smartfoodmama is Felicity Newman – demented Jewish mother, academic, cook and enthusiastic eater. I have a lot to say and I have my ear to the ground, so some posts will be local and others will consider broader issues. I’d love some responses and sharing of anything of value.
So many genuine truths are now reduced to cliché simply because of their ubiquity: I “live to eat”, “tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are” and the words of my guru Michael Pollan: “Eat less, mostly plants”; but that doesn’t make them any less relevant.
I owe my passion for all things culinary to my parents, both gone now. It might seem strange to consider my father in this light, given that I grew up in a time of absent fathers and mothers bound to the kitchen sink. But my father loved the sea more than anything else, though he was also partial to a creek or river if it held any fish. His headstone reads: “Gone Fishing”. He lived to fish and I can remember my mother, Victorinox knife in hand, straddling a 100 kg tuna. In those days only other South Africans would take this free sashimi-fresh bounty. Australians didn’t eat tuna or even calamari back then.
My father showed me the wonders of the sea and provided his family its delicious inhabitants. Crustaceans from the Sydney Fish Market in the days when you could just drive in and park anywhere. Dad would cook these in his very big pot. Mum grew up in an orthodox Jewish community in the mid-north of England. She ate no crabs or oysters or any “trefe” (unkosher foods) but cooked whatever my father craved – including piri-piri prawns. Mum wasn’t what anyone could call a fancy cook but she stepped out of her comfort zone from time to time. This meant that as well as delicious staples (meat balls, chicken and mushroom pies, mac cheese, fish cakes etc) she sometimes surprised us.
Dad loved to fish with Vince Young, a local pharmacist and ABC (Australian-born Chinese). His glamorous wife Norma gave Mum a recipe for soya chicken. So grateful because it heralded the arrival of garlic into my life and a beautiful chicken dish I have adapted and continue to cook. That pales into insignificance though when you consider her traditional Jewish dishes. I’ll share these and I’ll even blow my horn by telling you that my mother acknowledged that I made better matzo balls she did. Her chopped liver however, has not been bettered. Perhaps if I had her vintage mincer? Anyone else’s mother had one of those? They screwed onto the table and looked like this:
apparently they’re alive and well and available on Gumtree!
So I need to say thanks to Mum and Dad. It was a noisy and sometimes disfunctional household to grow up in but it was never dull. I ate an eclectic range of foods with those South-African braais, Cape Malay curries, fresh Australian seafood and hearty “heimish” (homestyle) Jewish dishes. I learnt a lot. Let me share with you.