February 13th, 2010
Eggplant, melanzane or aubergine – all the same and all beloved by me. If I were allowed two vegetables only for the next year, one of them would be eggplant. It’s a vegetable favoured all throughout the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy. There’s a huge variety, within Italian regions and between, in the preparation and cooking of the eggplant, but the region I am most familiar with is Campania and Naples.
Non Italians sometimes make the mistake of assuming the cooking of the south of Italy IS Italian cooking. It’s not; it is the cuisine the poor Italian migrants took with them when they fled the poverty of the south. Countries like Australia and the US adopted pasta and pizza and now turn out abominations under the label ‘Italian.’ That’s because these foods, particularly pizza, are cheap to make and lend themselves to the modern notion of ‘fast food’. You rarely see eggplant in these pizza/pasta establishments because people go, ‘Eww, what’s that?’ and won’t eat it, preferring vast amounts of cheese and processed ‘meat’.
Eggplant doesn’t yield its beautiful nature quickly, it’s not fast, you need to take time with it. However, if you move up one level from the pasta/pizza cuisine you might find the Eggplant Parmigiana, but you are more likely to find it’s easier cousin the ubiquitous (in Australian pubs, at least), Schnitzel Parma-jarma. This consists of a deep fried piece of beef schnitzel, plonked on a plate and covered in tomato sauce and cheese and whacked under the griller, served with chips and a sad piece of iceberg lettuce. And BIG, half the plate usually.
Again, this is a dish favoured by endlessly hungry young males, although I saw it on a menu at the Parndana Hotel on Kangaroo Island, listed next to their special – the one kilo steak. Yes, a one kilo steak. The publican told me nobody had ever managed to finish one of these, even during shearing season when blokes around twenty, who’d been shearing since six am and had worked up a mighty hunger, came in, sank a few ales, got a bit cocky and ordered this orgy of meat.
But back to the original Eggplant Parmigiana. Its name does not come from the variety of cheese used, as Mary Taylor Simetti explains – ‘Sicilians have a word, palmigiana, that means ‘shutter’ and that stems from the resemblance between the overlapping louvres of a shutter.’* The overlapping eggplant slices resemble the shutters and hence the name. She says Sicilians cannot produce ‘L’ and ‘palmigiana’ became ‘parmigiana’. I love this sort of useless information.
I was taught to make Eggplant Parmigiana by an elderly Campanian woman and the way she prepared it literally took all day – eliminating it from the fast food realm. Her method is a classic example of the cuisine of poverty – take a few cheap, plentiful ingredients and work them hard. She knew about hard work - after raising three of her five children in a one-room house and doing her washing at midnight in a stream at the bottom of the hill. This was a woman who never took her washing machine for granted.
I’ve been around other Italian women, some of that generation, some younger, who butcher pigs and use everything – days of unbelievably hard yakka, grow and bottle their own tomatoes – not as quaint and colourful as the movies would have us believe, and rise before dawn to strip an orchard of olives to take to the local olive press. I’ve been at an olive pick and after half an hour in the sun and wind, wanted to say, ‘Why don’t we just go down to the shop and buy the oil?’ I’d wanted a quaint, rustic experience among the olive trees - a basket on my hip, bare feet, swishing red skirt and smouldering looks exchanged beneath trees ripe with fruit. You know, just like in the movies. But the best thing about picking olives is stopping.
To make the Eggplant Parmigiana, my Campanian friend sliced the eggplant into centimetre thick slices, sprinkled them with salt and left them while the bitter juices were drawn out. Then she’d dry them, place them on racks in the sun for most of the day until a little bit leathery. The next step was to dredge them in egg and flour and fry until golden, making sure there was no excess oil left on the slices. Then she’d layer them alternately with regato cheese and her incomparable tomato and basil sauce, bake in the oven for half an hour then serve. The next day small squares would be served cold as part of an antipasti. It’s a huge effort, one that few people have the time for anymore, but it’s an effort that results, eaten with salad, good bread and wine, in a memorable meal – if you have any energy left to eat.
Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food, Mary Taylor Simetti, Ecco Press, 1989
For more of an insight into life in Southern Italy until relatively recently, I recommend these books – particularly Ann Cornelisen’s two books for her moving accounts of the women’s lives
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
Torregreca; Life Death and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village, Ann Cornelisen
Women of the Shadows; Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy, Ann Cornelisen
Old Calabria, Norman Douglas
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November 27th, 2009
I’ve been having a bit of a think about why I started writing, in case someone asks me. I can give them the long answer … which might involve a couple of bottles of wine, an open fire and some deep and moody background music. Or I can give them the short – I had a go, loved it and kept going. Somewhere in between there are some other interesting bits and pieces to pick over.
One of these is technology.
As a kid I used to play about with my mother’s old typewriter. Not writing anything serious - no precociousness here I’m afraid - but just to see what it did and how. The pressure required to push down one of those keys was enormous, requiring at least two sticky fingers and a tongue poking out. (It was old even when she bought it).
Then there was pen and paper. At university I wrote my essays in longhand and then would literally cut and sticky tape various paragraphs onto the wardrobe door. I’d have a long cascade of pages and snippets and scribbles and cut outs trailing down onto the carpet. I could read it in sequence, and cut and change as I felt necessary.
