So cold outside that I can keep cheeses and yoghurts fresh by stowing them in between the inner and outer window. So warm in my room that I can ripen bananas by just letting them sit on my table. Not that there’s anything at all strange about that, Europe.
Tag: food
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you are like a fresh cranberry
God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.
We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.
They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.
Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.
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meat time
I love how the cat comes and sits, not next to the fridge, just sort of within range… letting me know with infinite courtesy that, you know, no hurry or anything, but some people might say it’s high time for Meat Time. “Meat Time!” I say, finally noticing her where she folds like a furred god, immaculately footed. Her tail is wrapped around her legs, she is not getting in anybody else’s way, she doesn’t say a word – and not only because she has no words and little use for words, it’s because she is being polite. If I walk between her and the magic fridge, where, for all I know she knows, the meat actually grows, ready carved into fresh nibble-sized bleeding chunks, she almost falls over herself skipping to reach me – she does a little hop, like a twist, her backside and haunches still sitting on the ground while her eager front feet have set off in the opposite direction. She reminds me of comics in old movies who say, “They went… thaddaway!” pointing two fingers in two directions. I let the chunks of flesh fall into her bowl. I’ve given up moving the old hair elastic that is her beloved and her prey, which every day ends up dropped into her empty dish. I hadn’t given up wondering why she would drag it over there once she’s done chasing and torturing the poor thing, then one day it dawned on me: oh. This is her eating place, where she would drag the corpse of her intended supper if she weren’t a soft little domestic possum-murderer. That worn elastic is her prey.
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fear of bunyips
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop to remind me: “You know, those scary… the obokodies.” “Bunyips?” I said. “Bunyips, yes,” he agreed.
I let the chooks out to huddle in terror under a clump of some flowering ginger that sings. Its scent sings. They are frightened by the death of their fourth friend, two days ago, who was torn into heedless headlossedness by a hawk. I guarded them all day. Chased them out into the sunshine and leaned over the sagging cyclone wire to pick them up, plumply one by one, and carry them safely home. I bent my back under bushes and collected basketsful of dry kindling. I washed all the rugs and hung them out for sun’s succour. I took the landfill and all our recycling down to the council bins, near the road. In between I was supping and sipping on things that the humming ether brought me, random stories, articles and talks that lit my tiny local and deeply domesticated sky like tinsel snow shaken through a palm-sized dome. I set the axe against the tank and broke some branches over my knee. At the foot of the scored stump on which hardwood is splitted I found the dusty remains of the peeled head, eyeless and gone, of the poor chicken who wasn’t the fittest, on Wednesday, and didn’t survive. This is where my inner-city Berlin visitor had executed her a second time, after she died, so he could pluck her in hot water and rub her all over with red cooking herbs. The whole tiny house smelled of good food last night and I ate my baked potatoes and looked on, unable to stomach it, lacking the courage, picking the eyes out of a salad.
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the plastic to drown us in
Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.
Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.
Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.
I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.
In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?
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vegemite kid
One’s German companion begins to assimilate. He is working his way through a jar of Vegemite, observing that it contains the exact same colouring as Coca-Cola: 150c. “The trouble with Vegemite,” he says, scraping the traces of its oily residue into his gullet to clean the butter knife, “is it kind of contaminates the knife. You really wouldn’t want it to end up in the strawberry jam.”
“Ugh,” I say, “no,” thinking of my brother with his webbed feet who used to eat one big bite of his toast with Vegemite and then four tiny bites of his other toast with honey. But Vegemite and honey, like honey with soy sauce, is in a special class of its own. We are on our verandah where the morning sun slants across the houses and I am gazing dreamily at the near corner of our block, a shady spot under the camphor laurel, where the rusted star picket has trapped a flapping shard of paper. “In Germany of course,” he says, “some people eat liverwurst with marmalade.” I put my cup of tea down and stare at it. The milk has turned it to the exact colour, pinkish and intimate, of liverwurst. Life is disgusting and here we are in its midst, chewing and swallowing, digesting and turning everything to shit. Sitting so pretty and containing all the world in minute, pulsing, cellular form, thinking our slow morning thoughts and and gazing at the sun.
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like there’s no tomorrow
I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!
