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    You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food
    You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food
    You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food
    Ebook155 pages1 hour

    You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food

    By Kari O'Gorman

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    About this ebook

    This book is your intimate dining experience with award-winning Australian writers. Taste Tim Tams in Thailand, catch a meal from a window in Cyprus, discover delicate differences in a large family, learn how to wrap bakcang, discover why broken biscuits are so addictive, and how to plan your lunch outing at a wake. But most of all, learn why 'the language of love should always be food'.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKari O'Gorman
    Release dateJun 20, 2015
    You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food

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      Book preview

      You'll Eat Worse Than That Before You Die- An Anthology of Family, Friendship and Food - Kari O'Gorman

      Little Birds

      by Karen Manwaring

      He says you don’t have to eat them, Angela translates her Uncle Dimitri’s words for me.

      I am squeezed between her teenage cousin Ari and her Aunty Fotini, doing my best to make conversation despite their limited English and my even more limited Greek. It is our second day in Cyprus, and the extended family is gathered around this table to welcome us. Every female relative has cooked her speciality in our honour, and the table can barely hold the dishes of oven-baked lamb, stuffed tomatoes and onions, taro chips, pasta bake, and salads. Theo Dimitri has had the spit turning under the fig tree since early morning, so there is an enormous plate of pork and chicken, charred and smoky from the souvla.

      The plate passes down from Theo Dimitri at the head of the table, from hand to hand until it reaches Thea Fotini beside me. She balances its heaviness so that I will be able to serve myself. The plate has come to me first, as I am both a guest and a stranger. I am being welcomed but also tested.

      Here, her eyes are saying, eat these. They are our traditional food. They are our history. We prepared them with our hands.

      The gleaming bodies are quite beautiful. Heaped on an old, china plate, they are a Gothic still life of tiny wings, legs, breasts and necks. It is the heads though, like the shiny, bald domes of beggars or holy men that I cannot stop looking at. The empty eye sockets gape like caves. The beaks seem enormous now that flesh and feathers are gone and they remind me of the masks of some fantastical ballet chorus.

      I take hold of the serving tongs and feel the conversation around the table quieten. The windows of the house are all open on this baking-hot day, and the heat is intensified by the food, the closely pressed bodies of the family, and the concrete courtyard outside the window. The sky is white and taut, holding its breath.

      Theo Dimitri, the hair of his moustache and chest white against his brown skin, sits at the top of the table. As I hold the tongs above the plate, I catch his eye and he looks down at his napkin, folding it in half and then in half again. I understand that he does not want to influence me. That alone, from such a man, is as powerful as if he were imploring me to eat them. I know that my accepting this dish will be like my joining him in a handshake or a glass of his fiery Tsiporo.

      Maybe they think that I would not want to eat something so wild, just as I would perhaps not eat the white snails they gather from the shrubs down near the beach or the rabbits from their backyard cages. I think of my life back in Melbourne where I avoid battery-farmed meat or endangered fish; where I feel dismay at news reports of whaling and duck shooting.

      Maybe they suspect that I am an environmentalist who judges them and their way of trapping this delicacy. They might think that I see this issue as a battle. Later, I will hear about conservationists trespassing onto farms and ripping away the glue-covered twigs from the trees. Theo Dimitri often finds bunches of these twigs, crushed into the ground in his orchard.

      __________________________

      The evening before this dinner, I stood at the sink and looked out of Thea Anna’s kitchen window at the dark red soil of her fruit and vegetable garden. I had arrived from Australia just hours before and had never visited a place that felt so foreign. The streetscape beyond looked Middle-Eastern to my eyes, with its flat-roofed concrete buildings, date palms, and bougainvilleas.

      Thea Anna was to become my oasis of English conversation while I was in Cyprus. When she was in her twenties, she had married Freddie, a Jamaican man who took her home with him and then to England to raise their family. A few years before he died, they came back to live in Cyprus. I could hear the echoes of all these places in her accent as she brought me up to date with generations of family history. She told me stories of her early confusion and frustration as a migrant and the pride she took in twenty years of work in a chocolate factory in Birmingham. That factory still sent her Christmas cards every year.

      Thea Anna went outside of tradition in her choice of partner, but still remained accepted in her Cypriot family, just as Angela had done by choosing me.

      I had brought a thick book to read in Cyprus, thinking that I would sit in the background while Angela and her mother caught up with family. I had made a pact with myself that I would not be offended by the coolness or judgement of the aunties and uncles. I would go on this trip for Angela and her mother.

      When Thea Anna, her daughter, and her teenage grandson picked us up from the airport, I had held back from all the kissing and hugging.

      Hello darling. Thea Anna had said as she drew me into her arms. Come on, are you tired? Are you hungry? Let’s go home.

      The next morning, I watered Thea’s beloved pot plants, puzzled with her over why her cumquat tree was failing to thrive, and discussed the difficulty of gardening in a climate where rain is so rare. I fed her semi-wild cat and learned to set the table the way she liked it on her covered verandah, where three generations of the family would arrive early every day to have breakfast together in the cool of the morning.

      Thea Anna made me comfortable enough to go to her kitchen and bring out sourdough bread, dried haloumi cheese, cucumber, tomatoes, olives and boiled eggs. I did all this as she carefully made the stovetop coffee in the long handled ‘briki’. She said her coffee was so good because she stirred it with a thin mulberry stick that Theo Dimitri had whittled for her.

      Thea also instructed me, whenever I was at the kitchen window, to watch the small trees in her garden for any sign of movement.

      There, I had said on that first morning, when I’d seen the leaves in the middle of the tree shaking. There Thea, in the second tree.

      Yes? Good girl.

      She had rushed out and gently extricated the feet of the tiny bird from the glue-covered branch of the tree. Bringing it into the kitchen, cupped in one hand, she’d stroked its head tenderly.

      There, there, my beauty, she’d said, half-turning her back to me and, leaning over the sink, had taken its throat out with the toothpick she kept in the pocket of her apron. Within minutes, she had bled and plucked the bird and placed it in the freezer.

      That’s eight now, she’d said. With Dimitri’s as well, we will have a good meal tomorrow.

      __________________________

      Now as we all sit around the table, it is clear to me that the meal is more than a good one – it is a feast. Only at Christmas or Easter, Angela tells me, would anything like it be repeated. Theo Dimitri and Thea Anna have caught enough of the little birds to make the three dishes that have elevated this meal to a celebration. One is an omelette of wild asparagus, peas and dill with the halved birds tossed through. The second is a platter of whole little birds, grilled above the charcoal of Theo’s souvla until they are golden and their skin almost crisp.

      The last is this heaped plate, the bodies boiled and glistening in their own fat. It is this that is being offered to me now.

      I pick up a bird with the tongs and put it on my plate. It looks like a tiny quail. I wonder if it might be the one that I pointed out to Thea Anna yesterday and I remember the brightness of its eye as she held it in her hand, its delicate feathers and fine claws. I remember too, the swiftness of Thea’s sure hands as she killed and plucked it and the care she took as she placed it with the

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