Eat My Words

By M MacCallum

Best-selling author Mungo MaCallum's witty and incisive take on the world of celebrity chefs and crazy food fads is underpinned by a deep affection for really good food.
Mungo MacCallum started eating at an early age and just got back from lunch. In the meantime he has become one of Australia's wittiest and most incisive political journalists, written for everyone from the AUStRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW and SBS television to 2JJJ (now tRIPLE J) and PENtHOUSE. In this, his eighth book, he muses on epicurean pleasures past and savoured - from doing pre-dinner drinks and drugs with Leonard Cohen in the Greek isles to lunching with lobbyists in the fleshpots of Canberra, before escaping to reside, cook, and write some more, on the NSW north coast. this unlikely memoir of food and friends (and the occasional rant about tofu), is a call to arms for a no-nonsense approach to shopping, fast food, herbs, restaurants, camping and cooking real food. Enjoy this generous helping of Mungo's favourite recipes and anecdotes containing (be warned) offal, fat, sugar, cream and other delicious ingredients. this is Mungo as you've never read or dined with before. Bon appetit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781743096628

M MacCallum

In a career spanning more than four decades, Mungo MacCallum has established himself as one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, broadcasters and commentators. Beginning his career in 1965 with THE AUSTRALIAN, Mungo then joined the Canberra press gallery to witness John Gorton’s electoral victory over a promising young opposition leader called Gough. It was to be the first of many seminal events in Australian federal politics that Mungo reported on for national newspapers, local and online publications, as well as commercial and independent TV and radio networks. He is the author of eight books.

Book preview

Of Ben Chifley’s Onions, Bert Evatt’s Potato Straws and Sam Kekovich’s Lamb

If it is true that you are what you eat, I should have grown up to be a stunted and narrow-minded conservative; but then, too, so should all of my generation. I was a war baby, and much of my childhood was spent under the cloud of food rationing. For many this remained a serious problem for some time after the war, affecting even the prime minister. Ben Chifley, having spent his early years as a train driver, in later years became a great fan of motor transport. He was regularly driven from his home in Bathurst to Canberra and back, and made something of a ritual of stopping at a favourite cafe in Gundagai for a steak. But on one sad occasion, the proprietor greeted him with some embarrassment. He could supply the meat, but the onions the prime minister always demanded were simply not available. ‘Oh yes they are,’ replied Chif, and withdrew two succulent bulbs from his coat pocket.

Of course, food shortages were not new to the wide brown land; a couple of years after our settlement in 1788 the wreck of the supply ship Sirius almost reduced the new colony to starvation. So severe was the scarcity that even those invited to dine at Government House read on their formal invitation card the instruction: ‘Bring your own bread.’

In contrast with those really harsh times, the 1940s were a breeze. As a child I was never really aware of rationing; food was nothing to get excited about, as long as there was enough of it, and in my house there always was. Obviously some products were in short supply and others unobtainable altogether, but we still managed a nourishing and balanced diet – probably healthier than many do in these more affluent times.

But the trouble was that our diet was generally dull and almost always predictable. The basis was the traditional meat and three veg, and the meat was generally lamb; this was partly because lamb was both the cheapest and most plentiful beast, but also because one of my uncles ran a sheep station and could be relied on to provide the odd free carcass.

Beef was a bit of a luxury and pork a treat almost as rare as chicken, for which rabbit was considered a somewhat inferior substitute. I have always regarded this as a totally unwarranted denigration of the luscious lagomorph. Derided by farmers as a pest and dismissed as underground mutton, rabbits were killed as dog food and considered basically unfit for human consumption.

Real mutton, of course, was considered a second-rate substitute for lamb, and these days is almost unobtainable, as is the intermediate hogget. This is a pity as the more mature sheep meat is great in braises, stews and curries. And of course it is the essential basis of that archetypal colonial dish Australian goose. There were geese in the early days – they came out on the First Fleet. But either they were reserved for the governor or they escaped; certainly they did not appear on the normal colonial menu. But a substitute did: the Australian goose. It deserves immortalising. The following recipe is taken from the Country Women’s Association of New South Wales Coronation Cookery Book, first published in 1937. But it is undoubtedly more than a century older.

Put two or three (according to the size of the family) flaps of mutton in the bottom of a large stewing pan or boiler. (You can get these from your butcher.) Add one onion, one carrot, three cloves (all whole), three peppercorns, a stick of celery, salt and pepper. Simmer gently in just enough water to cover the flaps. When quite tender, take out the bones and press the meat between two dishes, leaving it that way until the next day. (Refrigerating wouldn’t do any harm.) Save the liquid. When quite cold and firm, trim nicely, roll in egg and breadcrumbs and grill slowly until golden brown. Make a sauce from the liquid and flavour with a little cayenne pepper, lemon and a spoonful of sherry if available. It would want to be, because the guests (or rather the family) will, depending on size, want to knock off the rest of the bottle before eating the dish. I have never tried it: underground mutton seems a much better bet.

