Cooking for Claudine by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter [John Baxter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780720265
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2015-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Alcohol permeated my childhood. My parents were far from heavy drinkers, but, like most Australians, they routinely socialised with their friends at the pub, leaving my brother and me to wait outside in the car, sometimes for hours. After a few such spells with nothing but the Austin A4 manual to read, I took to carrying a few books in the back seat. This inculcated a lifelong reading habit, so I should be grateful for their neglect, though my brother was less so. Years later, by then a bank manager, he found himself running a branch near one of our parents’ preferred watering holes. When the staff invited him for a beer after work, he suggested this pub.

“As a kid,” he explained, “I spent so much time outside the place, I’m curious to see the inside.”

When we were adolescents, getting drunk, and persuading a woman to do so as well, was the foundation of social success. Believing no woman would agree to sex while sober, Australian men overwhelmingly reposed their confidence in alcohol—even though, like cannabis (and, for that matter, Viagra), it had no sexually arousing effect at all. Quite the contrary: too much drink induced the humiliating state known as “brewer’s droop”.

When it came to seduction, a sizable faction favoured gin, but it was expensive and demanded complicated mixers. Chat-ups mainly took place at parties or the beach. Arriving at either with a bottle of Beefeater and a choice of tonic, ginger ale, or bitters (not to mention ice and slices of lime) was not only cumbersome but might be construed as excessively calculating.

This never worried me. I would cheerfully have carried all this equipment in the trunk of my car, and did sometimes turn up at parties with a couple of bottles of champagne on ice in the back seat, just in case. One reason I got on so well with the British novelist Kingsley Amis, when we met in London years later, was our shared respect for a well-mixed drink. Amis never went on a journey of any length without, according to his biographer, “what amounted to a cocktail cabinet; a large straw bag with handles, in which he packed bottles of tequila, gin, vodka and Campari, as well as fruit juices, lemons, tomato juice, cucumber juice, Tabasco, knives, a stirring spoon and glasses …”

Since women regarded beer as vulgar, the run-of-the-mill lubricant to Australian seduction was wine—for preference sweet, fizzy, and white, qualities women were believed to favour. In England, the market leader was Babycham, an “alcopop” made from pear juice, but Australians preferred Barossa Pearl.

As I had to thank Mr. Schindler in his delicatessen for introducing me to blue cheese, I owed a debt of gratitude to those vintners who produced Barossa Pearl. They closed the door definitively on the world of beer and opened another on the fascinating world of wine. Launched in 1954, this poor man’s champagne was the brainchild of German winemakers who fled Europe before World War II and settled in South Australia’s Barossa Valley.

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