What I cooked last night.

Posts

How everything got cured and everyone lived forever.

The health food store near the Fawkner Street corner closed for ever one afternoon in the early 1970s. The health food boom had begun. Begun? With a closure? The paradox was simple. Whereas the original health food store sold bulk grains, dried fruits, nuts, flours, unwrapped loaves and cheeses to first-generation eastern European migrants, the health 'boom' left staples in its wake. Amid the new-found mobility of the 1950s, post-war children tired of their migrant parents' villagey habits, and turned to supermarkets and shopping malls, often walking greater distances across endless acres of car parks than had their forebears to the corner shop. It was yet another age of progress, not to mention irony. Snake-oiled with health claims verging on promised immortality - e at yogurt and live to 108 like the Bulgarians - manufactured food products made anything not so produced look like the quaint output of some gnarled grandma in a bucolic stone cottage surrounded in the unpav...

Dinner party music.

Beethoven, back on Earth in the twenty-first century and reincarnated as his hearing self, was walking along a street when suddenly from the speakers of some passing open car came sufficient notes of Cantata on the D eath of Emperor Joseph II that he recognised his own unpublished composition. He was horrified. A sudden terrible thought struck him, already confused by the motorised monsters (albeit that a late-eighteenth century mind could reasonably deduce that self-powered vehicles, already more than a mechanical chimera, may have advanced). The more dreadful thought that struck Beethoven was that perhaps the music of the spheres had always been there for the taking; that time might even run backwards, and that he had merely been a medium, a conduit, for plucking a series of notes from this hellish place and time and transtemporising them to a reverse future residing in the urbanely familiar eighteenth century. He had defeated time, apparently. But the cacophony, notwithst...

The pasta, the leek, the novel and the font.

The dressing for the gnocchi was merely a leek, cut very finely from the middle, where it is not white nor dark green, but a colour most accurately described as chartreuse. This brilliant yellow-green tone is rendered almost fluorescent when cooked very gently. I sautéed the little flecks of leek, curved like minute sections of E-type Jaguar front wing, or small arcs of the lime-green patent leather knee boot of a 1960s Carnaby Street model, in a generous quantity of olive oil, keeping a careful eye on it so that it wouldn’t brown but merely absorb the oil via a kind of reverse oleaginous osmosis. It had been a busy day. The weather hadn't turned. One or two warm days; the rest had been wet, windy, cold. Second month of spring. I had found a book in that shop where people throw out their unwanted clothes, old pictures off their walls, kitchen pots and pans and utensils beaten and greyed, and broken crockery sets (broken as in incomplete if not actually chipped) left over fr...

That cold day in the mall.

Coffee tastes better outside, I thought. Could be the fresh air. I was sitting in the pale sun of late winter with a coffee, a book, and that eternal latter-day yoke, a phone. The wind was skittering the chairs and tables, like dried leaves, and lifting the fine-beaded foam on my coffee, the colour of a palomino’s mane. The mall was a rectangle of concrete broken up by large whorls of broken bluestone, like cross-sections of giant fossil snails, or had that been somewhere else? Cafes, a smoke shop, and a post office looked out from under their eaves on six or eight tall thin eucalypts that gave too little shade in summer and too much against the scant sun in winter. In the past the strip was greengrocers and barber shops and continental butchers and an Italian cobbler and salami shops crowded with young mothers; and suddenly appearing among the ant-like busyness to talk and enquire solicitously after their husbands was the priest who strode black-cassocked five hundred yards ...

The candle maker.

My father, his life upturned and then flipped upright again like a fibreglass canoe, rode the passing years silently, serially taking on hobbies. Freelance photographer, gem collector and polisher, horse race predictor, painter in oils, student of quasi-religious phenomena, candle-maker. Some of his photographs still exist in an old corrugated box that I found beneath a shelf when I was clearing the outhouse he built as a darkroom in the forgiving late 1960s. A grimacing baseball hitter at Ross Straw Field, mid-strike bat caught forever in the horizontal, stands in black and white infinity, his body curling with the chemical-spattered photographic proof paper. A rider, red-coated and tall in the saddle, wafts a grey across a fence, towards camera, at an Ascot Vale equestrian event, the horse’s eyelashed protuberant eyes frozen in time as if from some medieval painting. A familiar sedan is parked outside a store, ‘pies, sandwiches, cigarettes,’ on a main road steeply shadowed by br...

Sunrise.

They extended the house because of more children, and kicked me into the new room. It faced east and was built over the front lawn. I imagined the grass turning brown and dying slowly beneath me while I slept. On those incendiary summer mornings, the sun, one thing in life you could depend on, would hoist itself above the cream brick house across the street, and smash like a ripe peach into my dark green blind, its fragments making pin-holes of light in the canvas, and throwing blurred circles like hot dancing snowflakes onto the opposite wall. I would jerk the blind up, drowning the pin-hole light show in a solid cube of dazzling white. Across the road, the cream brick house always looked like a square crouching animal, silhouetted until midday beneath its eave ears. The new bedroom absorbed the original front door. Now I used it as an exit, which I used at night with unscathed dignity - instead of clambering, novel-style, out of the sash window - on my way to an...

The literature of labels: an irregular series …

Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly. Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly? Vegan-friendly , trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing semi- obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both. Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process w...

