I came across the gorgeous blog of Melbournienne Lucy Feagins.  She has done a great job blogging Gertrude St.  The beautiful photo of Amor y Locura above is hers.  I find so few blogs that I really want to read these days, but this is one of them. It’s so what blogs should be like: journalism without the corruption.  And with good photos.  Good blogs need good photos.  Free and ad-free.  But hers even boasts hand-drawn maps to die for.

Apart from Gertrude St, it has much of interest to whatever remains of Abbotsford Blog’s readership after its sad neglect by me.  For example, her posts on:

• Abbotsford’s Yello Diva (how to explain: just click on the link);
• Gertrude St’s Cottage Industries;
• the Gertrude St florist Mr Lincoln (move over Vasette);
• Abbotsford’s Mondo Trasho; and
• Abbotsford’s Studio Hacienda.

But then just about everything else is likely to be of interest.

Meanwhile, The Age has written another story about The Terminus.  The Age likes The Terminus.  I like The Age and The Terminus. This time it’s the Terminus’s bingo night — Wednesday — which gets a rap.  Other posts about The Terminus are here.

I had known of it for a long time but the premises had such an unhappy past (Ruby Red) that historical prejudice had blinkered me, for years. They’re open for lunch on weekdays, for dinner from 5.30 p.m. Monday to Saturday and they have a tiny beer garden and a happy hour, and a bottle shop, open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Their gnocchi al ragu, at $13.50 for a perfectly filling entree size, was bloody fantastic, and a $16.50 entree sized linguini marinara was equally good. I was delighted when they bought me a glass of champagne when I asked for a Cooper’s Sparkling and then invited me to drink the error on the house, promptly bringing me a bottle of — oh well, I said — Cooper’s Pale.  There’s something not-quite-there-yet about the place: weird location, unhappy past not-quite-yet-erased, no bread on the table, too much space, and slightly amateur waiters, but the food is really good, the ambience pleasant, the prices good value, and they are prepared to deliver for just $2.50. Despite the size, the place was almost so busy on a Friday night that we could not get in without a booking at 7 p.m., and people were enjoying themselves.

The Yak Speakeasy has closed and I never got round to going there. Bars can be like that in Melbourne. But I met the new owner, Michelle, who’s going to preserve the place as an accoustic and country somethingorother venue, adding food. It opens in either a week or a fortnight. Meanwhile, I was pleased to take this photograph of some palm trees, full of the beer of the month from Piedmonte which accompanied my Badabing at Ladro after a bout at the Elm Family Hotel on Spring St — what a find, more anon — with my friend with the initials ABC. He is a departmental mandarin who the other day sent me on Her Majesty’s post a xerox of a little essay by Luis Bunuel about his favourite bars. Expecting twins, his account of our adventures will be published on Monday, providing it gets through the legals.

Yesterday my curiosity about this place prompted me to detour from my otherwise rigidly fixed route to work on my bike, in my suit. It doesn’t exactly leap out at you when driving past as the missing breakfastry of Abbotsford, and even after peering through this window last Sunday when it was closed, its true nature did not reveal itself, but Bomb Cafe & Bar, as I have discovered it is known (229 Johnston St, not far from the corner of Hoddle St, 9486 0699) is a great spot. Like so many long thin places on Johnston St, a small front section gives onto a middle room and then a magnificent back yard graced by a large peppercorn tree. The hot breakfast menu looked promising, the people behind the coffee machines engaging, but I had a pastry with custard and raspberries with my coffee. Steak, red wine, and salad followed by cheese and walnuts at Vue de Monde didn’t really help at lunch.

Nor did beers after work at Ilk Bar. A trip to Jim’s Greek Tavern did not eventuate when we discovered that pizza could be ordered and delivered to the skanky back courtyard where we were enjoying the unseasonably warm evening. Undoubtedly the other option, the local Thai restaurant, would have been better, because Fresca’s pizzas aren’t up to much, particularly when compared with their substantial cost.

I turned up at Ilk Bar at 6 p.m., definitely not a cool thing to do, and it did not start filling up until about 9. They don’t take plastic. One of the three owners is a florist. There was a most retro flower arrangement sitting on the bar. I said I wanted a beer. The man started reeling off the choices. Helpfully, I asked whether the beers that were available might be the ones displayed behind him. Somewhat hesitantly, he said, yes, except for the Asahi. I asked for a Peroni. It was hot and bright outside, but dim dim dim inside. He got out his little torch and peered into the depths of the fridges for a while. I said I would have a Coopers. He told me that Ilk Bar had changed hands amongst friends. It was not quite what I expected. I had only poked my head in before, but the bling had definitely been there. There were film nights. Now there are plans to revive the film nights. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe a bad thing. At least you can hear yourself speak now. Apparently a lot of people have parties there.

