Sour Cream

Last night we watched our fav cooking programme on TV; The Cook and the Chef. Maggie Beer and Simon Bryant share a passion for food and cooking. Simon is the Chef, runs a restaurant and teams up with Maggie who calls herself the cook. It is a well balanced presentation of good tucker.

Last night one of the dishes served up contained sour cream. It immediately reminded me of Mrs Sabodka. Mrs Sabodka was a post war refugee to Australia and for some time lived as a boarder with our neighbor in Bicton. As I recall, she was a very flamboyant woman; spoke English with a heavy european accent and wore lots of jewellry and make-up. I must have been around 9 years of age when she tried to introduce our family to sour cream. Poo, yuck....thanks but no thanks my mother said...not to Mrs Sabodka of course. Mother used the more diplomatic 'Oh that's interesting' whenever she didn't like something.

The most exotic Australian cuisine at the time; around 1948, would have been battered sheep brains which mother tricked us kids into eating by calling them fish. We loved them too!

The neighbors who took Mrs Sabodka in were a strange lot. Miri the wife was a pre-hippie hippie who was married to Jack 'Deafy' Williams. Jack was what was then termed 'deaf and dumb'. He communicated with a pad and pencil punctuated by grunts. I recall that he a wonderful motorcycle, a water-cooled Velocette, which ran like a sewing machine. One evening he rang our doorbell and I opened the door to find Jack there with a horse nudging the screen door. He wrote that he had found the horse wandering and didn't know what to do with it. I cannot recall what my father said/wrote to him, but later we had a few laughs about that one.

I have searched in the White Pages for any Sabodkas without luck. I would love to find out her story. Was she a holocaust survivor? Where did she come from?

Of course I may have the spelling quite wrong. Some european languages do not sound as they are written.