Mulligatawny soup

 

I have never eaten Mulligatawny soup but it is the most wonderful word. Apparently, it’s a rich beef or chicken soup seasoned with curry and associated with the Raj. The fact that British people often “go out for a curry” where we might have Chinese or Italian is presumably also a consequence of the Raj. Paisley is another thing we can associate with the East (east of Britain that is). Apparently, although the pine-cone or almond-like form is of Persian origin, and the textile designs cramming many of them into a rich pattern are originally Indian, the English name for the patterns derives from the town of Paisley in the west of Scotland, a centre for textiles where paisley designs were produced. And another factoid: In novels about the Raj, the British characters often ask for “the other half” meaning another drink.

It’s interesting that many cultures have given their cuisines to the world but that some haven’t contributed much. Estonian cuisine doesn’t come to mind, for instance, or Latvian, or Lithuanian. I don’t know much about Swedish food, or Danish (except for herring), or Norwegian or Icelandic or Finnish, yet yards of bookshop space goes to Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese cookbooks. Of course, this could be just a reflection of Australia’s culinary tastes. Perhaps other countries have different cookbook preferences. The multitude of African countries, for example, must have notable cuisines over and above the food of their colonial powers.

I have dozens of cookbooks which I’ve collected since the ‘70s, all purchased in the vain endeavour to improve my cooking. As I’ve said before, my mother wasn’t particularly interested in cooking and my grandmother only made two things that I can recall: the abominable kasha or buckwheat, which could win the Stink Olympics and an actually-quite-nice honey cake for the Jewish New Year which she called, mysteriously, “ginger cake”. I went from my parents’ home to my husband’s home with no living alone in between, so my repertoire of recipes at marriage was, well, meagre. Hence the cookbook frenzy. I started with the Women’s Weekly recipes which I cut out and put into scrap-style books. Then I purchased the Woman’s Weekly cookbooks and eventually branched out to cookbooks of European cuisines, particularly Italian. For instance, I have two cookbooks of the wonderful Claudia Roden, one specifically Italian and the other generalised Mediterranean. I was also given by my spouse, undoubtedly to make a point about my cooking skills, a beautifully produced set of cookbooks published by TimeLife which consisted of four wonderfully illustrated books each supported by a more robust text-only recipe collection. They were The Cooking of Provincial France, The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire, The Cooking of Italy and American Cooking.

On marriage, I was given the famous English Constance Spry Cookbook, all 1235 pages of it, with recipes for all necessities. As 97% of the recipes were outside my interests or ability, and many of them were of the “first catch your turtle” variety I can’t say I consulted it often. I was also given Florence Greenberg’s Cookery Book stuffed to the brim with kosher recipes of the British persuasion including one for Oophlaifers or Fingerhuetchen which are apparently “thimble noodles” (no, I never tried these, tempting though the name was). It was Florence whom my mother and I went to for Pesach baking recipes like almond macaroons and coconut pyramids. For those who don’t know, on Pesach (Passover) you can’t use wheat products so significant research needs to go into substitutes like almond meal and “matza flour” which is ground up matzot (plural of matza, but you can say matzas if it comes more trippingly off the tongue!). And matzot are the sheets of unleavened bread which substitute for bread on the eight days of Pesach. Interestingly, the constrictions on cooking during Pesach have produced some wonderful foods. As well as the biscuits mentioned above there are the utterly wonderful k’neidlach or matza dumplings which you have in chicken soup and lokshen pudding; lokshen are flat noodles like tagliatelle. For the pudding they are cooked and mixed with a variety of sweet things including stewed apple and baked in the oven.

When I turned 50 I decided to buy myself the then newly-published the cook’s companion by Stephanie Alexander. (I also joined the Labor Party as another birthday present to myself, but that’s a story for another day!) Alexander’s book was then very expensive, but it’s an absolutely wonderful compilation of recipes plus much wisdom on technique, kitchen gadgets and ingredients. I have no idea what the newest-best-thing is on the cookbook front but I would recommend Alexander’s book to everyone.

Some recipe books are wonderful for the stories they tell. I had one on mediaeval cooking, for instance which taught me much about mediaeval life but presented a set of recipes which I would never use. There are also some books in the kitchen cupboard which evolved from endearing TV shows like the Two Fat Ladies, or books from Jamie Oliver's oeuvre or that of the delightful Nigella Lawson. I have a number of modern Jewish cookbooks including the Monday Morning Cooking Club publications, written by a group of young Jewish women in Sydney who have compiled recipes from their older relatives and brought them up to date. Victorian broadcaster Ramona Koval has also published a Jewish cookbook. My favourite book in this genre is The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece. Not only are the recipes fascinating, they reflect the fact that the Jews of Greece were/are an amalgam of Sephardi Jews (Spanish origin including the Jews of various Greek islands like Rhodes and of Turkey), Ashkenazi Jews (those from other parts of Europe and into Russia) and Romaniote Jews (those whose ancestry dates from the ancient Graeco-Roman word). I knew nothing about this sub-culture of Judaism but I’m now much better informed.

 

Quote of the week from the Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

From what I think is the funniest comedy sketch ever written: the Dead Parrot Sketch where the John Cleese character tries to return to the pet shop the dead parrot which he unwittingly purchased there: “It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It’s ceased to be. It’s expired. It’s gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It would be pushing up the daisies if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It’s an ex-parrot.”