What I Cooked Last Night

Having lost his father at three and his mother at twelve, the breach of a close familial circle would always weight heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the theme of Tolkien , the movie. The young Tolkien is placed in foster care under a Catholic priest who later bans his girlfriend Edith, insisting the student go up to Oxford. There, Tolkien bonds with three fellow poets, the quartet calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS). The scenes of their poetry meetings at the Barrow are realistic and are devoid of the slow-motion filmic tics and posh-Brit characterisations typical of the genre. War ensues. The company is burst asunder. In scenes of blood and death in the Somme, an injured, fevered Tolkien staggers through mud and gore in a fruitless search for two of the members of TCBS. Delirious, he thinks he hears the voice of one who is already dead calling desperately. As soldiers and horses are cut down and fire burns and blood pools into small dams of red, walled b...

On an unseasonally hot day in October 1965, I was taken to see a movie at the Paris Cinema in Bourke Street, Melbourne. In the film, The Sound of Music , Christopher Plummer played Captain von Trapp, and was later scathing about the movie. Last week I saw Plummer play Ebenezer Scrooge in The Man Who Invented Christmas , this time at Village Airport West, which was a field of thistle with Vickers Viscounts flying over it in 1965. Right now is the time of year when Christmas-themed movies hit the cinemas, but The Man Who Invented Christmas is not really about Christmas. It is about Charles Dickens' struggle to write a book following two 'failures' after several hits. It should have been titled Famous Novelist Suffers Writer's Block for 104 Gripping Minutes , but that would not have helped box office sales. Dickens is struggling to pay the bills, his agent is getting nervous, he is continually interrupted by family members, and his destitute father comes to stay. Th...

Titles roll. Music. Scene one: day Tableau : the ancient shed at the end of the yard leans to the east. It was built in the 1940s, a simple rectangular steel frame with sheet-iron walls and a corrugated roof. It has one door, no window, and no light, because power was never connected. It is pitch black inside. You prop open the north-facing door to admit light. This works best in winter when the sun is further north, slanting in. Action : I enter screen left and pull open the crooked shed door. Ancient hinges complain. My eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and a great shape can be made out in the corner: a hulk of cast iron on wheels. Covered in dust, it resembles an abandoned steam train in some long-forgotten rail yard shed. Tracking shot : I somehow I drag it out into daylight. Locked-off camera : I hose the dust off the iron horse, and exit screen right. It dries in the warm air. Scene two: evening Against a painted backdrop of a line of ornamental pear trees and a...

Two teaspoons of salt? someone exclaimed (re yesterday's recipe). It’s not that much, I replied. Indian main courses are meant to be small serves filled out by much more rice or bread and vegetables. And in any case, these recipes are upfront about their ingredients, instead of sneaking them in progressively like some others. Take a British-style beef stew, for example; in which the beef is shaken in seasoned flour before being browned. How much salt goes into the flour? More than a shake. Then stock is added to the stew. How much salt in the stock? Who knows. The rest of the seasoned flour usually thickens the stew. If it is served with potatoes, these may be cooked in salted water, mashed with more and then salted further at the table, as are any side vegetables. The whole thing may then get a downpour of Worcestershire, HP, tomato sauce or similar. Thoroughly delicious: and by that stage, quite salty. The curry, on the other hand, is garnished with yogurt and herbs. In o...

Talking of sacks of potatoes (previous post) always reminds me of a movie I saw once, and if you happen to have seen it, you will already know what it was. But let’s start at the start. One bleak night, many years ago, my older sister lent me her MUFS* membership card - as she so often very kindly did - and I went off on my own to the cinema. The cinema was the long-gone Carlton Moviehouse , above Genevieve’s café, also gone. The cinema was known as the bughouse as cinema-goers were not the only patrons. The building now houses a student travel agency, but the cinema had students and others travelling in all kinds of ways long before the agency was selling jet flights. That night at the Carlton Moviehouse, I travelled to London. The movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy , was one of those ultra-gritty British productions typical of the early 1970s. British writers and directors were at the top of their game then, before political correctness softened storylines and killed scriptwriting...

