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?