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.”

Rolling in Nostalgia

Rolling in Nostalgia
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 12, 2014

Last Sunday I had my first encounter with a Chiko Roll since 1988. We met by chance, that Chiko Roll and I in Cockburn Sound, on a jetty I hadn’t set foot on since I was in pigtails.

Two hours earlier at home, the man of the house had yelled through the back door: “Hey! Let’s go fishing in Safety Bay!” Of course, I knew the fishing was a subterfuge – what he really wanted was to marry two of his favourite things: his Holden ute and a long drive.

Regardless, the kids know to pounce when an adventure’s in the offing. Inside ten minutes, they’d found their shoes and loaded the hand lines and buckets into the ute. They were sitting expectantly in the back seat by the time their father had jemmied loose some squid bait from the back wall of the freezer.

We took the scenic route – past Kwinana’s industrial estate and the fertiliser plant, belching columns of grey steam. It was not yet 4pm, and the Palm Beach jetty was packed. Bronzed kids with glistening skins sprinted past us, daring each other to climb over the railing and dive-bomb into the deep water.

Fishermen were staking out their territory. I took my youngster to the end of the jetty and baited his reel with a blob of squid while his father and sister horsed around on the beach.

For the next 45 minutes, mother and son caught nothing but a baby blowfish. It flopped and squeaked, trying to puff up into something more menacing. Being a novice fishwife, I had to shut my eyes to extricate the hook from behind two buck teeth. I made a ceremony of releasing the captive back to its watery playground but my six-year-old, bored, had already wandered away to find dad.

I packed up and leant against a concrete bench watching the anglers back-lit by an orange sun. Two matrons with matching perms were enjoying the same view. One of them had a half-eaten Chiko Roll in her lap, still in its stripey paper sleeve.

“Wow!” I said. “A Chiko Roll! Haven’t seen one of those in years!”

They turned in unison and laughed. “We still love them, even though they’re bad for us!” the lady in the cream tracksuit replied. She motioned towards her friend. “Tottie and her husband had the fish and chip shop up the road.”

Tottie was inspecting the paper bag in her lap which was turning grey from the spreading bloom of grease. “Chiko Rolls and dim sims went like hotcakes on Sund’y evenings,” she said, “We rolled them in chicken salt and the kids went mad for them!”

I left them re-living the 1970s and tried to remember the last time I had a Chiko Roll. I could still picture the straw-coloured filling flecked with carrot, but could only recall the taste of cabbage. The rest was a mysterious slurry cleverly named to suggest chicken, without promising actual bird. In fact, the Chiko Roll was more or less an Ocker spring roll, a fat tube of carbohydrate designed to be managed with one hand. The ends were cleverly plugged with batter so the insides wouldn’t seep down your front.

I remembered the Chiko Roll being extraordinarily resilient. It could remain edible after days of sweltering under the glare of a roadhouse bain-marie. The outer shell, a deep-fried chamber of dough, could be sat on without it collapsing. I know this because in my twenties, I once rear-ended one, getting back into my car after a pit-stop at the Myalup roadhouse. I didn’t even dent that Chiko Roll, such was the gentle pressure applied by my then-dainty left buttock.

The Chiko Roll has a larrikin’s pedigree. It premiered at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show in 1951. Its inventor, Frank McEncroe, a boiler-maker, had welded together his prototype with a flux of egg and flour. He was inspired to experiment after sampling a ‘chop suey’ roll from a stall at a footy match.

His new snack sold out. With a sausage-machine, he began mass-producing the rolls from the back of a fish shop. Surf dudes and top chicks lived on them. I remember the ads featured a sultry leather-clad blonde astride a Harley Davidson, her Chiko Roll gripped at a suggestive 60-degree angle. Mum complained that the lady’s jacket, unzipped to the waist, was ‘sending the wrong message.’ I thought the Chiko Roll was meant to keep its filling intact but here was hers spilling out. I ignored what I didn’t understand.

That Sunday night, under a pink-streaked sky, the five of us demolished a parcel of fish and chips. At the shop, just the one Chiko Roll lay basking under the warmer, next to a shrivelled pair of dim sims. I eyed-off the trio but wasn’t game to buy. Who knows what’s in them? I’m guessing deep-fried nostalgia.