I knew I loved food. Its preparation, its fragrances and sensations but I didn’t know how I loved it. As a child, I had been entranced by the exoticism of my Dutch grandparents’ cooking, the distinctly un-middle class Australian broth soups, liver sausage and my Opa’s hybridised recreations of Indonesian dishes he remembered from the Javanese war. They had served me hand-ground coffee with sugar syrup and Oma made pies with blackberries I picked. Even my hermit father slow-roasted kit (baby rabbit) stuffed with banana and cloves. I knew I loved the language of food, the mystery of creation and the breathtaking art of cuisine but with no sense of the culinary geography of foreign places, I was without language, mute, for I had no words to describe what I wanted.
At sixteen, my rural high school upset the natural balance of the not-so-egalitarian Australian education system by making it to the grand finals of ‘Mock Trial’, an academic competition in which senior students recreated the charged atmosphere of the court-room. Up until 1993, this competition had effectively been the sole province of Sydney’s well-heeled private schools, so it was more than a little outrageous that a group of country students were bettering their betters. The upshot was a rare spring of repeated trips to the metropolis. Sydney, a city where I would later apprentice as a chef, a city that would be an orgasmic cornucopia of Asian flavours, exquisite haute cuisine, flowing red wine and the discovery of Middle Eastern mezza or Spanish tapas. I was there in Sydney, the city that would one day open my heart to food; my true love, my enduring passion, my sin, my soul. Despite this, I cannot remember a single remarkable meal in all those trips. I was in the City of Flavour but I hadn’t taken a taste.
We lost Mock Trial. That’s to say we came second-place. The revolution had made it to the gates of traditional power and faltered on the steps. In a strange parallel, I had arrived at my epicurean destination and forgotten to take a bite, one that would have started a life’s pursuit of taste earlier. Defeated, both the team and I returned to our humble, country town origins. By way of consolation, our consultant barrister took the group of awkward and rambunctious teenagers to dinner at the finest restaurant in the town.
Until now, I hadn’t even heard the phrase haute cuisine, let alone experienced even a provincial version of it. The moment came to order and, in a precursor to adulthood, I was given the freedom to choose. And choose I did. Reef and Beef, known equally vulgarly as Surf and Turf - a prime cut of Australian rib eye with lightly boiled prawns and a Tartar-style sauce. It was incredibly arrogant of a teenager to order such a dish but that was not all, not quite.
The bemused waiter looked down at me and asked me how I would like the steak. Balancing at the tip of my cultural diving board, I didn’t even hesitate. Rich with inexperience and youthful exuberance, I told him I wanted it ‘bleu’.
The waiter’s grin widened. “Would you like it rare?” I smiled, almost manically. My love, until then unformed, was finding its first expression. I was leaping off that diving board. “No, I mean bleu.”
I cannot tell you where I had learned the word, perhaps I had an innate reverence for meat, a belief that a real steak must be eaten unburnt. The waiter returned and I raised my first forkful of that perfectly seared steak, glistening with red jus, dripping with the succulent prawn and the tang of sauce. As I tasted the blood, I was reborn. A flood of memories; freshly shucked oyster from a saltwater river, my first crab sweetly powdered, a raw chilli snatched from my grandparents counter, a bean of ecstasy and agony. At that point I knew, I truly knew I loved food. More importantly, I loved food as it truly should be.
