What I cooked last night.

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 ha...

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 carbona...

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, Ma...

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 ...