Good Enough to Eat by Rita Erlich

Rita Erlich states that Good Enough to Eat is ‘a guide to some of the best foods in Melbourne’. It is that indeed and a very good one – and fun to read as well. But it has much more than a provincial value. Since Australian Book Review is a national journal, it is worth stressing that this book gives invaluable advice that is applicable anywhere – how to shop, what to look for, how to judge this or that purveyor, above all what questions shoppers should ask not only of the sellers but of themselves. Her approach to shopping for the best ingredients inevitably leads to comparatively small shops – a very good family butcher, a particular neighbourhood fish shop, the best market fruiterer, or one of the increasing number of good specialist food shops where ‘you will still find that magic combination of factors called service. For me,’ she writes, ‘service includes real care about the quality of the food sold, a willingness to provide special things, a knowledge of what is sold, and an interest in the customers.’ Miraculously, she has found quite an impressive number of shopkeepers who pass this test – ones who know their food, ones you can talk to about food (an opportunity not afforded the customer by supermarkets). Erlich is not happy with the way the local shopping centre has, at least partly, given way to the ‘massive shopping complexes (accessible only by car)’ – and neither am I. This is not only because of the absence in supermarkets, by and large, of anyone to talk to about food, even anyone who knows what the place has; it is also because in many respects the customer’s choice is limited. Superficially, of course, there’s a wide choice, but she is right: how often it is that, with meat for example, you cannot get the particular size or quantity you want. Indeed. When I want exactly 780 grams of blade or a single porterhouse cut extra thick I stick to Don Jago at Victoria Market or Andrews in Kew – both know me for a start (they happen to be two Erlich mentions favourably). Incidentally, she has specific objections to supermarket meat itself: that the ‘close plastic film wrapping makes meat a bit sweaty’, and that there is an ‘increasing presence of grain-fed beef, which is high-fat and low-flavour to my palate’. Of course, supermarkets could be improved with a more personal approach in providing fresh food – and they even do so in some instances. But many are a long way from anything like the friendliness of the local shop or the market stall, that conviviality that is the reverse of treating as the ‘enemy’ any customer who asks a question. Erlich rightly observes that ‘small greengrocers turn over their stock and are able to keep watch on it’. On the other hand, I hesitate to accept her remark about a recommended Box Hill fishmonger that ‘You can’t miss the place – it’s where the crowd is thickest’. It may be a very good shop indeed, but the vegetable stall at Victoria Market with the biggest crowd has the cheapest, not the best, carrots or what all. On a quite different point, she suggests that it is ‘not a good idea to go to a fish shop with a fixed idea of what you want … how do you know what you want to cook until you see what looks best?’ This is certainly a golden rule for fish, but she extends it to all food shopping, and that worries me a little. It may be true, within limits, of fruit and vegetables too, but with meat for example it implies an extraordinary ability to think, impromptu, of the other ingredients of an appropriate recipe. But perhaps I am quibbling – the need to be flexible in shopping is certainly important. Enough of general points. What does she say about Melbourne specifically? The book begins, ‘Melbourne is Food City. Australia as a whole feeds itself extremely well but Melbourne seems to do better than anywhere else.’ Well, that may offend local pride in other cities but – which one has produced a book like this? Erlich has visited (in most cases twice) all of these 150 establishments, a monumental achievement, especially since she visited many more that did not make the grade. I have no basis for commenti&shy;ng on many suburbs; by and large, I mainly know Carlton, Kew, and Victoria Market, but I find it hard to fault her in these - Canals in Carlton for fish, Andrews or Kopecky for meat in Kew, Natural Tucker Bakery, the impeccable Tennent’s (Collingwood) for poultry, Jago for lamb and beef at Vic Market. These are all places that, to my knowledge, meet Erlich’s demanding criteria for service and quality. But I do question her on one point: she dismisses fish at Vic Market as a ‘shortcoming’, but fails to mention the striking exception, MacQuire’s, where freshness and quality are a religion. After the shops and the nine major markets there is a chapter on ‘Specialities’ – coffee etc., Asian food supplies, ‘health foods’, herbs and spices, pasta, and cheese. (We have already found two excellent places, formerly unknown to us, from this guide.) And then there’s a final chapter on ‘Growing It Yourself ‘, in the context of Melbourne’s having a climate that ‘supports real diversity’ (more than I had realised). The book has also very useful indexes, one of names and suburbs, the other of foods. Macmillan has patently been too slow in getting the book out, but I have been able to detect only a very minor detail in which it is out of date. Good Enough to Eat is presentable, well designed, and with pleasant drawings by Roy Churcher. The most extraordinary quality in this Baedeker of Melbourne food sellers is that Erlich comes freshly to each one of the 150 shops she deals with. Each one is treated individually, differently, usually with some personal detail about those who run them. It will be a boon to all who welcome knowledge of where to shop. Together with her editorship (with Claude Forell) of the annual Age Good Food Guide and authorship (with her husband Dennis Pryor) of that fine cookbook, Two in the Kitchen, Rita Erlich is becoming the doyen of Melbourne’s writers on food.

Hume Dow

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