What I Cooked Last Night

In that west-facing big old 1960s kitchen that filled with gold from the lowering sun on summer evenings, silverbeet was the main competitor to cabbage in the battle of the boiled greens. We ate great fleur-de-lys sheaves of silverbeet, bought at the Victoria Market, and cooked in a big pot on a cream Chef stove until the white stalks had turned almost black from the leached leaf pigment. Cabbage on the other hand assumed an almost transparent appearance and had a faintly herbal aroma. It squeaked when you ate it. These over-cooked culinary relics are satirised by sophisticated modern foodies, but a hungry teenager took great satisfaction in the unadorned plainness of plenty. My mother borrowed her rustic boiling technique from her own mother who, as a teenager on the family farm near Corowa had cooked for farm workers who were not fussed with sauces, blanching or exotic accompaniments. Not that they had a choice: the cook couldn't be fussed either. Nothing was tarted up: gravy for...

After quoting Helen Hanff in the previous post I hesitate to admit that 84 Charing Cross Road comes under consideration for that author’s own solution to limited shelf space.

Some months back I was puzzled about the irrationality of throwing things out that work but retaining things that don't. I gave as an example old scissors. They never get thrown out, just tossed in a drawer. Another example might be books: people will keep a forgettable $19.95 paperback on a bookshelf for decades. Helene Hanff remarked on this in 84 Charing Cross Road (Andre Deutsch, 1971):  "I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again ... It shocks everybody. My friends ... read all the best sellers, ... get through them as fast as possible ... skip a lot ... never read anything a second time ... don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in a wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never read it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON'T THROW IT OUT!" I personally can't think of anythi...

I drove from Williamstown through Footscray and down into the Maribyrnong flatlands where the mud is still visible. I grew up on a ridge overlooking this valley and we would walk down steep Afton Street every time the river flooded to watch the water lapping at some park bench or even a house. Few thought it would happen again, falling victim to the common misguided belief that the world is on a continual improvement plane, and disasters (except for climate change) are all in the past. Indeed, the painted post showing the height of the 1920s and 1974 floods was some kind of local curiosity, a kind of totem pole showing ancient events, to gaze at knowing the water could never - in a million years - go up again to that neck-ricking height. Impossible, they said: the river mouth had been widened, the estuary had been dredged, weather bureaucrats had insisted rain would never again fill dams. Maribyrnong in spate, let alone the river flats flooded? Never.  You can fool yourself in...

This tuna pasta recipe uses fresh tuna rather than the usual canned variety in tomato sauce. (Nothing wrong with canned tuna - one of my all-time favourite comfort dishes is pasta with canned tuna, grated cheese and peas.) Marinate a piece of fresh tuna in lemon juice, chopped garlic, salt and pepper for a few hours. Bring back to room temperature before cooking. Cook pasta: this is best with short, chunky pasta such as fusilli or rigatoni.  Cut the tuna into fat cubes and sear in a little olive oil and white wine until just done. This should be timed to synchronise with the pasta cooking time. Trim some green beans and asparagus spears, chop into thirds and steam until both vegetables are bright green and just starting to soften.  Chop some vine-ripened tomatoes, or use semi-dried ones and gently warm them through in a little olive oil together with some halved pitted black olives and a scattering of capers.  When pasta is done, drain. Add cream and white wine to the sti...

Term break. Four times a year now; they seem to happen every few weeks. We had driven out of Melbourne mid-morning under a slate sky and a rain-blowing southerly on a cold late-winter Saturday. North, north, north: trying to outrun the weather. Around midday we pulled in for lunch on the run at a truckstop cafe on a great curving main road in a town west of Bendigo: salty, deep-fried, battered food: food you'd probably never eat standing still or sitting at a table. Food that reaches way down into the prehistoric DNA. Does salt enhance the view of mountains sliding by on the horizon or, conversely, does that incredible panorama make the food taste better? After the western roll we corrected northwards again, munching, and in the rear vision mirror grey fingers of cloud groped towards us, chasing again, like fingers of a giant. Small towns swung or swam into view and out again; Bridgewater on Loddon, Serpentine (describes the river, not the town), Durham Ox and Kerang, a 1950s relic...

The AFL's Essendon Football Club was founded in 1872. Essendon was a respectable suburb in the lower middle class sense of being seen to be respectable. Many early players were drawn from local churches. Anglicans, Baptists and Methodists gravitated to the Club. Catholic footballers, largely Irish and working class (although some were better educated and culturally richer than many of their bovine-like overlords), knew they need not apply to play at Essendon, and generally went to the neighbouring industrial suburban clubs of Foostcray, North Melbourne or Fitzroy. Reasons are lost in the mists of time, but history yields clues. In 1916 the highly-patriotic Essendon Football Club, exclusively Protestant, airily proposed along with many of the more affluent clubs that players compete as amateurs and that the League turn all gate receipts over to the Patriotic Fund. The proposal was rejected as a drain on the poorer clubs, and the four working-class largely Catholic suburban pillars ...

