What I cooked last night.

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...

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some passing open car came sufficient notes of  Cantata on the D eath of Emperor Joseph II  that he recognised his own unpublished composition.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 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...