An Interview With My Grandmother

 

Peering from the other side of a skype call, what seems like a million miles away from where I was sitting in my four bedroom apartment, the afternoon sun beating down upon my window with the morning rays pour into the windows surrounding my grandmothers four bedroom small brick house. The time difference notwithstanding, she greets me with the same cheerfulness like I had just pulled my car into her driveway.

 

My Grandmother Barbara Bradley, has always been the best cook in my family. Since the death of my grandfather twelve years prior, she has always been the one to make the roast for every family gathering and desert’s to satisfy even the most sweet toothed individual. Even when not asked to, she never goes to someone’s house without first baking or cooking a dish. When asking her to do this interview, she worried that her secret recipes would be taken. After spending a solid ten minutes assuring her that this would not be the case, the interview began.

 

She began with a story about her childhood and her helping her mother with the cooking around the house. “More salt she used to say, this needs more salt,” she remarks saying that everything that her mother would make required just a touch more salt than what could be considered necessary. Whether it be for a roast lamb, pork, chicken, everything required just a bit more salt. She attests this as a main reason for having high blood pressure in her later life something for which I equally blame her for my own high blood pressure. She recalls these times with her mother as instilling in her a love for cooking, not because she had to, but because they were the times that her and her mother truly bonded.

 

When asking her what she meant about this, my grandmother replied that these meals were meals that her mother had cooked with her mother and so on and so forth. “There is always a difference between the food cooked in Australia and the food cooked in other countries, like England or Germany.” To frame this, my great-great grandmother was English, coming over to Australia from England in the mid 19^th century, booking passage on one of the boats that brought new citizens out to the colony. “They use everything they could when cooking,” she continues. “If there is some ginger in the cupboard, they would use that ginger. If there is mustard, they would use that mustard. They used everything they could because the alternative was spending money on things that you didn’t really need.” In the times following the Great Depression, my great grandmother had to use every scrap she could to make ends meet, including in the pantry. I remember a time when we werr having one of my grandmothers famous deserts: sticky date pudding. Making my way through the happiness in pudding form that layered the bottom of my bowl, I found a raspberry. Looking up at her, all she could say was that was what she had in the pantry and that if she didn’t use it now, it would go unused for a bit longer. That and she thought that I could use a little fruit in the pudding I was so veraciously consuming.

 

“I had to feed a husband, three boys and a girl who ate more than the rest of them. I needed a lot of food,” my grandmother said, telling me story of the food she used to make for her family. “Most of the food was gone within seconds when the family sat down,” she said, laughing as she recalled those instances. I asked her what her day was like when she cooked for her family during those times. She replied that being a stay at home mum, after the kids had gone to school, she would walk down to the local shops where a butcher and a grocery sat next to each other. She would get the fresh meat for that day, whether that lamb, pork, chicken and on occasion beef if it wasn’t too expensive. Along with a small amount of vegetables from the grocery, this allowed her to cook a relatively large home-cooked meal that fed everyone. She recalled that when the butcher and the grocery closed down, she had to drive to the local supermarket and swears that the meat just wasn’t as good and the vegetables weren’t nearly as fresh. What stayed the same however, was the love that she put into those meals. And she still used a lot of salt.

 

My grandmother continued her stories, telling me about the Christmas lunches and dinners she has with the whole family, and how the food is prepared for several days in advance. I remember driving with her down to the fish market in the middle of Sydney one December, hundreds of people lining the walls of an oversized warehouse as they searched for the fresh seafood that all of them would eat in the next few days. She only wanted to get a couple of kilograms of prawns, perhaps only one or two. In the end we walked away with seven kilograms of prawns as I reminded her that the five kilograms from the last Christmas lunch had been eaten by my extended family in less than 20 minutes. In those days leading up to Christmas, she lived in the kitchen, baking deserts that would appeal to the senses and feed the horde that was my family.

 

It’s dark as I finish the interview. I didn’t have the light on so my grandmother asks me to turn on the light because she says that she is getting older and her eyes don’t work like they used to. I ask her what she is doing for the rest of the day in that small four bedroom brick house and if it was anything fun like some of the stories she told me during our talk. She smiles at me, says she actually has to go because she is baking a desert because she is going to see my family tonight.