We took them to the Astor cinema to sit in antique fold-up chairs, see curtains opening on the wide screen and, most importantly, eat choc tops. Shock: the boys chose Golden Gaytimes instead. The movie was an old musical with no special effects and a Rodgers and Hammerstein soundtrack. Alexandra, however, had a Choc Top to herself. Before intermission, bored with the movie, she sat on a couch next to the sleeping cinema cat and did not spill a drop of ice cream. I sat on the other side of the cat and read the Sunday newspaper in the dim art deco light with the sounds of gunshots and whinnying from the auditorium and the faint rumble of trams outside.

Pasta is a cliché, a bore, a culinary banality on a million restaurant menus. How does it go? Bolognese. Carbonara. Alfredo. Marinara. Pescatora. Napolitana. Puttanesca. Arrabbiata. Arrabbiata? That means angry. Don’t get angry, get even. Tell the kids, or your husband or your wife or your brother or your sister or your mother you are serving them pasta with yogurt tonight and watch their reaction. Pasta with yogurt? Yes. Pasta with yogurt. Plain, tart yogurt with the sting of garlic and the crunch of parsley and the yielding texture of chickpeas and the bite of fresh ground black pepper. You’ll never order spaghetti napolitana again, or buy one of those supermarket jars with a photo of a wizened Italian on the label (or Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid for that matter, I can't remember which) containing sauce made in a hundred gallon vat in Dandenong one night two years ago. This recipe is dead easy and you don’t even have to cook the sauce. Pasta with yogurt, garlic and...

It took more than two and a half years to rebuild. Inside, one of Australia's best pipe organs sits in the north transept. One of the first things the fire brigade had done on entering was to throw a tarpaulin about the size of a tennis court over the organ to lessen water damage. Then they put the fire out before the whole place went up. Nice work. Major rebuilding took place in the roof and ceiling . Most of the furnishings - pews, carpet etc - had to be replaced due to water damage. Although the interior is now almost complete, scaffolding fills the apse - the 'east wall' - which in this case really is at the east end of the building. Fabric has been draped over the scaffolding to partially obscure it during services, so that the altar has the appearance of a movie set designed to look like a church. The centre aisle is patterned marble where before there was red carpet. It's a little over the top in design, shines like a mirror and is very echoey. Drop the crysta...

Nicholson Street is a twentieth century shipwreck of architecture. It is a magnificent mess. It is a proud dowager wearing a faded dress and cobwebs. It is a jumble of Victorian shopfronts and Edwardian houses and 1950s grease monkey workshops and accountants’ offices and suburban law firms and Thai cafes and factories making God knows what. Nicholson Street is tattoo parlours and ugly video stores and bicycle shops and newspaper publishers and pasta manufacturers and student houses with Tibetan flags across their front doors, bikes on their front porches and naked bulbs glowing in uncovered windows. And trams run through it. * I was on foot, heading south on the west side, the North Carlton side. It was dusk, almost six o’clock, and bleak. A tram trailing phosphorescent dust flew north, loaded to the gunwales with scarved and wired commuters bound for the home fires of East Brunswick, and red wine, and Mozart. I walked past Bande a Part, a pizza place for Franco-cinephiles where...

Thomas tried to spoon some of my tea over a bowl of freshly cooked rice, telling me it tastes delicious. There is no Japanese blood in my family. As far as I know. *I saw the movie years ago in Cinema Studies 1 at RMIT's old Radio Theatre in Bowen Lane (probably my favourite cinema ever) and while I can't remember the plot, I've never forgotten the name.

July 1974 was the middle of an unusually cold and nasty winter. I was in the last year of school. That month, I saw an evening performance of Oedipus at Colonus at the Melbourne University Union theatre and froze on the tram on the way home. That July, I also had my first cinema date. I took the girl by tram to the newly-opened Cinema Centre in Bourke Street. Acres of electric blue velour chairs swept down to a giant screen about half a mile away, and more acres of electric blue velvet draped the walls, downlit in the folds by continuous hidden fluorescent strips. The walls concealed new sensurround speakers that made you think you were going down with the ship in The Poseidon Adventure . It was the last word in 1970s cinema décor and it was hideous. Oh, the movie: Chinatown . I had kind of forgotten about it. I half-remembered the darkness, Faye Dunaway and a score that sounded like a Formula One race in slow motion. Or something. Then it all came back, thanks to this Terry Tea...

Remarking that I have never watched an episode (does reality television have episodes?) of Masterchef gets a similar response to when I let drop that I have never seen any Star Wars, James Bond or Quentin Tarantino movie (or in the latter case, film). The second admission covers most movie audience types, so there's always a falling jaw.