Cookbooks and travel journals give a taste of things to come
Longing to travel? Here’s a couple of ways to feed the flame for future adventures.
With so many of us in lockdown as I write, we are having to find inventive ways to travel. I’m not talking about sneaking into Victoria by swimming across the Murray River in the dead of night. We’re being more imaginative than that. This is travel of the mind and, for me at least, of the tastebuds. My transports of delight are taking place in the kitchen.
In recent weeks I’ve been to France courtesy of a creamy pot of coq au vin and a bottle of Cotes du Rhone (while watching the Wallabies play Les Tricolores). I’ve tootled off to South Korea for fried chicken with entertaining YouTube chef Maangchi (who filmed that particular instalment of her cooking class in a snowy New York). I enjoyed a little side trip to India with a paneer curry (thank you Madhur Jaffrey). And as Australia took to the Olympic pool in Tokyo, I flew the green and gold, albeit with a cross-cultural twist. My homemade fettuccine, the creation of which was an Olympic event in itself, was slathered in a sensational pesto of native ingredients such as warrigal greens and saltbush by NSW Indigenous caterers Mirritya Mundya.
There’s been a bit of time-travelling too. I discovered, in a dusty box in the garage, old travel journals dating back to the 1990s. They took me to a period when every overseas trip made us feel truly intrepid. There was no internet to provide a full preview of what we might see and do; sometimes we just had to wing it.
One diary zoomed me all the way to Indonesia’s Togian Islands, where I sipped sunset beers on a remote village jetty, snorkelled until I was waterlogged and feasted on freshly caught crayfish for dinner. There were arduous treks in central Sulawesi, rickety rope bridges over roaring rivers, pig hunters armed with spears, bus rides from hell and toilets that were worse.
From Sulawesi’s Bada Valley, famous for its carved granite megaliths, I hurtled across the tussocks of a grassy runway in a pint-sized six-seater Cessna before soaring over the jungle. In the pocket of the seat in front of me was a safety card that advised us to “relax and rest after a crash”.
In my diary from Vietnam, I tried to interpret highway etiquette on a hair-raising tour of the Mekong Delta. Two little toots of the horn apparently indicated the desire to overtake; a full-blown blast and the frenetic flashing of lights meant death had just been narrowly cheated. I wrote: “All of the above is conducted without any change in facial expression, gesticulating, swearing etc. The only time you’re aware of a driver’s concern is when they utter a gentle ‘phew’.”
Now, where can I find a good recipe for pho bo?