Nothing is more nostalgic than the palate. We can forget what someone or something looks like, the color of the hair or eyes of a childhood friend, but we never forget the taste of favorite foods lovingly prepared by mothers and grandmothers. More often than not, they cooked by instinct and never wrote down their recipes.
If they shared them at all, they used expressions like a pinch of salt, a dab of butter, a cup of flour – never saying how much a pinch might be, how large a dab, or the size of the cup. But they always seemed to get it right when they cooked. My mother was a fantastic cook – although the kitchen was not a place with which she was familiar.
A rich man’s daughter, who grew up with servants performing all the menial tasks, she barely knew how to boil a kettle of water when she arrived in Australia. She had been preceded there by a maternal uncle who did well for himself in the lucky country and had suggested that his sisters and their families follow. Three of them did, but my grandmother, who was more affluent than all three put together, was reluctant to give up her lifestyle.
It was taken from her, along with her life, in the . My great-aunts were also great cooks and all lived in the same neighborhood, some distance from each other. My great-aunt Henna was arguably the best of them all, and it was she who had the patience to teach my mother the secrets of the stove.
She lived only a few minutes’ walk away from our home, and when I was very young I .
