What I Cooked Last Night

Shchi?  It looks unpronounceable* to the English speaker's eye, trapped by the double digraph. It’s just cabbage soup. It features enticingly, within cosy steamed-up café windows, in Hal Porter's The Paper Chase  (see post July 9). For a couple of fleeting years, Melbourne’s late-1930s intelligentsia gathered at Café Petrushka, where discussions of fascism, philosophy, borscht, communism, and wall paintings forestalled looming premonitions of a new world war. Porter's autobiography exhumes artists, dancers, chefs, writers and drunks; and they live again, dustily, gold-specked, spectral, in the memory-shroud of history. The cafés owners bought their cabbages—and everything else for their kitchen—a few blocks away at the Victoria market. My grandmother shopped in those post-Depression days at the same market, approaching at a similar distance, but from the opposite direction. Cabbages, cabbages. Cabbages stacked in four-in-the-morning darkness by the sleepless; carried from t...

The neighbours' children, four and six, are candy-coloured noise machines in their winter woollens; bright as bunnies; excitable, alert, and enquiring. The teenager visits them occasionally, crossing the road to their little white house when their parents go out for dinner or a concert, to babysit them. ('Babysit’ seems obsolete once children pass the age of two or three. Monitors? Too close to surveillance, and therefore creepy. Looks after? Too folksy. Minds? Supervises? Too official. English has multiple words for so many ideas but no satisfactory word for 'guarding' children.) * The children’s mother had messaged the teenager on one of those closed-community message platforms—virtual village squares without the well. Could you garder les enfants on Tuesday? The teenager didn’t receive the message immediately, possibly being in a class, watching a movie, or sleeping.  That’s where the trouble starts. You can’t be at that metaphorical village square, loitering like a...

(We) stroll ... under the twilight plane-trees of Collins Street until we turn to enter Little Collins Street and the Café Petrushka. ... (through) a glass-panelled door streaming with the condensed breaths of Melbourne's 1937 intelligentsia—writers, musicians, painters, actors, dancers, and their hangers-on ... run by two young women, Minka, ... of Russian-Jewish parents ... and Jessie ... (who) must arise at unseemly hours to buy meat and vegetables at the Prahran and Victoria Markets. With the help of a part-time assistant cook, Minka and Jessie prepare the food in a ten-foot-square kitchen separated from the dining-room by green curtains. … I pay ... for kotletki golubtzi or lenivy shchi ... Minka is willing to give me poppy-seed rolls and a large bowl of borsch for lettering out menus in Cyrillic script ...   … the paintings ... hung on the sweating green walls … are grimly abstract or murkily message-ridden as though to prove … amid the laughter and melodious teaspoons and ...

Two . Six . Eighteen . A week ago he turned twenty-one, so we celebrated with dinner at the Little Hungarian (no, we’re not), a modest glass-fronted café of the gingham-cloth kind in Glenhuntly Road.  On a cold wet midwinter night, we ate finely-hammered schnitzels edging over their plates like storm-tossed boats, chicken soup with matzoh balls, szegediner goulash; lecsó salad, sautéd red cabbage and sauerkraut sides; and then followed these with caster-sugared strudels and crepes leaching fruit like snow-dusted forest floors.  Egri Korona red wine filled glasses which, through their prismatic distortions, turned the lights of the trams sailing past outside into little planets of rain-streaked gold.

At night the trees speak in hushed tones over the small starlight-silvered bungalow, but the river at the end of the street snakes its bends in black silence. I walk along the river’s north side at night, sometimes under a full moon, listening to the faint hiss of the upper branches of the silhouetted pines, old cypresses planted a century ago by some riverside farmer who probably lost stock floating away in its sinister flood prone flatness. Eventually the child, his auburn-haired, kaftanned and sandalled mother sometimes already in exhausted sleep, is grown enough to accompany me past twilight to climb on the tubular steel play-rocket embedded in concrete at a sky-bound forty-five degrees. He sits silhouetted like the trees, so I cannot see his astronaut’s intent frown of concentration. We return to the bungalow and he sleeps and I read, deep into the night, motoring magazines or Bleak House or the film festival program. George, the Sicilian landlord, collects the rent every second ...

It is the year of Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever , and because I am busy with studying and working and finding somewhere to live, I miss the two blockbusters, and never, ever see them. It is also the year of Annie Hall , and I do see it, but not in that year. It is 1977. My first landlord is one of several Georges. Rentals in the inner north-western suburbs are often owned by Greek immigrants, but this George is a short Sicilian; his only Greekness being a comical Thalia face. Having seen a classified ad in the Saturday Age, I push open the angled glass door of Abbot and Dean, Real Estate Agents and Property Managers, in Rose Street on the Monday morning and sign a twelve-month lease. That squiggle decides it: I'm leaving home, bye-bye : age nineteen. The bungalow is a board-and-batten square with soft green panels enframed in white timber below a raked roof, crouching in semi-seclusion amongst trees in the back yard of a house on a sloping corner block at the river end of Abe...

