Bite Your Tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 6, 2014

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

While the waitress made my coffee, I tried guessing what was inside the crumbed and battered shapes glowing under the warmer. The square ones were likely hash browns, I decided. The yellow rings would be squid. Or maybe onion? I could tell the crabsticks by their customary pink stripe .

My late step-father, Stan, refused to call them crabsticks. “They don’t put an ounce of crab in them!” he’d snort. He called them Sea Legs instead. (Stan was convinced “they” were also responsible for eighteen minutes of missing Watergate tape, the disappearance of Harold Holt and the refusal of a brand new Victa lawn mower to start on the first pull.)

Growing up in the 70s, the arrival of convenience food gave the Watsonia polony knob cult status in our kitchen. “At last!” my Nan’d say admiringly, as she sawed through the rubbery tube with a bread knife. “Someone’s making life easier.”

The polony knob was always served cold from the fridge, sliced into thick discs and sandwiched between buttered slices of cob loaf. Nan called it luncheon meat, and marvelled at its durability. Polony knobs lasted for a fortnight. They never dried out and retained their lovely rosy shade until the very last slice (which was puckered, obscenely, where the metal catch pinched closed the tube.)

For a while there, ‘polony pink’ was my favourite colour. But Nan said polony was actually ‘Baker-Miller pink.’ “That’s the colour they’re painting asylums these days,” she explained, pointing to the little pile of polony slices on my open sandwich. “I read in the Reader’s Digest that a psychologist called Mr Baker, and his colleague Mr Miller, discovered a shade of pink that keeps patients calm and compliant.”

As a child with excitable tendencies, I always calmed down after lunch, which, according to Nan, only enhanced polony’s reputation as a superfood. I was never convinced the Watsonia polony knob tasted like meat, but it didn’t taste like broccoli either, which was all that mattered.

Usually a Nan’s polony sandwich came with a side serving of Kraft processed cheese. We called it ‘plastic cheese’ as a compliment. It, too, appeared indestructible. Plastic cheese came cocooned in Alfoil inside a small silver and blue cardboard box. I recycled those cheese boxes as coffins for pet snails who inexplicably expired on their diet of grass clippings and polony crumbs.

No matter how high Nan cranked the griller, plastic cheese never melted like normal cheese. It sat on my toast like a doormat. Even if the bread was cremated, plastic cheese would only ever develop a black blister. Poked with a knife, the blister would shatter into a fine layer of ash.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum had discovered French Onion dip. She made it from scratch by tipping two sachets of Continental French Onion Soup Mix into half a litre of sour cream. Even now, I can’t understand how a dish so high in calories didn’t make me a fattie. Perhaps because it was too repulsive to eat. French Onion dip couldn’t be saved even by Ritz crackers.

Mum’s coleslaw however, was a triumph of convenience cuisine. It contained the usual shredded cabbage and carrot, but she added a tin of Golden Circle crushed pineapple and a handful of sultanas to give it a tropical edge. Then she took the edge off with a whole jar of Miracle Whip mayonnaise. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mob of lamb chops with fatty tails and a scoop of Deb instant mashed potato.

Back at the roadhouse, I paid for my coffee and contemplated a chocolate bar, casting my eye over the sea of shiny wrappers. Some were new to me with names I didn’t recognise – Crispello, Pods, Bubbly. “Whatever happened to the Polly Waffle?” I said to the young waitress.

“The what?” she said, giving me a guarded look.

“The Polly Waffle!” I repeated. “You know – that chocolate log-thing with the tube of white marshmallow inside!”

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But it sounds gross.”