Open Writing

Conjure up images of Australia and Eucalyptus trees, kangaroos, sea, surf and barbeques spring to mind - not a Sicilian cookbook. But it was just such a publication I came across in Freemantle, Western Australia that gave me food for thought. I was so struck by its title and content that I made a mental note, not expecting to do any more about it than store the image in the ‘things I saw but never bought’ pigeon-hole of my life. Once back in England, that cover and title kept creeping back into my thoughts and one day I mentioned it to an IT savvy daughter who promptly secured it for me via the internet.

‘My Cousin Rosa’, in principal a cookery book; is in reality the charming story of the author, Rosa Mitchell’s early childhood memories of Sicily and how her whole family gradually relocated to Australia, taking with them the essence of their homeland in the way they cook and gather together to eat as a family.

Rosa Mitchell made the transition from Sicily to Australia in 1962 and as she explains in the publication’s introduction, the family now numbers over 130, often meeting up in groups to make and preserve the dishes they hold dear.

Within its pages you can almost smell the Mediterranean, taste the olives, sun ripened tomatoes and meaty salamis. You can certainly feel the love and a sense of appreciation of identity and roots.

She says: “I like to make the basic foods my parents and grandparents ate all their lives back home. Making food is not just something we do to survive; It’s the coming together and sharing, chatting and arguing over the methods and superstitions….We pass down recipes…”

Food is indeed a very uniting ingredient in our lives, something comforting and familiar that can instantly make us feel ‘at home’. The smell of baking bread for example, always takes me straight back to childhood, reproducing in a moment Mr Child’s bakery that once occupied premises in the neighbouring street to ours. Racks of hot loaves waiting for customers, their crusts varying from light, golden brown to crusty burnt umber according to where they had been place in the bakery’s wood-fired oven. Large bloomers, cottage loaves, twists, sandwich and tin, shapes and sizes to suit everyone’s taste. My mother would send me to fetch home a loaf and the baker would often slip an iced bun in my hand along with the change.

Likewise the sharp but at the same time sweet, aroma of blackberries on a rolling boil brings back those days when I helped my mother put away enough preserves to see us through the winter. Hours of picking, cleaning, weighing, boiling, testing and finally bottling up for the satisfaction of a neat row of jars, all well worth it when I was able to sit by a roaring fire and tuck into jam and toast in January and taste September on my tongue.

Today restaurant dining and celebrity chefs often provide us with a completely different form of experiencing food. Will the memory of any of those meals stay with us? Maybe one or two will be outstanding for opening up a new idea or of such enjoyment that we will remember it for the whole ambience of the occasion. However, I will take a bet that the food we crave in days when we feel in need of comfort will be those dishes that we remember from childhood, when what we ate seemed to be bound up with the love and security of the family and the familiar.

Each generation will crave something different and it may even be that in years to come the memory of selecting a plastic-wrapped sliced white from a supermarket shelf will be just as precious to a whole raft of people a anything homemade. In a similar vein, I can recall a young person telling me that on a visit to India with different curries on offer at every street corner, what they really craved was a burger. Whilst neither sliced white bread or a burger would ever be my choice, it does emphasis my point. It is not about what we eat but about what we associate with it.

Both my twin daughters are keen bakers. They mix up batches of buns, muffins and coffee cake as if they were born with wooden spoons on the end of their arms. The reason for all this baking they tell me is that they want to emulate their own childhood when they would come home from school to a jug of hot chocolate and a plate of cakes on the kitchen table. Back then I saw my efforts as a means of staving off their hunger pains until their father got home for dinner. They however, remember it as returning to the security of home, to warmth, to love and the familiar.

What greater compliment could I wish for?