After a few hours of listening to music like popped up gymnopedies and drinking Coopers we wandered along Johnston St, ending up at Kooshi where we sat in the front window, though we could have sat in the middle or back room, or in the long thin back yard which is a pleasant place to have breakfast on the weekend. It’s a diverse and good place, the third long thin Johnston St establishment with an inviting back yard I visited yesterday, equally at home serving breakfasts, doing dinners off a small menu (I had a great meal there last time) and being a bar late at night.

We passed the Bendigo Hotel and in the interests of investigative journalism, I poked my head in. There were lots of Greeks, and Greek music up on the stage. It is a phenomenon every Friday night. It was quite a surprise.

Books for Cooks is a beautiful double-fronted Gertrude St shop full of 15,000 cook books and books about food and wine more generally. Its proprietor Tim White spent a decade at what is generally regarded as Melbourne’s leading law firm, Mallesons, and is not the most ebullient shopkeeper in the world, but his and his wife Alison Schulze’s labour of love is undoubtedly our gain. They have a newsletter which you can sign up for at the website, and their bookmarks are useful for having metric-imperial conversions set out in a fashion helpful for consultation mid-recipe. They’re open 7 days, 10-6 p.m. (11-5 Sundays) and their number’s 8415 1415.

Here’s an interesting Age article about the Australian cookbook publishing market.

I bought a translation of Nikko Amandonico’s La Pizza; The True Story from Naples and learnt that the two truly authentic Neapolitan pizze are the marinara and the margherita, but marinara has no seafood at all. Elsewhere in Italy, the marinara is often called Napoletana. It owes its name to “the times when fishermen, after a night at sea, would stop off at the bakery and, extremely hungry but in a hurry to get home, would ask for a pizza that was light and quick” — tomato, garlic, oregano, and oil.
The story of the margherita is that it was born on 11 June 1889. The Queen, briefly down in the uncouth South for a stay in the palace down there tired of the over-elaborate French-style recipes that the court chef cooked, and expressed “a wish to taste a local speciality about which she had probably heard some lady-in-waiting or domestic staff raving” and summoned Don Raffaele Esposito. With his wife, he progressed to the palace by donkey and cooked up three pizze, one with small whitebait-like fish, one with olive oil and cheese, and one with tomato, mozzarella and basil.  The Queen liked the last and the story now goes that he told her he had invented it for her, combining the three colours of the Italian flag, and that it should be known as pizza Margherita, much as Escoffier devised Peach Melba for Dame Nellie, presenting it to her in an ice sculpture of a swan. Pizzologists tell us though that the recipe was printed years earlier.  The Queen’s letter is framed on the wall at Pizzeria Brandi.  The bourgeoisie then got in on the act and the modern pizza phenomonem was born. Till then, certain monarchs had eaten pizza incognito, but the beourgeoisie had thumbed their noses at it, the first take-away food, and the first fast food delivery in history (or so Nikko Amandonico claims; I wonder whether Bombay’s tiffin box system was not then well in existence).  Originally, pizza salesmen wrapped cloth into a doughnut shape on their heads and walked around with a metal box on top containing shelves of cooked pizze which they would sell when they found a buyer, unfurling the little fold-up table they also carried. The punters would chomp it hot and runny with their hands, folded in half. Then punters started turning up at the pizza kitchens, and chairs, then tables, then cutlery followed from the start of the 19th century.

Naples as the birthplace of pizza relies on the combination of the doughy baked disc common to many ancient cuisines with the tomato.
Recipe for pizza margherita: 25g fresh yeast, 250 ml lukewwarm water, 400g unbleached strong plain flour, 1 tsp salt. Dissolve the yeast in 25 ml water. Add 2 tblsp flour. Mix to a smooth paste. Leave to rise under a cloth for 30 minutes. Make a crater with abobut 350g of the flour, with as deep a hole as possible in the middle. Pour the yeast liquid, salt and th rest of the water into the hole. Work the ingredients together carefully with well-floured hands.  Knead continuously for about 10 minutes.  When the dough is elastic, form it into a loaf and then cut it into 4 pieces of the same size.  Form the pieces into balls and leave them to rise under a cloth for about 2 hours or until they have doubled in size.  Use one ball for one pizza.  Kenad for a couple of minutes.  Press out and flatten the dough with the palm of your hand into a thin, round circle.  Use a rolling pin to make it really thin.  Finally, press with your knuckles about 2 cm inside the edge to make the raise edge. Then take 200 g of one of * cherry tomatoes, halved * san marzano tomatoes (pictured) cut lengthwise into 5 mm clices * whole canned tomatoes and in every case crushed by hand to get rid of their juices, and drained thoroughly in a collander.  Then spread the tomatoes evenly over the dought leaving the 2cm raised edge alone. Spread a clove of garlic, thinly sliced, and sprinkle 1 tsp dried oregano over the lot. Sprinkle generously with about 2 tbsp olive oil and season with salt before baking at 275 degrees Celsius for 10-12 minutes (or if, as is likely, your oven will only go up to 240 degrees, after pre-heating for half an hour, for 15-20 minutes) on a pizza stone or an unglazed terracotta tile.  The trick then is to eat it as soon as it is out of the oven.