Road to Strathewen.

The city was designed radially, its outbranching main roads like spokes in a wheel. I grew up on a north-west spoke that impaled the blunt mercantility of Moonee Ponds and Essendon on its way to Keilor's thistle-infested basalt plains, where the wind cried nothing. Not that it was a cultural wasteland. At school as a seven-year-old I used to gaze at the face of a smiling whale as it surfaced in the Southern Ocean on a giant world map pinned to the wall behind Miss Burns’ desk while she played Tchaikovsky on the mono record player I had carried, boxed in its case, laboriously from home. The basic timber church across the schoolyard, a half-acre of knee-ripping gravel embedded in asphalt, still practised Benediction, that most aesthetically and psychically rewarding of Christian rituals. Later, having bought a car, I discovered a new spoke, a new vector in the broken circle of Melbourne. This new trajectory, pointing north-east, pierced suburbs aroused by the semi-rural Heidelberg sc...

Mt. Dandenong.

The uncle was not a real uncle but a second cousin, adopted by my grandfather as a seven-year-old after his mother had died in his infancy. His father, post-war, had been too busy or couldn’t be bothered; or was drunk, or syphilitic, or both, or just disappeared. Now it was the early 1960s, and the uncle was a proto-hippy with a dark clipped beard and Buddy Holly glasses. He could have been a folk singer of protest songs, but instead took a successful career in finance and married a tall dark-haired beauty with eyes like deep pools and the kind of freckles that spoke of past summers on endless beaches. For all that unlocked vault of luck, or Calvinist pre-destination if you prefer, the uncle was not pretentious. He drove a blue Volkswagen, and he drove it like a Porsche. On Sunday afternoons he threw it around hairpin bends on the road up to Mt. Dandenong, at the top of which we fell out, dizzied, laughing, cramped. We gazed at the map-like monochrome spread of Melbourne way down ...

The Volkswagen.

The underside of a car loomed above me; it looked, up there on the hoist, like a stuck beetle seen from underneath. I made out a Volkswagen, its headlights half-shut eyes in the garage gloom. The office window, variegated with Castrol, Visco-Static, Penrite, and Marlboro stickers, opened on the apron where the sun was dropping bombs of heat. It made silhouettes of bowsers and humans and rendered the houses on the other side of the road colourless. Beyond the houses a faint line, an eye-shadow, of low distant hills held its midday trance. The garage attendant became a tall thin stooped cut-out of some dark animal pointing a gun at my unseen father, a sitting duck in the driver’s seat of his black cardboard car. Heat-driven waves of fuel vapour rose, refracting the Shell sign behind the attendant as he dutifully tap-tapped the nozzle on the car’s tank outlet. Every last drop. I slunk out into the swimming atmosphere and climbed onto the hot vinyl. We slid smoothly out of the Shell se...

The goddess and the Madonna.

Three right angles took me to school, thanks to the1920s cartographers who, in their grid obsession, turned geography into geometry. I started school early; four. From the front gate, two hundred gently rising yards of cream and red brick houses crouched behind shrub and lawn, neat, ordered, tidy. Left turn. Fifty yards. Still a gentle ascent, fewer houses; bigger, quieter, somehow richer. Must have been the east-west orientation rather than my north-south. Right turn. Main road. Careful: Frank in my grade two class, who lived on this road, was knocked down here once. Never the same. Ran across desks, molten anger. (Alcoholic father didn’t help; much older lawyer brother the same. Mother was an angel; dark eyes uplifted in some kind of accepting grace behind which lurked an infinite sadness. Also, two beautiful flaxen-haired sisters like muted divas.) Twenty yards. Left turn. Thirty yards. School gate. Three right angles: a square peeled open into a zig-zag line on a map, as...

A shorter history of the health food boom.

You think you saw something last week in the supermarket, and you look for it, and it isn't there. Must be out of stock, you think. Then you go home and google it, and find out it was discontinued in 2008. Nuts. But I saw it not a year or so ago. Maybe two. No, you didn’t. You haven’t seen it for seventeen years; maybe fifteen if you kept a pack in your cupboard going stale for a year or two. In that fifteen years other things happened. Children were born and grew. You bought some cars. Some relatives died. Others didn’t. The house leaked for two years until you got it fixed. The house across the road sold, thank God, the owner’s subwoofer had sent earthquake rumbles under the entire street. The parish priest died. Out-of-mind things come back as if they were there a minute ago, popping out of some elusive brain cul-de-sac, like a handkerchief in the pocket of an old coat you haven’t worn since last winter. Pro-Vita Weat-Harts: white pack, single ear of wheat graphic in ochre sil...

And to think our parents and teachers thought they were devil-worshippers.

Of course, 3RRR and 3PBS announcers played Black Sabbath favourites all weekend; I heard ‘Changes’ oftener in the past week than I had in the last half century. Monday morning program Deeep (sic) Space concluded with the little-known Black Sabbath track 'She's Gone' (google the title and you’ll be in Hall & Oates 1970s heaven, or a 1990s stadium rock echo-chamber) from their 1976 album Technical Ecstasy , a song that throws up a line in which perfect iambic pentameter, give or take a syllable, alchemises mere words into lyrics of otherwise ineffable sadness and beauty: The silent emptiness of one-sided love