What I cooked last night.

I dreamt about the immensity of the task: the rambling house; the thousand books; the clothes-stuffed wardrobes in every room; the groaning originally temporary but now permanent spillover shelves warped with the weight of accumulation.  Much of the gathered freight had been magpied from charity shops by the obsessive collector - who wasn't really obsessed, but merely gained great satisfaction, having been a child of the 1930s Depression and therefore had economy flowing through her ancient veins, in paying next to nothing for old treasures. And yes, old junk. Anything that had a potential practical use was never to be thrown out. This habit, not rare among early-twentieth centurians, predated an entire twenty-first-century obsession with recycling, a thoroughly corrupted incarnation of that elementary, transparent six-letter word: thrift. But her thriftiness was not the hair-shirted asceticism associated with today’s displays of self-denial; indeed there was an element of brio in

14 October 2024 Dear Angelika I write to you with the sad news that my mother Mary passed away last month. She had been suffering several conditions and eventually succumbed in hospital. She died quite peacefully on September 25. Mum always enjoyed receiving your letters and cards. She looked forward to hearing all your news, especially about your many cycling and walking adventures in the countryside and along the rivers of your country, news about your cooking, and about your garden and the animals and birds that appeared in it from time to time. Mum’s funeral was held on October 11, and many family and friends attended, including grand- and great-grandchildren, and even a great-great-grandchild. The funeral was held in the St John Bosco’s church in Niddrie, close to her house in West Essendon. It was a sad but nostalgic occasion, because in the 1960s my mother and father had sent us to the parish school next to the church, and both of my parents helped out with parish function

There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass.  The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death!  The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air.  Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely exultant at ha

I was early for the visit; the traffic had seemed lighter than usual. I parked in my usual spot in the shadow of the University’s halls of residence and walked to the cafe and sat at the end bar near the pizza oven and read my current book, The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp, a careful and detailed study of slavery in the ante-bellum South, published in 1956; and in which the author acknowledges that ‘… American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation …’. An hour later I left the café and walked rather quickly, as light rain was falling although it was not cold, through the university and across European-treed Royal Parade, elms still not in full leaf, to the hospital; and then in through the private hospital section’s entrance, along several corridors and around several corners, past radiology and a few other -ologies, and finally down a flight of steps into the main reception area. That knowledge of the labyrinthine building saved a few hundred metres o

My mother occasionally receives letters from her German correspondent Angelika , but as she can no longer read, I read them to her.   Extracts from a letter received recently, posted here with permission:   “(Dear Mary) … Here in Dortmund spring has arrived … trees are in bloom … bees and bumblebees are humming around and the butterflies are dancing on the flowers. There are a lot of titmice and robins, even jays. But I do not like the magpies. They are a danger to all the smaller birds. There is also a pair of brown squirrels that visits my garden every day. It is quite a punctual animal; it has its breakfast in the birdhouse at 10.30 a.m. … Spring is the prettiest time of year, I think.  “At the beginning of May I plan to do a cycling tour along the Danube. We’ll do about 50km every day which means that we’ll stay in about fourteen different hotels. … We will travel to the south of Germany by train, taking our own bicycles with us. My bike is 56 years old and it has only … three gear

There is a thing called spaghetti omelette - frittata di pasta - in which you use your leftover pasta, generally spaghetti, to fill an omelette. Not a bad idea for a late weekend breakfast, for example: an omelette bubbling  with cheesy spaghetti.  I didn’t have leftover spaghetti; I had leftover omelette. So I did the opposite, using the omelette as the ‘sauce’ for a pasta dish. The omelette had been six eggs, a dash of milk and plenty of salt and cracked pepper, filled with a cup of grated cheddar and half a cup of very finely chopped chilli salami. It was a big omelette and half had been left over. Having sliced the remaining omelette into small neat cubes, I cooked the linguini, drained it, and put it back in the pan with a generous dash of olive oil and cream. Then I added the egg very gently to warm through. To serve I showered the lot with plenty of chopped parsley including the stalks and more parmesan-style cheese. Pasta di frittata, I suppose. Or cubist pasta carbonara?

