This book is full of practical hints and tips on everything from pantry staples, to why temperature is important when making pastry, to wrangling a perfectly cooked roast chicken. It’s a book for any skill level – from supercooks to beginners, and it’s a wonderful read, as visitors to Charlotte’s blog How to Shuck an Oyster would expect.

After howling with laughter at the stories of horrible Home Ec food, and plain old howling, remembering cooking for a friend during her chemotherapy treatment, I went back to page 81 – just the recipe I needed for the too-many mandarins sitting on my bench. This Whole Orange Cake is a classic; delicious, and not the slightest bit temperamental.

2 whole oranges (I used 5 mandarins)
250g castor sugar
6 eggs, beaten
250g almond meal
One and a half teaspoons baking powder (I used 1 teaspoon bicarb – for a gluten-intolerant family member)

I won’t reproduce the method word for word, but it’s very easy.
Put the whole oranges (or tangellos, or mandarins) into a saucepan of cold water, bring to the boil, simmer for 2 hours, large fruit, or 1 hour mandarins)
Drain, cool, cut in quarters, remove pips.
Preheat oven to 180.
Process fruit till smooth.
Add sugar, almond meal, baking powder, process to combine.
Add mixture to beaten eggs, stir well to combine.
Pour batter into a buttered, lined cake tin.
Bake for approx one hour, till skewer inserted comes out clean.
May need to cover loosely with foil after half an hour if browning too quickly.
Cool in tin before turning out.
I used a 27cm tin, the recipe calls for 24cm, which will give you a deeper cake.
(Charlotte uses a cooler oven, 150 degrees (aha! – and so probably doesn’t need to cover her cake w foil))
I made a quick syrup with mandarin juice, brown sugar, mandarin segments, teaspoon rose water, two teaspoons orange blossom water, and scattered some pomegranate seeds on the cake.

Can’t wait to try the pomegranate honey, p30.

And I have never brined a chicken before, but intend to try that soon, too.

Despite a huge number of cook books in the house, a few of them specifically French, I could not find a madeleine recipe – very disconcerting – so I trawled the net and put together this one after reading about a dozen. It worked well.

It is such a pleasure when the form of food is not only pretty but functional – like a spiral pasta shape that invites sauce to cling to it. In this case the scallop-shell madeleine shape delivers fine crispy edges and a plump, buttery centre. Delicious.

Ingredients
100g plain flour + extra for dusting (tin, not cakes)
three quarters of a teaspoon baking powder
100g castor sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon very finely chopped lemon or orange zest
125 grams unsalted butter, melted, cooled + extra for buttering tin
1 – 2 tablespoon icing sugar

Method
Sift flour, baking powder with pinch salt.
Beat sugar and eggs till thick and fluffy.
Gently fold in the flour, vanilla and zest.
Gently fold in the melted, cooled butter.
Cover with gladwrap and chill mixture for 30 minutes.

Heat oven to 200/C fan forced.
Butter well and lightly flour the madeleine tin.
Spoon mixture into mould (small tin: approx one heaped teaspoon per madeleine.)
Bake for 6 – 7 minutes, until golden, and springy to touch.
Tap tin firmly to loosen; tip onto cake rack.
Dust with sifted icing sugar and serve warm.

The chilling step is important: the mixture thickens and aerates during this time.

The occasion for making madeleines was a long-delayed discussion of our reading, and rereading, the first volume of Proust. It was so interesting to read a different translation this time around. Twenty odd years ago I read the C.K. Scott Moncrief translation revised by Terence Kilmartin (Remembrance of Things Past), this time the recent translation by Lydia Davis (The Way by Swann’s).

Here, from the first translation, a little of the famous ‘petites madeleines’ dipped in lime-blossom tea passage:

‘No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.’

And from Lydia Davis’s:

‘But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause.’

Such different interpretations – in the first passage, the isolation relates to the nature of the pleasure itself; in the second, the pleasure isolates the ‘I’ narrator. What a daunting number of choices must be made on every single page. I preferred the more recent translation, and its editor’s and Lydia Davis’s introductions provide a fascinating discussion of translation in general, and her approach to Proust’s language compared to that of Moncrieff in the earlier translation.

It’s got nothing to do with being annoyed by the limitation of five-star ratings: they are, perforce, reductive, but we’re all accustomed to living in a cultural space that spits out these summary assessments of theatre, films, music, books, aren’t we? Apparently we might not be able to attend for more than a nanosecond. Grab that rating and run.

