What I Cooked Last Night

Of course, I would never dream of serving pasta any other way than al dente . Social ostracism might ensue, if you’ll pardon the sarcasm. I was standing by the pot, watching the steam rising frantically in baroque curlicues; little parallel curves like a Don Martin cartoon in a magazine circa 1968. I turned it down to ‘simmer’ and wondered how generations of Italians managed to instantaneously transport themselves from the threshing fields, the horse and plough, the FIAT production line, or the corner garage at the very moment nonna drained the cooked-to-the-second yellow strands. Maybe they did, but it seems unlikely. Forgive me, padre, for I have sinned (SFX: jiggle of rosary beads—use uncooked rigatoni if unavailable: shaken, they sound uncannily like chunky wooden beads). The sin : I once broke the al dente mantra, enthusing on this weblog about well-cooked pasta—in that instance a thick, muscular, robust bucatini paired with a meat ragu made from the leftover semi-solid fluids f...

In 1948 she was already 27; over the hill, as her American-slang-talking buddies might have said, jokingly; or not. Some of them had actually married American soldiers during the war. Years later, when I was writing a history of the college she had attended, a clear-memoried ninety-year-old who knew every stitch in her darned woollen gloves told me one or two had returned to Melbourne after the war accompanied only by a child. Kathleen was an amateur thespian; local theatre companies, play-reading groups, poetry recitations, that kind of thing. She was tall and willowy, and had a face that smiled crookedly; she was no beauty. She lived with her parents and wrote diaries. She worked in a city office and wore fawn gabardine coats in winter on the tram into town and home again. The house was an untouched Edwardian, of the kind you expect still to be lit by gas, on a triangular corner block below the rail bridge in Ascot Vale, and from the east window of its heavy-sofaed sitting room, you ...

This old house has no built-in wardrobes, so we ordered a new freestanding one from the furniture store to replace an old one that was too small for a teenager's fashion ambitions. The new wardrobe came flat-packed in three huge packages, like the monoliths in 2001:A Space Odyssey . The monolith packages contained innumerable pieces of particleboard, some main strut-type wooden beams, scores of shiny metal items that looked like pieces of hinge, and hundreds of tiny metallic screw-like objects. Attached, and nicely protected inside a ziploc plastic bag, was an authorless book entitled—I think— Instructions: The Seque l. I might have embellished that last bit, but the book is gone; it could have been A Long Day’s Journey into Night or Ulysses . There was an option. By paying an extra fee you could have the million pieces magically transmogrified into an actual wardrobe, 'magically' because the assembler would not need to read Instructions: The Sequel or A Long Day’s Journe...

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...