A while ago I was sent the re-issued Moro cookbooks, which have come in handy lately, as I’m in the midst of developing a signature salad. I know, it’s not going to change the world. But it’s important to me. I’m back in Oz, you see, and when you attend a barbecue here (which is definitely more than once a year) it’s good manners to bring a salad.
But it seems that barbecues have moved on quite a bit since I was here as a twenty-something, when you would see people rocking up with two cling-filmed sausages in their top pocket, and salad was iceberg with a few cherry tomatoes on top. There’s been a mining boom, so at an average barbecue now you’ll see a spa on the deck, boutique ales in the outdoor kitchen fridge, fillets of beef on the barbecue and signature salads on the table.
Unfortunately, I pretty much missed the entire boom. So we’re house-hunting with some pretty savage filters on our search engine and so far all we’ve come up with are a couple of deceased estates, both so decrepit you wonder how anyone lives in them (and then remember that they don’t, anymore). A deceased estate has a terrible stillness. Ceilings so yellow with cigarette smoke they look varnished. Fake roses on the kitchen table. A single, bone-dry towel hanging on the backyard clothesline.
The one today reminded me of the Larkin poem:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Anway, what can you do? Except develop a signature salad and keep breathing. I have had very positive results from the Chickpea salad on page 246 of Moro The Cookbook, until I found out that the chickpea is already spoken for, so to speak. I’m now contemplating a parsnip coleslaw. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