The humble bunny was derided for years as tramps’ food. But the fact is that, with a little care and attention, rabbit makes a fine dish in its own right. Masquerading as roast chicken it is not so good. Rabbit is too dry and scrawny to roast well, even wrapped in fatty bacon. While the huge farmed bunnies now sold are better for roasting than the wild variety, they’re not as tasty; roasting generally is enough to give rabbit a bad name. However, chopped in pieces (preferably by your friendly butcher) and stewed, it can be excellent. Slow-cooked as a daube (French for stew) with onions, carrots, herbs and garlic in a red wine and tomato sauce, rabbit makes a fine meal. An interesting variation uses green olives, capers and celery, and mixes red wine vinegar and extra oil with the tomatoes as the basis of the sauce.

But my own favourite is a Parisian preparation, or so it was called in the magazine in which I found it. Don’t panic – the recipe below works just as well in Brunswick Heads as it does in France. Season your dissected rabbit with salt and pepper, and, if you like a thick sauce, sprinkle it with flour. Brown it in butter over a medium heat and then warm up half a cup of brandy, set it alight and pour the flaming liquid over the beast. Allow the fire in the pan to die down, and extinguish any outbursts that have spread. Toss the lot in a casserole dish.

Now melt another knob of butter in the frying pan and gently cook half a cup of thinly sliced onions, the younger the better (spring onions are ideal), with 250g (about three cups) of whole button mushrooms, and a good tablespoon each of chopped parsley and chopped French tarragon (it must be French, not Russian or winter tarragon – if you can’t get genuine Artemisia dracunculus ‘Sativa’, don’t bother with this dish).

When the onions are soft, stir in about three tablespoons of Dijon mustard, about half that of lemon juice and, if you like, a cup of cream – I leave this out, not being fond of cream in savoury dishes, as I do the instruction to thicken the sauce with egg yolk before serving. Just add the mixture to the casserole and cook in a medium oven (170°C) for about 45 minutes. I’m assuming most people these days have a fan-forced oven, although frankly I think it makes no difference for casseroles and not all that much for roasts. Just take the stuff out when it is cooked. The essence of the dish is in the tarragon/mustard flavour, which, to my mind, restores the rabbit to its rightful place in the culinary hierarchy.

Before leaving the subject of rabbit, I should mention that at a food and wine gathering at the National Press Club in Canberra I was once served rabbit done in chocolate sauce. This weird concoction was presented as a famous Belgian dish. Perhaps this explains why Belgian restaurants are a rarity outside that country’s national borders.

There were certainly none in postwar Sydney, but then, in the forties eating patterns were firmly ingrained and generally predictable in the harbour city. Fish was seldom seen; I recall the odd meal of tinned salmon with white sauce but, apart from takeaway fish ’n’ chips, that was about it. Meat was the go, variously grilled, roasted or stewed, sometimes as a fricassee or a weak and yellowish lamb curry which was bulked out with raisins.

The staple vegetable was potato, or occasionally white rice; pasta was something that came out of a tin with tomato sauce and was served on toast. Vegetables were limited to peas, beans, cauliflower, carrots and cabbage, and sometimes an unappetising and unwanted serving of boiled spinach.

My mother went to boarding schools in Australia and England before returning to live in her parents’ house, where her ageing nurse had been transformed into the household cook. Thus when she married shortly before the war, she approached the kitchen with some trepidation. I best remember her sweets and desserts: chocolate fudge, Russian toffee, coconut ice, a fine banana custard and, in later years, a knockout chestnut cake. But apart from that her cooking was worthy but uninspired.

Breakfast was certainly hearty: perhaps some stewed fruit followed by a huge bowl of cereal (usually Corn Flakes or Weet Bix) with milk and sugar added to provide the nourishment lacking in the cereal itself; my chemistry teacher was fond of assuring his class that we would get more benefit from eating the cardboard packet than from the product it contained. Then there was the hot course, usually bacon and some form of eggs and often more meat – chops, sausages, steak or liver. And of course there was plenty of toast and jam.