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we three bears
I love that porridge rhymes with forage. It feels like you would go out gathering the stalks of grain, and carry them home, and then brew them up over a fire in milk and eat them. Feels both cosy and adventurous.
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beware of the god
I passed a Turkish döner shop where they carve shreds of meat from a large, limb-shaped conglomeration that’s turning very slowly dripping grease into the grill. In front of the low window sat a patient Alsatian. His nose was lifted towards the man sunning himself on his elbows, dreamily staring along the street while the meat crisped up behind him. I said, indicating the dog, “Er hat Hoffnung.” “Is he yours?” the man said. “Oh no, he’s not mine, but I think he has hopes.” He was already dipping his curled fingers into the tray of meat shards, peeling off a long strip and lifting it over the sill. He threw the meat and the dog caught it. Gulp. Gone. I said, “Wow, aren’t you nice.” As I got back on my bike the man was delving back into the gleaming pile of flesh and the dog was gazing at him as at a temple statue that has moved and revealed itself a god.
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a bitten grin
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. I just love it here. Invited by some new friends, in fact someone I’d met once, to spend ten days roosting in the writing cabin in their garden. We got talking at the airport last time I was here. We liked each other so much. I was shy about coming to stay, off one meeting so many months ago. The plane got in late and we drove through the long unfamiliar softlit suburbs, speaking in English and my three words of Danish, lapsing into silence with a sense of relief. “This is my desk,” she said, “I’ve cleared it off, feel free.” Her husband is a drummer, with quiet, gentle eyes. At the top of a steep pine ladder in the little attic room I fell into a deep, long sleep. An advertising sign at the Schoenefeld airport said, To travel is everyone’s right, but to me, travel is exhausting, it’s a piercing privilege. It takes me days for my soul to arrive. Over breakfast our host sliced an onion into large rings, a raw onion, built a layer ~ a layer of raw onion ~ onto his dark bread and pickled fish and curried egg. He saw my expression. “Even by Danish standards,” he confessed, “this breakfast is rather…” “Rather punk?” Today we took the train and explored the old city, with all day that happy, blessed feeling this place always gives me. I just love being here so much, I love it, and always have a sense of wellbeing. It makes me feel I must indeed be Danish, in part. Our surname, which we pronounce jerz, comes from Lübeck but sounds to me more Danish than German, even if ineptly or creatively Anglicized. So floating on sunshine like two leaves on water we wandered about all the livelong day long today. The old town is a maze of quiet stories. People sat in cafes by the narrow canals and disported themselves on cobbled squares. Summer is short and wears a scarf. The temperature gauge on the side of a building goes up to 27, then stops. We came out under the church tower past the high prancing fountain. Under the low arched bridge a shadow moved. Slowly the nose of a broad canal boat came into view, low on the water and brimming with motionless tourist folk. They looked half asleep. The boat was about three feet narrower than the stone arch, being steered by a young skipper with immense concentration. Behind him people lounged, a few couples chatted, one lady stood up as she came free of the low bridge and began filming a long round sweep on her phone. We watched, awestruck. He had to nose the boat almost into the stones of the opposite wall before he cleared space behind him to start to turn. With inches to spare he cleared the curve. A beautiful piece of piloting, wonderful to watch. I could feel the warm railing against my ribs. When the boat finally started to turn cleanly past the narrow bend in this ancient, odd passage of water I began to clap. “Woohoo!” I said. People on the boat looked up, woke up, and amazingly a burst of twenty or thirty up front also bloomed into smatterling applause. The sense of joy spreading was almost palpable, you know that feeling. The skipper bit his grin. Two men also leaning over the railing gave me sideways, wry, prideful smiles. For a moment we were all alight with each other. In aircraft a difficult landing in rough conditions will be greeted by decorous applause from the cabin, like an audience in a concert hall encoring a solo. It feels like the habit of an earlier age. “That felt good,” I said to my darling friend. We walked away under the walls of the museum. “Maybe,” I said, hopefully, “next time those people see something wonderful they might think, how lovely this is.” How sweet that I am here to see it. How skilfully that person plays. How dear and rich. My friend gave me a tolerant, affectionate glance that flooded warm water through my heart. I feel lucky.