Things suffer by comparison. How cruel, for example to feed children, for years, a dessert of light, fluffy, golden-yellow baked white rice pudding studded with fat moist sultanas and topped with a sweet cinnamon-speckled skin of milk and egg; and then to suddenly change the main ingredient to brown rice. * The faces of my three much younger siblings are freeze-frames as they gaze at their newly-brown desserts, having experienced a taste that is closer to dusky earthiness than the honeyed sky of its predecessor. It was permanent. The family has jointly graduated overnight, as it were, to the brown revolution: bread, rice, scones, hot cross buns, pasta, cakes, pie crust (see ‘hunza pie’); everything that can possibly be brown or wholemeal, is. * Brown rice dragged its 1960s reputation through time like an aging hippie who still plays Jefferson Airplane cassettes in his Kombi. Meanwhile other grain fads emerged and retreated. Right now ‘ancient’ as a grain descriptor seems important to...

A blue-and-white sky afternoon. An impatient autumn breeze searches for leaves. I am lying on my stomach in the school playground, gazing at the small seeds, like tiny dimpled bullets, in the stalks of the unmown grass, and imagining the stalks are trees, and that I am in an aeroplane.  The school building is an L-shaped angle in the south-east corner of an oblong bounded by Muriel Street to the north, Teague to the south, and Garnet to the west. Half the playground is paved in bitumen, embedded with screenings designed to prevent children slipping in the wet - the ground is on an incline - but which result in dreadful knee and elbow grazes when children fall at speed, often. The rest of the oblong is the field it has always been, and forms probably the best kind of playground, despite play experts later recommending steel swings, multi-coloured plastic climbing pyramids, or forts made from treated pine, all of which remove perspective and the sense of clear distance.  I can s...

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After the film was over, we walked out into a curtain of Ballarat darkness. I was reminded yet again of when I  had been taken to a cinema at age nine in the city on a hot, sun-drenched afternoon. Afterwards, we had exited after 174 minutes of The Sound of Music into a darkened 1966 Collins Street streetscape lit only by the yellowish headlamps of ranked taxis. I had felt somehow cheated, as if the sun outside should have held still while I was in the grip of the film’s illusive progression of time. We walked back to the railway station where the enormous canteen was still open. Shelves loomed behind tall counters and bain maries, and a swirl of round tables and attendant chairs on the floor overlooked Platform One through vast glass panes, designed in the early twentieth century to allow partakers of morning or afternoon tea to see the Melbourne train arrive - as if they hadn’t heard the engine’s shrieking whistle from miles away. We ordered chicken schnitzel rolls and sat at one...

The train curved up through the hills, diesel engines a distant busy hum against the gradient. Sitting in carriage three of four, we passed the outer suburban flatlands of Bunnings- and Kmart-encircled Melton, where the houses sit on volcanic rock and reverberate. Tom was reading Shirley Jackson; the short stories, not the one about the castle. I was dozing. The train slid through the Bacchus Marsh valley and tilted up again towards Gordon. We were travelling to the Regent cinema in Ballarat where Était une Fois: Michel Legrand was screening, its short season having already finished in Melbourne. I woke when the train pulled into the nineteenth-century station, tall enough to allow dispersal of the cindery engine smoke that once filled its cavernous interior, which was now drenched in shade. We walked the few hundred metres to the cinema, where only a handful of seats were occupied. In two screen hours, Michel Legrand grew from a child abandoned by his musician father to legendary Fre...

That summer I saw two words scrawled on the brick wall of a commercial building (shop? accountant’s office?) somewhere in Moonee Ponds, probably around Queen’s Park. The two words were stacked one above the other, like the headline over a side column on the front page of the newspaper. The words were Elvis Presley. I was in a car with my parents driving along Mt. Alexander Road, and one of them made a disparaging comment about Presley, or the graffiti, or both. They were in their late thirties then, with four children yet to reach the complexities of -teen age, complexities which generally either relax their parents’ steely rigidity, or confirm them in their uncompromising stubbornness. God forbid they took the latter course in the late sixties. In time, my mother would disrobe herself of whatever puritanical coat she wore, and overcompensate, like so many of her middle class contemporaries, eventually to play Victor Jara and U2 records and serve wholemeal garlic bread at family occasi...