There were cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts and so on. Grandparents. Distant relatives who came down from the country, the farm outside Corowa, and went home again, fitting in a quick visit secondary to attending the grand final or the Boxing Day test or once-a-year shopping at Myer.  But there was an aunt who was not related. She went to school - 1940s - with my mother, and they were friends for life. She was a fawn-gabardine-coated, hatted, husky-voiced woman with a round face and tight light brown curls and red lipstick; dressed and made up as if she’d just walked out of the war years. Her three children, honorary cousins because their mother was an honorary aunt, had grown up a couple of suburbs away on a sun-filled north-south street like ours, and their simple post-war timber house like ours faced east as ours did, so that entering it was like walking into a familiar but transplanted environment. The honorary cousins had 1950s Christian names (Maree, Thomas, Margar

The pack says polenta but it’s corneal. It’s only polenta after you’ve cooked it. And cornmeal is maize, ground to various consistencies. Corn flour is the finest of these and was sold for decades in Australia under the ‘Kream’ brand, of which tons were sold every year to thicken the watery stews of Irish and Scottish immigrants.  Complication #1: Australian cornflour is corn starch rather than the entire grain, ground, as it is in the rest of the world. So that previous sentence is not strictly true.  Complication #2: some products labelled ‘corn flour’ are made from wheaten starch. The hell with it. Let’s get on with the story. Polenta, the cooked product, is - as I think I might have mentioned somewhere - a good alternative to mashed potato. It has an affinity, a complemetariness (or possibly more correctly a supplementariness) with strongly flavoured dishes not quite equalled by the spud, even when dressed up for dinner, so to speak. Velvety, creamy polenta stands up, for example,

British music journalist David Hepworth considered 1971 the most significant in rock music, calling it ' ... the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music'. Puffery, of course, but that was the publisher’s jacket copy. (By comparison, Andrew Grant Jackson’s 1973: Rock at the Crossroads  could be read both as an alternative ‘greatest year’ or as confirmation of pop music’s decline.) Either way, 1971: Never a Dull Moment  exhumed a year awash with towering names producing so much great music the charts literally couldn't accommodate it all: The Doors' LA Woman , Van Morrison's  Tupelo Honey, The Faces'  Every Picture Tells a Story ;   albums by T-Rex, Black Sabbath, The Who, George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and more, obviously .  A teenager forging a dark and ragged pathway through life guided by such musical signposts could not help but be perplexed by, di

August 19 is - was - National Potato Day. While the last thing the world needs is another National ‘Day’/‘Week’/‘Year’ of something or other, that particular recognition of the potato was at least just an industry marketing ploy: few would be aware of it apart from a muster of farmers from Colbinabbin, Terang, or the Adelaide Plains at an industry conference in some regional convention centre where they talk Russett Burbank and Sebago and Dutch Cream by day and get drunk in the evening. Conversely, the United Nations takes a much more serious approach, marking its own International Day of the Potato in May: its webpage, virtually anthropomorphising the innocent tuber, features such arrestingly appetising gerund-led (of course) headlines as ‘harvesting diversity, feeding hope’ . The UN’s ‘diversity’ invocation is not a plea for greater culinary variety - that would be far too mundane for the bureaucrats in New York, Geneva or Vienna. Leave that to the servant-class chefs. But let's

An end-of-winter dinner when spinach is plentiful and cheap. Olive oil and cream tame the rustic earthiness of the green leaves into a silky voluptuous pasta dish for spring. Yes, it’s still more than a week away but the sky can’t help telling the story. Sauté a medium chopped onion, a leek chopped into thin rounds, a chopped garlic clove and a red capsicum chopped into fine strips in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In another pot, wilt a bunch of spinach, washed - but not spun, so the leaves retain some water - and chopped roughly, in some more olive oil. Turn with a wooden spoon occasionally and add plenty of salt and pepper. Remove from heat immediately the leaves have collapsed. * In the west, those winter evening skies have all but gone. The show is over: the dramatic severe blood-orange stains marked with patches of black, like Turner paint storms, are now transforming into paling blue-white spring ambitions, hanging on for longer, fingers of light grasping for summer. * Me

She had left a hand-written note on the kitchen table. Inscribed on a paper napkin, cream, one of the more robust ones, embossed, that you could put around at a dinner party. ‘Dear family ….’ Cursive handwriting. Baroque Ks and Ms and Ts, all curlicues and loops and tails like little wedding dress trains.  ‘Going on bus to Llandysil …’ Telegram style. You never lose it. The style disappeared after the telegram’s demise; returned for the SMS and text. No-one had to relearn it, it just reappeared, with a few acronyms and affectations.  ‘ … to visit Laurie. He must be lonely.’ It was signed off with another heavily curlicued three-letter word: ‘Mum’. The curlicues probably haven’t changed much since the 1960s; maybe just a little flatter and slightly out of line. Visiting Laurie would be difficult. He has been dead 32 years and two months. He no longer resides at Llandisyl, the nursing home, which in any case fell to the wrecker’s ball, or whatever they demolish with these days, two decad

 Mistakes follow me everywhere. They jump out at me like angry lions. * Centreway Steakhouse. 28 Centreway, East Keilor. Probably one of the best butchers in the north-west.