Food for thought - the early days

Mutti told me that when she first married my father she cooked for six weeks without repeating a meal. At that time women had to resign from their jobs when they got married, so I guess she had the time for this food extravaganza. My parents married in the May of 1939 and war was declared in the September, so this food extravaganza could not continue as rationing soon became the order of the day.

During the war, Mutti learnt to do lots of things with potatoes because she had some relatives with a farm and that was what was available. She and my father were far luckier than the majority of the population because most people were completely dependant on rations. They were doubly lucky because my father had relatives who were fishermen up by the Baltic Sea so occasionally they were able to get herring as well. Mutti also told me that when she and my father left East Germany they hosted a farewell party. None of the guests, apart from close family members, had any idea that they were leaving. Had the secret plans of escape been made known, they could have been arrested. She somehow made sandwich topping for a great crowd of people using one hard boiled egg. I have no idea how.

When my parents lived in India (where I was born) they didn't at all embrace the local culture and kept making German type food. Buying food in the markets was certainly tricky and I heard stories of the meat hanging black with flies. My mother would buy a massive chunk of meat and cut off all the outsides before cooking the small nugget from right in the middle. She boiled all the water we ever drank, washed fruit with 'Sunlight Soap' and never attempted to use lettuce. We three survived unscathed unlike many of their friends who suffered with severe 'Delhi belly'.

When my mother arrived in Australia she assumed the food would be similar to what had been available in Germany before the war. Had she and my father moved to the Eastern suburbs of Sydney where there was a large, mainly northern European Jewish migrant community, they would have immediately felt right at home, but they ended up in Mosman and the food just wasn't the same. Had they been British they would have found all that was familiar.

One night in the early days not long after they had settled in Australia, as a real treat, my parents went out for a coffee and were really looking forward with anticipation to the delight that they had known 'back home'. These days we are all used to nice little cafes where you can get a large variety of coffees or teas but in the early 50s in the northern suburbs of Sydney that just wasn't available. They ended up in a milk bar - wooden benches either side of a wooden table and the coffee they ordered was a cup of chicory with hot milk that had a skin on it. My mother nearly threw up and then nearly cried with disappointment.

Eventually coffee became more widely drunk and was available, not anywhere near where we lived, but in European style cafes in the city. As a family when I was a bit older we would dress up and go by ferry into the city and have afternoon tea at 'Repins' where they served lovely coffee and also had a big variety of European cakes and pastries. I remember one particular occasion vividly when I ordered a slice of 'Dobostorte' a many layered cake with butter cream between each layer and a thick glaze of toffee on top. I was trying so hard to be a lady, sipping my hot chocolate and eating tiny forkfuls of the delicious torte. I tried to spear some of the toffee topping which shattered, sending a shard flying right at a man at the next table hitting him on the arm. I was mortified.

We had a coffee grinder at home and I think for a while our German relatives sent us coffee beans which my father ground. My mother always baked beautiful cakes and on Sunday afternoons they would drink coffee and we all would eat cake. We often had visitors or went to someone else's place for coffee on a Sunday afternoon. Even if they were our best friends we would dress up, frocks for my mother and me and a tie for my father.

At the local shops my mother bought meat from Mr Boulton the butcher and he cut topside steak for her in very thin slices so that she could make 'Rolladen'. This was one of the meals for special occasions. The meat hammered thin, spread with mild mustard, sprinkled with speck, was rolled up and cooked in a delicious creamy sauce.

My mother really wasn't a meat cook though. She made stews, roasts and casseroles very well but she never learnt how to cook chops and steaks. She fried them in oil until they were grey and as tough as old boot leather. The smell of a big fat leg chop simmering in oil used to make me gag and I could never understand why people loved chops so much until someone served me a tiny grilled lamb loin chop. Now they are amongst my favourite dishes. Steak to my mother meant topside steak - a dry meat at the best of times, but if you fry it in oil - yuck!

Vegetables and fruit she bought from Mr Morrissey. We always had lots of potatoes. Mutti would want waxy potatoes for potato salad or floury potatoes for dumplings but nobody knew what she was talking about. The choice, much to her despair, was old or new potatoes. Waxy? Floury? What was she talking about!

We used to go into the city and visit a delicatessen in Wynyard station, run by Hungarians, who sold European style smallgoods. After a few years we discovered another delicatessen had opened at Crows Nest, a northern suburb close to my father's business premises. Every Friday he would buy a variety of smallgoods, enough to last the week plus extra for the kids at the flats. John, Libby, Pamela, Michael, Katy and I would line up with our mouths open and my father would go down the line popping pieces of Berliner sausage and slices of salami into what he called 'the beaks of little hungry birds'. We loved this treat and it introduced the other kids to completely new flavours of food.

Mutti cooked every day. We were too poor to eat out until I was much older and even then my parents resented how expensive everything was, not taking into account the fact that a restaurant needs to pay wages, rent and has a whole lot of expenses that need to be added to the price of a dish. At home we always had lots of vegetables, little meat and plenty of fruit even when we were at our poorest. My mother could never forget having nothing and being hungry during the war, so every morsel was used, even dry stale crusts of bread would be soaked in water then added to mince to make rissoles.

My mother's greatest culinary expertise lay in baking. She was particularly clever at using yeast and made many wonderful creations over the years.

I resented the fact that we couldn't have good Aussie food like that which my friends ate, such as savoury mince with mashed potatoes followed by rice pudding, that she never learnt how to make a proper curry when she was in India (her version of a curry was diced left over lamb with a spoonful of Keen's curry powder and a few sultanas) and that she wasn't willing or interested in trying new things. When I was older and still at home I cooked the occasional meal and liked to experiment a bit in the kitchen using recipes from Margaret Fulton's cookbook so I went out and bought bottled herbs such as oregano, thyme and dill and then threw out those same bottles of herbs when my parents moved out of their house over twenty years later. My father on the other hand loved the food that his beloved wife cooked him. He appreciated the fact that she made the dishes that he was familiar with and he always looked forward to sitting down at the table with the starched tablecloth and napkins to share a meal with the woman he adored.

I pride myself in being quite a good cook, very different from my mother, but she is the one who taught me the basics. As a young child I had my own tiny rolling pin, mixing bowl and cake forms and when Mutti was baking she would give me a bit of dough which I would pummel, sprinkle with sugar and bake alongside her creation. I always thought it tasted fabulous. I helped shell peas, peel carrots and potatoes and chop parsley (the only herb my mother really knew) incredibly finely. I will always be grateful to her for her patience, introducing me to and giving me a love of cooking.