What I Cooked Last Night

Tuesday morning, 14 December 1971 A threatening humidity lurked under a blanket of darkness as we hit the highway out of Ceduna around half past five in the morning, dawn a threatening red streak on the east horizon. You have to start early to make headway before the heat hits. The nearest large towns are Port Augusta, 300 miles to the east and Norseman, about three times that distance to the west. The road west runs along the bottom edge of the Nullabor Desert where it meets the section of Southern Ocean called the Great Australian Bight. Cliffs run along the coast for hundreds of miles and the sea, over millions of years, has gouged tunnels deep into them. These surface as blowholes in the plain and people, straying off the road, have fallen into them. What a horrible fate.   Today, we’re aiming to reach Eucla, driving across a red desert with nothing in it except a dirt road. The car has run like a Swiss watch so far, hasn’t missed a beat. It was a steamy, dusty, unforgettabl...

It was still dark, but the birds were twittering and tweeting. I sat up and realised those verbs didn’t work any more. More perfectly good words gone forever. I felt my way to the kitchen, found the kettle and put it on. Then I switched the light on. I could have done that first, but I hadn’t been able to find the light switch, and the faint light from the east-facing window had led me to the kettle first. That’s what happens in when you’re in an unfamiliar house. At least I hadn’t clocked myself on an overhanging mantel, or a door ajar. The kettle hummed and then clicked off and I poured the water into a brown ceramic teapot over loose leaves of Tuckfields Tynee Tips tea, the name of which product once led to an alliterative jingle that once heard, could never be forgotten. I haven't. * We were staying in a renovated 1940s timber house in the middle of town. It had polished floors, an east-facing kitchen, two bedrooms, and a lounge furnished with comfortable chairs and a b...

It was the nicest cup of tea I'd ever drunk. Perhaps it was where I was, or who had made it. I was standing in the enormous reception room of an old Anglican rectory at three o’clock on a cold Thursday afternoon. Gas heaters flickered high up on the walls. It would have been a very cold room when not in use, which seemed to be most of the time. Several large trestle tables, laden with food, ran almost the length of the room to the western wall, where a large stained glass window with a dove and a cross in it stretched up about twenty feet. Behind tables, ladies were wielding giant teapots and the tea was flowing, like the Diamantina in flood, into a regiment of cups and saucers all lined up in perfect formation. There must have been forty people in the room, queuing for tea and eyeing off the spread, which consisted of rolled-up asparagus sandwiches, tiny pastries, scones topped with jam and cream, strawberry and lemon lamingtons, butterfly cakes, rum balls and more of the kinds o...

An item in the morning newspaper last week advised people to avoid tea on hot days. Nonsense. My mother and father used to double their tea intake during heatwaves. Hot and strong and sweet. It was cooling. My father never drank a glass of water in his life. Today you see people sucking on water bottles in air-conditioned shopping malls as if they were trekking through a wadi. The same principle with spicy food. A chilli-laden dish is a great thing to eat on a sweltering night. Far better, for example, than a roast or heavy pasta. Eat it with hot tea or cold beer (only after the sun has gone down in the latter case) and you’ll be well fed and well hydrated. Vivek Singh, in discussing regional variations in Indian cooking in his book Curry: Classic and Contemporary (Absolute Press, 2008), writes: 'The southern end of the peninsula, consisting of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, is blessed by a long coastline, and hence a strong bias towards seafood dishes. ... ...

One-inch pillows of fresh salmon, poached ever so gently in a little wine and garlic. Strips of avocado added to warm through. Egg noodles cooked until just done, drained and draped in ringlets on white plates. Salmon pillows and avocado strips placed in little cairns on the pasta. A little cream in the pan juices, reduced in the wine with salt and pepper and poured over each dish. A large glass of cold chardonnay, glinting yellow in the gathering dusk. The first outdoor evening meal of spring has to be special and it was. * We had an afternoon tea for Thomas's birthday; crustless sandwiches, and small open pastries filled with lightly beaten egg and tiny bacon squares and shards of spring onion. And tea: my favourite Earl Grey. * I'd been discussing euphemisms earlier in the day with a teacher. Teachers know all about euphemisms. They have to use them. It's enforced by Education Department bureaucrats. We had been discussing reports in the news of students ...