It was laborious, but few people had PC’s then. My first essay in General Philosophy was titled ‘Is it better to be Socrates Dissatisfied or a Pig Satisfied. Argue the case.’ Well, the answer was obvious, was it not? With my earnest undergraduate brow furrowed with concentration I feverishly rearranged my arguments until Socrates emerged triumphant. I’d think differently now, but that’s for another post.
Now I have more technology than I can poke a proverbial at – and doesn’t it make writing easy? It’s been my pet theory for years that access to this powerful writing tool has caused the explosion in creative writing. There are creative writing courses sprouting everywhere, but I never succumbed to their easy promise. After three degrees and a couple of stints in the tertiary sector I swore I would never undertake formal education again. Ever. I’ve chosen a different route and had to re invent the wheel numerous times, but it has suited me.
I do wonder however, that if I had to write a novel in longhand, would I do so? I don’t know the answer and I don’t have to test it. But I can say that having had the urge to write fiction; the ease in the physical doing of it has definitely contributed to my persistence. It’s not as romantic an answer as you’d get after the wine, but it is a small part of it.
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July 24th, 2009
Adrenalin is not my thing. Anything physically extreme, other than indolence, I find unappealing. So if I was granted a day in any job I wanted, (full skill set included), I’d be unlikely to choose piloting a jetfighter over Iraq, or cray fishing in the Southern Ocean, or even going fast in a police car, sirens at max volume. No, you wouldn’t find me there.
Because my first choice would be a day as a casting director.
My friend Elly and I, after a few glasses of wine, invariably cast and re cast various films. Sometimes, usually when the bottle is finished, I think we should lend a hand to those people in Hollywood who miss the mark so often. The Hollywood casting directors, I expect, have to factor in demographic appeal and box office ratings in order to secure the millions of dollars required. We’ll dispense with those details when it’s my turn.
The perfect actor for me is one who I don’t see, like John Malkovitch in Disgrace, or Penelope Cruz in Volver. I don’t want to see actors acting, and I don’t want to see heavily made-up actors ‘acting’ either – Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, please step forward. I think this latter film was one for the special effects boys to take their skills out for a run around the block. But I don’t want to sit there and think, ‘Ooo, aren’t they clever, doesn’t he look old.’ It jars. It sends the necessary suspension of belief, and absorption in the story, toppling off the highwire. What I see is a celebrity acting and thus the pact between the director and me is broken.
John Malkovitch
I used to flick through the trash mags wherever I found myself in waiting rooms. I don’t now, because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know that Celia had 14 husbands before she met the love of her life, had her breasts enlarged, reduced and enlarged again, loves steamed fish and heaps of salad for lunch and is now up on the screen trying to convince me she’s Lady MacBeth.
In an increasingly celebrity obsessed culture, if you want to remain slightly naïve and able to wallow in the make believe of film and books you have to shut these things out. You have to be careful on the internet, not just about what you reveal about yourself, but what you discover about others, and I’m not just talking about saucy pictures and stalkers. I’m talking too much information about the producers of culture.
Vivienne Leigh as Lady Macbeth
Patrick White revealed in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, that as an avid lover of opera, when he discovered Joan Sutherland liked to do needlepoint during breaks from the stage, he was appalled at her ‘suburban-ness’ and could no longer listen to her sing. Patrick was a bitchy old curmudgeon but I agree with completely on this matter.
I feel a similar sense of lost innocence when reading now. I read Danny Gillan’s post ‘Critiquer’s Guilt’ (see link page) and found myself agreeing with him – as I usually do. One way to kill reading pleasure, that wonderful immersion in the narrative, is to be on the lookout for comma placement and too many adjectives. I have to say it does improve ones writing skills, but what does it do to me as a reader? I enjoy a book where I don’t see the mechanics, where the form is so good it’s unobtrusive and there’s none of that ‘hey, look at me, I’m writing,’ author-in-your-face, po mo, pared down cleverness.
Having a professional editor comb through my book was a fascinating and humbling experience, not to mention invaluable as a learning experience. I subsequently went straight to editing a friend’s manuscript, less rigorously of course, and found myself unable to stop the process of distanced critical reading of any text, anywhere. I’d pick up a can of tomatoes, read the list of ingredients and think about the positioning of the full stop. Should I buy that brand if they can’t get it right? I do allow myself the luxury of refusing to eat at a café that misspells ‘hamberger’. If they can’t pay attention to spelling, what will the ‘hamberger’ be like. You dreary pedant, I hear you mutter. I do have terrible anxiety over apostrophes, so maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh.
Penelope Cruz in Non ti Muouere
It’s been a few weeks since this intense editing experience and I’m beginning to loosen up. I still find part of my brain hangs on tenaciously to the critical eye, but I know I’m getting better when I can read a book and lose myself in it. I was told to read James Ellroy’s book The Black Dahlia and to look for examples of the apt verb, of which he is reputed master. But I find myself enjoying the forties street slang, the character’s internal motivations, and the simple who-done-it nature of the mystery.
But I can’t help thinking as I read it, whoever cast Scarlett Johansen in the role of Kay Lake in the film version should be sent to a casting re-eduction camp. Scarlett’s a beautiful woman, but playing a hard boiled, over educated, ex call girl, who is involved with two detectives trying to solve the same murder…well, it’s way beyond her range. Who I would have cast I’m not sure. I’ll have to sit down with Elly and a bottle of wine and think about that.
Scarlett Johansson in The Black Dahlia
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