Tasty Treasures

Tasty Treasures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 14, 2014

I lifted the metal lid of our circa-1958 shamrock-green letterbox. Small daughter handed me with a wodge of envelopes, clamped with a fat elastic band. “Bills!” I groaned.

Four-year-old was now scrabbling behind the rickety mailbox post. “Something fell out!” she shouted and flapped her discovery above her head.

It was a postcard. A striking botanical drawing stood out against an inky background. It pictured the life cycle of a sunflower, drawn in exquisite detail in every incarnation, from bud to bloom to seed.

I turned over the postcard and immediately recognised the handwriting – straight-limbed but slanting slightly backwards. The text was a recipe from a friend in her 70’s, a magnificent cook. She appreciates my weakness for chocolate and our shared love of baking. So she’d sent me a copy of her latest triumph – a delectable chocolate cake using sour cherries, ground almonds and rum.

I was touched. Some of my most treasured recipes were originally hers. Over the years, she has transcribed them onto handsome stationary, adding tips and tricks she thinks will help me, her less-seasoned protégé.

To make her famous cumquat chutney, I begin roaming the neighbourhood in May for trees festooned with fruit. I beg stripping rights from owners, then lug my golden cargo home. I’ll spend an hour chopping the bitter fruit, extracting pesky seeds. By kilo’s end, my fingertips are pruned and the juice is biting into the quicks of my nails.

My friend’s recipes are reminders of raucous dinners at her place in the 90s. Her table was always laden: slabs of salmon and rollmops washed down with schnapps, curries made from scratch, ripe cheeses and her renowned chilli jam. Her family’s prized dishes have become firm favourites amongst mine.

I’ve been collecting my trove of recipes since I was a teenager. The recipe for Mum’s signature dish, Pineapple Chicken, sits atop a bulging file in the top drawer of my desk. Still rich with evidence of its original owner, Mum’s handwritten page is dog-eared and spotted with greasy thumb-marks. But it’s not the recipe I covet, rather the remarks that live in the margins. “MUCH POSHER THAN APRICOT CHICKEN,” Mum has written in capitals, then underlined it, in case anyone should doubt her.

From her notes, I can track her attempts to combine fruit with fowl. They date back to the 80s, when her kitchen had glazed orange tiles and a clinkerbrick pantry. She has scribbled on the recipe in red biro: “1st time – used fresh pineapple – try tinned.”

“2nd time: Golden Circle Pineapple Rings work best. Check for rust.”

“3rd Time: Delicious served with rice and frozen peas.”

As a child, I anointed Mum’s Pineapple Chicken (and defrosted peas) the birthday dinner of choice.

My grandmother’s surviving recipes are frustratingly terse. Her buttermilk scones require ‘enough flour to make a soft dough’ and should be baked ‘until done.’ She needed only the bare basics to jog her memory. Her cooking was instinctive, a repertoire of corned beef and baked custards learned at her mother’s elbow in the 1920s, recipes she mentally fine-tuned each time she made them.

I have no such confidence in my productions. I like my baking instructions precise and foolproof. On a whim, I might vary the ingredients, but that’s when the dish flunks. I blame my catastrophes on the recipe. “Hopeless!” I’ll scrawl across the page, having wasted six eggs and a pat of Danish butter on a rubbery sunken sponge.

I still remember the first cookbook I fell in love with. I was 28. The Sydney restaurant critic Terry Durack had written a rhapsody to food. (On the cover was a woman wearing nothing but a skirt strung with garfish.)

I took Terry to bed every night for a week. “It was the slippery, silky, mother’s nightie feel of it that got me at first, a reassuring and arousing smoothness of impossibly luxurious proportions.” That’s how he described the taste of his first smoked oyster. I went to the fish shop, hoping I, too, would be overcome with mother’s nightie raptures. Sadly, my first smoked oyster tasted like an old slipper, plus grit.

Recipes are rich histories for swapping between friends and passing between generations. The internet has made recipe-sharing a furtive pleasure. I can waste an hour browsing through litanies of slow-cooked beef cheeks and self-saucing puddings when I’m uninspired by a kilo of mince and a limp head of broccoli.