We sat stretch-legged and stunned in the front row of cinema ten at Pentridge, and I emerged over two hours later, mid-evening, with my mental chronology rearranged like a typhoon rearranges a village. The boys didn't even live though the Bowie era but they still enjoyed the 154 minutes of Moonage Daydream , a neon-soundtracked cakemix of glam glitter space arthouse new romantic post-disco punk-survivalist rockumentary. Talk about your life passing before your eyes: that pre-year-twelve January day in 1974 when Sorrow oiled its way out of the radio on the spirits shelf behind the bar at the Windermere hotel and snaked across the pool table while I played snooker with friends on a camping trip. The hot March of the previous year when Space Oddity 's discordant fade-out chilled the charts four years after its recording. That October Friday night another year earlier when newsreader Peter Hitchener was still on radio hosting a weekly pop show and back-announced Starman segueing ...

On that cold, bleak night I was out late at the shops: it must have been about nine o'clock. It would be a late dinner. The car radio was chattering to itself. I turned it up slightly. Behind the voice were sound effects, like a radio play. Behind the soft commentating voice that sounded very much like the late Whispering Ted Lowe but wasn't, there was a clatter of metal on stone, a military screech here and there, a distant trumpet, and a faraway purr of drums: noises off (in the theatrical sense). The radio play continued as I drove down Pascoe Vale Road into Moonee Ponds and pulled into Pratt Street. In an apartment overlooking the carpark, part of a screen could be seen in an uncurtained upstairs window of an apartment. The head of a horse was visible, until it disappeared stage-right into an obscured section of the screen. The supermarket was brightly over-fluoro-d and vast and empty, except for some shelf stackers dressed in their dirty green corporate colours, like tired...

That morning I drove to the station and caught the train to the city, getting off at shadowy Melbourne Central and riding the escalator up into Swanson Street and the light of an early spring day. By eleven - the ideal time for a quiet coffee, after the breakfast stragglers and before the lunch crowd - a glass cup holding a rich brew of chocolate brown topped with a tawny golden spindrift sat on the bar in front of me at Pellegrini's at the top of Bourke Street, where nothing changes except the clientele. Later I walked through Myer and several laneways and eventually disappeared underground into one of the city's last remaining second-hand bookshops, Melbourne Basement Books, in Flinders Street. You could spend a week there and get through only half the books. By two o'clock I was on the train again, having walked under the clocks where once piles of just-pressed newspapers would fly out like those momentous edit points in old movies. But there was a very odd thing. It ha...

The title of the novel Leafy Rivers is not some evocatively named bucolic setting as the first edition's (1967) green-leaved cover artwork might suggest. It is the central character's name: Mary Pratt Converse marries Reno Rivers, but retains the nickname her brother gave her as a child thanks to her indecisive habit of answering 'never "yes" or "no" but always "I'd just as lief." '. The novel covers not much more than one day in 1818 - but the bulk of it is in flashback; the building blocks of Leafy's life heaved into place by an author in complete command of language, atmospherics, and dialogue. Flashback: Leafy and Reno move to the Whitewater Valley after being gifted tenancy of a cabin by its landholder, Simon Yanders, who has abandoned it, having lost his wife to milk fever. Credit being short in 1818, he is later forced to foreclose on the couple causing Leafy to undertake a desperate, nightmarish and ultimately fateful two-...

1952 : 'The North Suburban Club annual picnic remained a popular event. 1952 was to be no different, with the date set for 17 February and all the usual preparations put in place; buses chartered, ten nines (nine-gallon beer barrels) ordered and admittance prices agreed upon. Eleven days before the picnic, King George VI died. A special committee meeting on Monday 11 February postponed the picnic 'owing to 17 February being declared the National Day of Mourning'. The picnic was held the following month, and the new monarch would eventually reign for more than half the length of the Club's entire existence*.' 2022 *Extract from Dum Vivimus Vivamus: A History of the Moonee Ponds Club by  Paul G. Kennedy. Clarity in Design Publishing, Melbourne, 2021.

A long time before the ugly visual numeronym '24/7' became a commercial boast, the end of each week signalled a day and a half of rest. The period of time from midday on Saturday until Monday morning was a welcome release from the endless scheduling of daily life. But there was a frantic price to be paid for the pleasure of being unhitched from the tyranny of the clock for thirty-six hours. On Saturday mornings I stood, a nine-year-old and several years either side of nine, at the back of a throng of jostling shoppers in a blue-tiled, glass-fronted butcher shop in Moonee Ponds. Amid the smell of sawdust, blood, and raw meat, the butcher signalled the start of his weekly meat auction by waving his knife through the air, as if he were cutting through the stench. Frenzied bargain-hunting shoppers pressed forward and all but fought each other for the trays of weekend-sustaining bounty: chops, scrag-ends, roasts, flaps, oxtails, heads, innards, smallgood end-of-rolls. Moonee Ponds w...

The recipe called it a 'tortilla', but no flatbread was in it. Instead, potato. That made it Spanish. In the late 1500s, the Spanish conquered the Incas, and sailed potato-laden ships victoriously back into Europe. (There was some competition from a pirate named Drake who carried the same loot into England while Raleigh did the same for Ireland.) Spanish potato and chorizo tortilla. Sice about half a kilogram of potatoes thinly and boil them for a few minutes until not quite tender. Meanwhile, whisk six eggs with a generous splash of milk and a few cranks of pepper. In a pan, fry a chopped onion, two chopped garlic cloves and one sliced chorizo sausage. Stir this continuously for around five minutes until the onion softens and the chorizo starts crisping. Then add a teaspoon of paprika, stirring it through. Line a greased baking dish with the par-boiled potato, including around the walls of the dish. Then add the onion and chorizo mixture, pour the whisked eggs over the top and...