Quite often a cold chop or sausage was included with the packed school lunch, which otherwise consisted of white bread sandwiches – egg, Vegemite, a slice of cheese with lettuce, tinned tuna, banana or even liver sausage, which would now be called pâté and considered a luxury. A separate piece of fruit was also included; it was seldom eaten, but was often useful as a missile. Once a week I was allowed to buy lunch at the school tuckshop: this invariably included a meat pie with sauce, a sausage roll with sauce, an apple pie with what was imaginatively described as cream, and a chocolate milkshake with extra flavouring.

Dinner was meat and three veg, followed by some form of dessert – usually stewed fruit or store-bought cake, unless my mother was in one of her rare creative moods.

Eating out wasn’t much better; when shopping for my school uniforms we inevitably lunched at one of the Cahill’s chain of restaurants. Typically my choice would be crumbed sausages followed by ice-cream cake and the caramel sauce for which the chain was justly famous. It was not quite ‘Fine food, graciously served’, as the advertising claimed, but it was adequate for the growing boy. About twice a year, as a special treat, we went out to dinner, usually to a ‘continental’ restaurant where I feasted on a prawn cocktail (imported frozen shrimp in a shocking pink mayonnaise) and steak diane (beef pounded to an amazing thinness and coated with a paste composed of equal parts of Worcestershire sauce and sour cream). No recipe for either dish appears in the following pages.

The pick of Sydney’s restaurants was Pruniers, which had as its signature dish ‘chicken in a basket’ – a roast capon presented in a basket ingeniously constructed of potato straws. On one memorable evening when we dined there, the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Doc Evatt, was at a distant table, addressing an audience visible only to himself while dismantling his basket and sticking the potato straws in his hair, something which I had previously imagined to be a figure of speech. I have never been able to face the dish since.

Towards the end of my school years I became one of a group of friends who would go out for dinner at weekends, ostensibly for a Chinese meal (sweet and sour pork made with carrots and tinned pineapple) but really to smoke cigarettes stolen from our parents. I remember neither experience with great pleasure. Essentially, I was a red meat child.

Like it or not, red meat is the basis of the Australian diet. Steak and chops for breakfast, a couple of meat pies for lunch, a roast and three veg for dinner. The great Sam Kekovich probably took it a shade too far (‘Not eating lamb is un-Australian – you know it makes sense’) but we are not, and never have been, a nation of vegetarians. Even in these semi-enlightened times, red meat is still the centrepiece on most Australian dinner plates probably four or five nights a week, even if it is cooked with a bit more imagination.

And let’s be fair dinkum about it: there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the vegies also get a decent look-in. And actually they can wait: my granddaughter resolutely refused to touch anything green until she was nearly six years old, and even then limited her experimentation to peas and broccoli. But she did, and does, eat plenty of fruit, pasta and cereal, and shows no signs of dietary deficiency.

One thing about meat is that it can be easy and convenient; for the ordinary home cook, bunging a couple of chops or a piece of steak under the griller and boiling a few spuds and whatever greens are lying around is the simplest way to a pretty good and well-balanced feed. And with the addition of a bit of seasoning, even the humble roasts of my childhood can be made highly appetising.

A chunk of beef (blade or topside) or, more expensively, a leg of lamb, studded with garlic and perhaps a herb (rosemary is always good), can be roasted with potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin or carrots and perhaps some small onions and extra cloves of garlic to provide a suburban feast – just add steamed greens and a bottle of red. Or the meat can be braised; first browned in oil and then cooked slowly until very tender in a covered casserole dish on a bed of chopped vegetables – typically onions, carrots and celery – flavoured with herbs and garlic, and some wine and stock. The result is invariably tender and delicious – a leg of lamb done thus is particularly good.

And for something completely different, here is a Mediterranean twist on the Sunday roast – ideal for a special summer dish. I serve it with potatoes cut into 5cm chunks and roasted separately in olive oil with a few sage leaves, and some kind of ratatouille – onion, garlic, eggplant, capsicum, zucchini and tomatoes stewed together in oil with fresh herbs, some paprika and perhaps a touch of chilli, or, if I’m in a hurry or feeling lazy, just the onion and garlic with a tin of diced tomatoes and some sliced zucchini. After a few pre-dinner beers your guests will not notice the difference.

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Reviews for Eat My Words

[anne_green-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Described as "A memoir of Politics, Pig-outs and Pickles", this book is written by Mungo MacCallum, an Australian political journalist with a reputation for wit and controversial comment. The book is a food-related series of remembrances of things past, which includes quite a lot of recipes and very little politics. For that reason I was disappointed as I'd hoped for a few more expose type anecdotes about political pigouts. Also I didn't particularly like the consistently ultra blokey (and occasionally sexist) tone in which it was written and the constant instructions to "grab" this, or "hurl" that or "chuck" some of something else became a bit tedious after a while.Very light reading ..