It all started with fish fingers and some microwave custard

After cooking her way through childhood, school and university Bridget Cormack has found a love who shares her passion.

Bridget Cormack as a young girl growing up in Adelaide, where she discovered the joy of cooking with her Nana.

Bridget Cormack

@bridgetcormack

4 min read

12:00AMDecember 31, 2022.

Updated 7:02AMJanuary 01, 2023

Nana Netter picks up the tel-E-phone and clears her throat, greeting the caller with a high-pitched “hell-oooh”. This is her phone voice. It is different from her home voice, the one she uses to say “bloody hell” when she accidentally steps in dog do.

Nana Netter teaches me how to say the vowels “A”, “E”, “I”, “O”, “U” – pronounced “yee-ooo-w”, with her eyebrows raised. With the panache of the late Queen Elizabeth II, she often wears a fuchsia suit, with which she co-ordinates her heels, bag and a scarf tied wispily around her neck. But she is wearing flats on her regular 2km walk to Adelaide’s Brighton Jetty via the library on the day when an elderly gentleman sidles up next to her on his scooter.

“Would you like to put your books in my basket?” he says, his wheels coming to an even slower crawl.

Nana, who has lived alone for almost four decades, is 84 and fighting fit. Yes, she says, my books are so very heavy and I would love you to carry them.

For a few years Nana and John are inseparable; until the old man passes away.

When love shows up, Nana shows me, you need to let it in.

What Nana doesn’t teach me is how to make magic in the kitchen.

“Mother never taught me how to cook,” she says as she fries fish fingers in her tiny apartment.

Divorcing her first husband, a wealthy man, who died not long after they separated, meant also divorcing the seamstress, cleaner and cook at their stately home on Victoria Ave.

When she married my grandfather, a barrister, she also had a housekeeper. But that marriage didn’t last either.

By the time I am born, Nana is living in a one-bedroom unit with wardrobes overflowing with hat boxes and furs, and a modest kitchen in which she prepares food mostly from the freezer or tins or made by somebody else altogether. According to legend, her signature dish is lamb casserole. I never taste it.

Bridget Cormack with Nana in fushcia.

Cooking – my first love – is a matter of necessity as well as passion for an only child whose parents separated when I was a baby. My mother worked hard as a nurse to put food on the table, and when she was doing odd hours I was cared for by my Nana or my aunty. Mum says I learned how to cook custard in the microwave when I was four.

What I recall is cooking dinner for Nana who is humming Edelweiss over my shoulder as I whisk eggs, melted butter and milk to pour into a nest of flour.

The rich smell of cooked batter infuses the kitchen, with its lemony walls and brown linoleum, Nana laying out strawberry jam and honey on the table. Pancakes for dinner aren’t a problem when I’m in charge.

Buoyed by Nana’s enthusiasm for everything I make, I start cooking T-bone steaks from Dad’s butcher’s shop, rubbing them down with garlic, salt and pepper just as I see my father do on weekends.

Mum teaches me how to make ginger beer; one day the bottle explodes. The edges of my kids cookbook become tattered as I master omelettes, cupcakes and pizza pockets.

In high school I regularly invite my friends over for dinner; we eat roast vegetable stack with crumbled feta and basil pesto, plotting weekend drives on our P-plates to Victor Harbor where we wait in the Maccas car park for word of a local party. Listening to the raucous laughter coming from the dining room, I wonder if this is what a big family sounds like.

Cooking means cash when I go to law school. There is the takeaway shop Spag-in-a-Box with the gigantic pots of tomato sauce simmering on the stove tucked behind the counter. Too short to stir the pot without a step, I peer over the rim at amused customers entering the shop.

At Dad’s butcher’s shop I stuff chicken breasts with garlic and butter, drop them in flour, egg and crumbs and do it again. And again. And again.

My best cooking job is at a little seaside cafe in Brighton, the same suburb where Nana met her love. A former fashion designer from Sydney has moved back to Adelaide to turn his parents’ corner deli into a cafe. He takes a punt on me as a cook and before law school every day I don my apron to make salads, bakes and tuna cakes for the display cabinet. It is the noughties and we serve fresh and wholesome cafe fare in retro digs to the sounds of the Cure.

Poring over Delicious and Gourmet Traveller magazines, I agonise about whether to drop out at the end of my third year of university because I love experimenting in the kitchen more than corporate law. The allure of an overseas exchange leads me to finish the degree, which eventually leads to journalism, a wonderful career that favours my varied interests. Cooking is returned to an expression of love.

About 10 years later I am invited over for dinner by a gorgeous man I meet on a dating app after a brave few years trying to find love online.

I arrive at his apartment in Sydney’s inner west. With a tea towel slung over his shoulder, he is busy whizzing something in a tiny blender in the kitchen. He emerges with a piece of swordfish resting on a delicate smear of pear and beetroot puree, edges of the white plate wiped clean.

I recall how on an earlier date I had proclaimed, red in hand: “You’ll never find a woman who can cook as well as me. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

It turns out this man has worked for a couple of decades as a chef, sharpening his knives at some of Sydney’s finer establishments including a stint at Quay.

Now I am learning the joy of being cooked for. As of a couple of weeks ago, that chef is my fiance.

Bridget Cormack is the deputy editor of Review.

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It all started with fish fingers and some microwave custard

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