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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 14. 1969.

Barthomew Felthers's Cooking

Barthomew Felthers's Cooking

As you follow these cookery notes I want you to focus away from recipes and keep making your own inferences about general principles.

Good cooking springs from a temper of mind and not from the memory of details in blueprints called "recipes". Those who persist in thinking about half a spoon of this, and so much of that, are doomed to remain timorous ritualists all their lives—as gastronomically illiterate as that legion of housewives who live in this country of good food but excel breathtakingly at turning it into pap.

Apprentices too dull to learn—get fired. But thousands of New Zealand housewives grow old in their kitchens and still cannot cook.

All they ever tried to do was imitate what Mum did or rote-copy weights and measures from a magazine like someone mixing concrete.

These minds were not directed to think about food, so naturally there was little hope of any inspired breakthroughs in their kitchens.

If you tip 30 cents worth of fish and chips out of a greasy newspaper, it's something to cat. If you place the same golden shark n' spuds on a suitable plate; douse it with a thick white lemon sauce, and decorate the pile with slivers of tomato (or something else with colour to it); you have a meal. You are beginning to act like a cook. We all know that food should taste good. But please remember—it helps things to taste good if they smell good and look good, too.

Taste, aroma, and appearance are the sheet anchors of sound cookery. Always bear this in mind because our national trend is to overlook the last two points.

To initiate yourself into the importance of aroma let's start at bedrock with salt and pepper. Get rid of factory-ground pepper in tins. Throw it out! Buy white or black peppercorns and crush them as need with a knife-handle on the table, or buy a peppermill.

Prepared pepper is like crumbling chalk— the aromatics have long evaporated. Freshlycrushed pepper sends up a delicious smell from its natural oils and will startle you with the difference it makes to your cooking.

The winter is coming on, and its time to make soups. But no matter how lazy you are, and if you never get past opening a can of tomato coup and lighting the gas—please start thinking instead of performing sonambulistic food rituals.

To begin with you have a mass-produced blend puree. Enhance it. Put some pepper in it. What about chopped parsley, mint, or green capsicums maybe. Experiment with adding body to it with left overs—perhaps there's mashed potato, sundry beans, corned beef, pumpkin, macaroni, peas, bean sprouts, garlic, various herbs?

Try to break away from culinary cliches and iron-clad combinations like: corned beef and carrots; roast lamb and mint sauce; macaroni and cheese.

Forget about traditional combinations and launch out following your senses, meanwhile reasoning eclectically

Roast lamb could be served with bean sprouts instead of peas, and mustard, horse-radish, or caper sauce could be used instead of mint. Does corned beef have to be married to carrots? There's thes whole greengrocer shop to browse through, if you think?

Here's a splendid soup compounded and dedicated to Victoria students.

Salamanca Red Soup, or Salamanca Salmon Borsch:

The famous Ukranian beef soups have regional variations. They contain meat stocks coloured red with heels or red cabbage, and are usually topped-off with a sour cream garnish. Discarding classicism and proceeding sensually, we combine Canadian pink salmon with beet stock, and garnish well with cottage or cream cheese, containing grated Eltham Blue Vein, mustard and lemon sauce. It suited my taste; but if blue vein is not to yours—use another cheese. Improvise!

Soup: 1 tin Sockeye salmon, a beet and two potatoes previously baked in oven, butter, blackpepper corns, salt, monosodium glutimate, sweet basil.

Garnish: Cottage or cream cheese, Coleman's mustard, grated Eltham blue vein cheese, chopped chives or parsley, lemon.

Prepare the garnish and set aside. Stir a small pinch of mustard into one part of grated cheese to three of cottage cheese meanwhile adding the chopped parsley to fleck the garnish. Add a few drops of lemon juice, too.

Soup: Pulverise two baked potatoes and the beet in a saucepan adding water and the entire contents of one tin of Canadian "Sock-eye" salmon.

Simmer slowly in water, stirring to a thick consistency, adding salt, two crushed black peppercorns, a little butter. A pinch of monosodium glutimate and sweet basil are added last.