It started, as all good dinner conversations do, with a throwaway comment by my companion about a curious dish her mother used to prepare.
“She used to take tinned mandarins.” She paused for dramatic effect. And then, with rising excitement, I finished her sentence.
“And mix them with sour cream?! I know it! I lived it! I ate it! My mother used to do it too!”
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Much hilarity ensued as we dissected the dish. Was it a dessert or was it savoury? Was it served with main course or coffee? Who came up with it? And why would you ever tin a mandarin in the first place?
One of the many interesting things about having been a child of the 70s and 80s in Australia is that the culinary scene was, (how to put this diplomatically?), a little less evolved than it is today.
Kids these days think nothing of popping down the road for a takeaway Thai, sitting down to a tagine or tucking into some sushi. They know their jus from their coulis and, raised on a steady TV diet of Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules, most of them can whip up a dish to make Heston Blumenthal blush.
Back in my day, however, at my childhood dining table, spaghetti Bolognese was considered exotic. In a gastronomic landscape where meat-and-three-veg ruled supreme and Keen’s Curry Powder (a substance that had no business calling itself a curry) was occasionally added to mince and cabbage to really push out the culinary boat, our palates were far less well-travelled than those of the kids today.
Which is not to take away from the job my mother — or any of her peers — did of raising us. We were all fed three meals a day. We were clothed, schooled and each night we enjoyed the privilege of going to sleep with a roof over our heads.
My parents were providers, pure and simple — and they showered us with love and attention. No-one appreciates more the sacrifices my folks made in rearing us than me.
I am truly, humbly indebted to my mother for the lifetime of support she has shown me and that she now lavishes on my children.
But even she has to admit some of the standards that emerged from her kitchen were odd in the extreme.
I told her the other day that her mandarin-and-sour-cream confection was the subject of dinner conversation and she seemed perplexed. She saw nothing even remotely odd about the combination.
“It was a great hit, actually,” she informed me. “And even more so when you added pineapple, grapes and desiccated coconut. Ambrosia Salad it was called. And it was very popular.”
And why wouldn’t it have been?
Of course, it will be Mum who will eventually have the last laugh when she is in her dotage and my kids are older and sneering at how embarrassingly retro and un-cosmopolitan the slow-cooked lamb shoulder and Mediterranean couscous that my wife and I offer up for dinner is. It will only be karma settling an old score.
And so, let me use this space to pitch an idea to the makers of Masterchef. Dispense with all this lah-di-dah fancy food.
Put your snow eggs and your crab and fennel salads with roast garlic créme fraiche back in the blast freezer, and open up a few dusty cook books from the 70s.
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I’m thinking ‘Masterchef Mums’ — sixty something women from all over Australia delving into the recipe books in their glory boxes in a cook-off we can all relate. And remember you heard it here first…
Mrs Corbett’s ambrosia salad
INGREDIENTS
Tinned mandarins
Tinned pineapple
Fresh grapes
Desiccated coconut
Marshmallows
Sour cream
Parsley for garnishing
METHOD
Drain tinned mandarin and pineapple. Put into a large bowl.
Add grapes, coconut and sour cream. Stir.
Top with marshmallows and parsley for a garnish.
Bryce Corbett is The Weekly’s Associate Editor. Click here to follow him on Twitter and here to follow The Weekly.
Your say: Is there a recipe from your childhood you remember with particular fondness or revulsion?
Video: The Weekly’s Xanthe Roberts cooking her raspberry and custard tea cake
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