Veg

One of my girls has become a vegetarian, for ethical reasons, and I’m finding cooking meat-free meals a lot more fun than I thought it would be, even when it doesn’t quite work.

Tonight’s tofu stir fry was enjoyed by two out of four patrons, so it wasn’t a complete disaster.

I’m aiming for two out of every three nights I cook for the girls to be completely meat-free: the third night I’ll cook a separate non-meat serving.

I’ve never been vegetarian but I find the moral arguments against meat-eating pretty hard to refute, especially when George Bernard Shaw or Brigid Brophy are doing the arguing, but I have always allowed deliciousness and habit to trump my conscience.

I did find it very hard to look at the meat section of the supermarket after I’d bought a bunch of tofu and mushrooms last week.

I should also say that I’m really proud of her, and that it’s a strange but not unwelcome feeling when one of your kids makes a lifestyle choice like this.

Mity cheese

If the people at Kraft had read Episode 8 of Ulysses they wouldn’t be in the spot they’re in now:

Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.

–Have you a cheese sandwich?

–Yes, sir.

And Bloom’s pun is an allusion to a potential cute and cuddly mascot: behold the cheese mite.

Molecular astronomy

The new, improved solar system, 3

Shiny moons and new planets may be all right for the gawking masses, you may ask, but what of those of us with more refined tastes? The adventurous chefs of tomorrow won’t be content with merely Earthly delights, and fleets of robot probes will scour the system for new and ever more absurdly expensive ingredients and techniques.

Moon dust is unsealed at the table and sprinkled over the amuse bouche. As the glittering powder is exposed for the first time in millions of years to a moist, reducing atmosphere, the fleeting bouquet, comparable to Sichuan pepper, freshly-cut glass and burnt gunpowder, will arouse the most jaded palate.

Martian salt, with its unique brick-red colour and sour, alkali undertones, is the idea garnish for sous-vide loaves leavened with Titanian anaerobic yeasts and poach/baked for three weeks.

Forget glacier melt or deep ocean water: nothing is as untouched, or as recherche, as comet water, frozen in the depths of the Oort cloud since long before the Earth formed. Its bracing ammonia-and-tholin tang makes it an ideal accompaniment for seafood.

Degustation

Orange

(Only a partial solution to Petey’s challenge. And it really needs a New York accent to work.)

Cooking in 10 Minutes

Edouarde de Pomaine

This is my favourite cookbook in the world. I found it at a bookstall at the school I would later send my daughters to. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s the only reason why I decided that it was a good school, but it was one of them.

First published in 1930, and translated into English in 1948, its tone can only really be conveyed by quoting a couple of my favourite recipes, particularly the boiled trout, which is not for the faint-hearted. Pomiane’s rules of engagement allow you to start the ten minutes with a pot of water already on the boil, and the use of tinned ingredients is permitted, within limits.

WHITE SAUCE

This is a horrible sauce, but at least it can be improved according to your taste. Then it becomes enjoyable. On principle, white sauce is simply starch paste buttered and salted.

VEGETABLES

[de Pomiane avers that his task in this chapter is really impossible because...] it is essential to cook vegetables for half an hour before beginning to prepare them.

OYSTERS AND SAUSAGES

Fry some chipolata sausages. Serve them very hot on a dish and on a second dish a dozen oysters.

Alternate the sensations. Burn your mouth with a crackling sausage. Sooth [sic] your burns with a cool oyster. Continue until all the sausages and oysters have disappeared.

White wine, of course

BOILED TROUT

You must buy live trout. Put a little saucepan containing a teacupful of vinegar on the gas. Let it boil. Put the receptacle in which you are going to cook the trout, filled with salt spiced water, on the gas.

In the meantime, kill the trout by striking their heads on the edge of the table. Clean them. Wash them. Put them into a hollow dish. Pour the boiling water over them. They turn azure blue. Plunge them straight into the boiling salted water. Cook them seven or eight minutes. Lift them out of the water. Drain. Serve with melted butter.

As you can see if you look closely enough the back cover is delightful in its own right.

Backstage

A word to restaurateurs: I do not want to be told when I am being moved from the bar to the dining room that “we’re running to a really tight schedule tonight”. I love cooking at home, and I love eating out, but when I’m out I have no desire to be taken backstage.