But my laptop’s cold, plastic interface is no match for Mum’s butter-stained school recipe cards, relics from compulsory domestic science. Sometimes I’ll flick through the cards and marvel at how unappetising 1950s food now seems. (Rock cakes feature heavily). Other times, I just want to see Mum’s girlish handwriting, alive on every page. Satisfied, I’ll put the cards back in the drawer, reach for the can opener and make a start on tonight’s Pineapple Chicken.

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 6, 2013

Memory has a mind of its own.  At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front  gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.  

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

It was there, in my nan’s kitchen, that she wrote me her shopping lists: long columns of her handwriting showing off her beautiful curlicue C for corned beef – 1 lb. Potatoes with a flouncy P, a firm downstroke for the B in Bovril, an exaggerated T for treacle and Sago – the o with a hook that swept the next word ‘Pudding’ into brackets – so I’d know what Sago was for. Such foreign-sounding things she wanted. I tucked her list into my koala purse and pedalled to the shop. First hurdle: deciphering her script. Second hurdle: matching the groceries to the strange words on the list. Then I’d ride home with bulging string bags hanging from my handlebars, banging on my knees or swinging dangerously into the spokes.

Even now, her writing goes hand-in-hand with how I remember her: graceful and neat. She left behind that permanent imprint of her 90 years on the planet. My nan’s lovely cursive resides on the backs of family photos. It lives inside the letters we keep as treasures under the lid of the piano stool at mum’s house. The seat of our family.

My own handwriting is as erratic as a chicken scratch. I’m so out of practice I can barely jot down half a page without writer’s cramp. I used to write my television stories long-hand on spiral notebooks, a welter of script. I sweated on the fire escape stairs outside the newsroom, scribbling away as deadline approached. Sentences that didn’t sound right when spoken aloud were roughly scrubbed out in favour of rhythmic ones. Sudden brainwaves would force themselves onto the pad, squeezed into margins  – a scrawl legible only to me. It was always a race to see whether inspired thoughts would vaporise before I could get them on paper.

No such trouble now. My laptop and I are intimates. My fingers fly over the keys – brain and hands finally in unison. Typing fast feels masterly. With such mechanical clarity, should I ever bother with pens?

My children won’t remember life before the internet. Their ideas will be pressed onto paper by the clicking of keys rather than the scratching of biros. For them, postcards will be quaint reminders of holidays before Facebook.

In high school French I decided my number 7 needed the European sophistication of a cross bar. I was a maths dunce but with one horizontal stroke, I became numerically glamorous – those 7’s of mine were so continental they could have been smoking Gauloises and eating croissants. Smitten, I have written my 7’s with a bar ever since: seventh heaven!

As classmates, we took great pains to graffiti our fanciest handiwork all over each others’ diaries. We changed our writing styles as often as the hems on our pleated beige dresses. Even now, I can instantly picture the cursive of my closest school friends: all those birthday cards and books gifted with their funny, affectionate inscriptions.

Curious, I don’t know the handwriting of newer friends. We talk and text and email, but don’t pen notes. Will their writing be bold or slap-dash or in beautiful italics? Are they right-handed or mollydooker? I’d like to know.

My husband hides a handwritten note each time he creeps out of the house at dawn for the airport. I wake up in our bed and feel less empty for the small thrill of finding his letter. Usually it’s tucked under my laptop or in the Cornflakes box. Silly I know, but it’s comforting to see the essence of him on paper, a billet-doux tiding me over until his return. I return the favour by planting an even more effusive love letter in his suitcase. (I usually wrap it around nasty household bills, each one annotated with a love heart in the hope he’ll pay them and leave me flush with cash.)

Now I’m mourning a graceful skill that has had its day. Handwriting is an art because expressing ourselves in ink is an exercise in restraint. Even a rude letter starts with ‘Dear…’ before roasting the recipient. How many times have I dashed off an email forgetting my hasty reply might be mistaken for bluntness – I’m always embarrassed at sounding impolite. Perhaps I need to slow down and reacquaint myself with the gentleness of handwriting. If I concentrate, I might even be able to make it legible.