit) and I must have added pounds. I still have the menus.