Fine dining is to a certain extent the cultivation of illusions, but it all depends what illusions you enjoy. Foodie culture is based on the illusion that you or I could actually be a chef, if only we had the time to source pork bellies from a farm in the Southern Highlands where piglets have to have their names put down on a waiting list two years before they are weaned. Matey glimpses behind the curtain fit in well with this culture, which finds its dismal epitome in MasterChef.

But I don’t want to pretend that I am a chef, I want to pretend that I have a chef, and a country house which has the best servants in the world. My ideal of good service involves a politeness so discreet and silent that one doesn’t even notice the existence of the politeness, let alone the waiters. I don’t care if they are running to a tight schedule or if the kitchen’s on fire or if the chef has just been knifed by the sommelier; all that is none of my business.

Let me tell you of a dining experience which will illustrate exactly what I mean. It took place at a small restaurant, the location of which is known only to myself and a small circle of like-minded gourmands, many of whom have since moved overseas or passed away. Over the preprandial sherry and toasted cheese, we talked candidly of our dissatisfaction with life, the general decline of standards in all things and of our own personal misfortunes and grievances, and took it in turns to enlarge upon the ideal mode in which to live one’s life. It was on the following day that the first of that remarkable series of successful speculations in real estate to which I owe my present comfort was to bear fruit. Not long after that, as my wealth increased, I was granted the leisure to re-examine my prospects and to embark upon an unexpected career change which led to the discovery of my true vocation. After decades of long and deeply satisfying labours, I arrived in a state of tranquil retirement, spending my time at my retreat in the rural hinterland, visited by friends of old and my many descendants, devoting myself to a life of contemplation, horticulture and the study of Ancient Greek. It was on a particularly calm and mellow evening in late autumn, when I sat before the fire and seemed to see figured in its ever-changing flames the appearances of faces from the past and future, a waiter appeared at my side and asked suavely, “And would Sir like to look at the dessert menu?”

Now that’s what I call good service.

The Bummalo

I know people have their doubts about Wikipedia but it is unmatched as a resource to trawl for possible answers to cryptic crosswords, and without it I suspect I would never have been made aware of the bummalo, which is also known as the Bombay duck.

Neither a duck nor a buffalo pronounced through a mouthful of mozzarella, the bummalo is in fact a species of lizardfish native to the Gulf of Arabia, prized as a delicacy when salted and pan-fried, despite its pungent odour.

In these strange days, when genetic science is striding rapidly ahead, we may soon hear of a chimaeric creation, a semi-aquatic cow with the smell of a fish, the mouth of a lizard and the name of a duck and a city. This hellish creature is the bufmalo, or bumfalo, depending on the distribution of chromosomes.

I don’t know if the bummalo should now be referred to as the Mumbai duck. Or, indeed, the Mumbai fish. Perhaps it will be the last surviving relic of the name ‘Bombay’, just as ‘Leningrad’ only survives in the subtitle of the seventh symphony of Shostakovich.

Showbag

This year I decided to avoid showbag envy so I took Grace’s Kit Kat bag off her hands after she changed her mind, only to find when I got home that more than half of the items were past their use-by dates. I suppose that’s one of the reasons showbags exist.  I feel a bit like someone who only just noticed that the apples used to make toffee apples are the low quality apples.

There were some attempts at adult showbags but they were all either dull or comically sad, like the FHM bag containing back issues of the magazine, beef jerky and an Easy Mac pasta meal. All of these were sponsored by magazines, which made me wonder if The Monthly should produce one.

3 x back issues of The Monthly
1 x back issue of Quarterly Essay
1 x Australia’s Best Political Essays 2008
1 x hair shirt
1 x poseable Robert Manne action figure, with fence
1 x lucky dip item – secondhand volume of poetry by either Les Murray or Clive James

On second thoughts, perhaps not.

If idiotic food blogs had existed when I was a student

The satay sauce tasted very strongly of peanut butter.

Nailed to share-house wall in middle stages of party.
Eaten directly off wall by a different reveller, much later in the evening.

Made at end of cocktail party when all the rum and reasonable fruit had been consumed. Never do this.