I read widely, I have my own taste, I’ve got a decent critical platform on which to base my opinions. I’ve served as a judge for the AWGIES, the writers’ guild awards, a couple of times. I’ve been in a reading group for twenty years, at which we have full and very frank discussion about everything we read. So it has nothing to do with having a critical by-pass.

It has everything to do with knowing how hard it is to write a book. Each person who manages to get a book published deserves a hug and a cup of tea and possibly a garland of some sort. It is heroic and painful and difficult and often under-appreciated or taken for granted, a bit in the manner of childbirth. And it’s definitely under-remunerated. In other words, it is hard enough, so to write about the limitations or the less-than-five-star-ness of a fellow-writer’s work in a public forum is something I just do not want to do. Whereas I do occasionally blog book love. So I’m guilty of inconsistent practice; I’m happy to sing praises, but don’t want to dis. With no logical reason really other than some sort of raw, amplified empathy.

Overall, I think a forum like Goodreads is a wonderful idea – a big public conversation about books and reading. What’s not to like? But it still gives me such a WTF smack in the forehead – sit down, strong beverage, shoulder massage, palm frond creating calming breeze – when I go onto Goodreads and see people throwing Lolita, A Visit from the Goon Squad or Pride and Prejudice three stars. Or fewer. Be still, my horrified heart. I do realise there are people in the world who don’t like the same books I do, but to see them out there in their zillions does my head in some days.

The idea of people rating my work is one of the things that didn’t even occur to me before my book was published. Coming across a dud rating is depressing, but I’ve found that if you avert your eyes really quickly, it’s sometimes possible to pretend you didn’t see it. The same strategy can work during scary movies. On the other hand, I love it when people give ‘Six Impossible Things’ a five-star rating. I will nevereverever get sick of finding out that it really hit the spot with an individual reader.

But I won’t be rating other writers out of five. Not while we’re out there in the arena together and they’ve just released the lions.

This Friday and Saturday the Northcote Town Hall will be full of words and thoughts and talk about reading and writing. A thousand words festival. It’s going to be great fun. Read all about it here. If you haven’t already got tickets, you can get them here. On Friday, Cath Crowley and I will be talking about how we build characters – and we’ll have two actors helping to illustrate our processes. If you come along, you can help us develop the characters. Steph Bowe and Cath and I will be talking about engaging reluctant readers with Bec Kavanagh, Simmone Howell will talk about literary diaries and the diary as a literary form. Michael Pryor and Leanne Hall will construct a story on the hop, with help from the audience. You can talk books and writing with Tim Pegler, Aimee Said, Andrew McDonald, Sally Rippin, Sue deGennaro and many other wonderful people!

In the spirit of Steven Soderbergh’s gorgeous acceptance speech from many years ago, this post sends love and congratulations to every writer who keeps turning up at the page (Julia Cameron’s beautiful, trusting phrase, which has held my hand so many times). To everyone writing poems, scripts, novels, plays, lyrics, short stories, creative non-fiction, memoir, reportage – and any other thing that requires the courage to tackle blank pages – congratulations! To unlisted, longlisted, shortlisted, winning, published and yet to be published writers who keep doing that great thing – to writers who are spewing out huge daily word counts, to writers who’ve thrown it all away and started again, and again, to writers who’ve survived the battering of another rejection, and lived to face the page again – to writers who are enjoying success and those yet to share their work with other readers – congratulations, stick with it, you are amazing, and thank you,

yours sincerely,

A reader.

ps. Moira Buffini, thank you for the perfect screen adaptation of one of my favourite books, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, serious legend.

Write Around the Murray - 9, 10 September

A thousand words festival – 23, 24 September

My reading group has been meeting once a month for about twenty-two years – I remember, because when we had our first meeting – at Annicks, a small French restaurant in Brunswick Street – I’d just had a baby, now a lovely 22 year-old woman, who is for the moment cranky at the tone of voice I used when imparting ‘everything I know about making truly delicious minestrone’ (too bossy). I’m hopeless at remembering unless I have something like this to anchor an event.

My husband is (usually)(quite) amused at my complete inability to remember our wedding anniversary – but how on earth can I? I know it is either January 29 or 30 – but, come on – they are extremely similar dates – nothing too distinctive about either of them…and it only comes around once a year (plenty of time to forget). Of course I remember our real anniversary, December 18, the first time we went out – to that restaurant with the Basil Fawlty-like waiter – because it was the day before my then not-husband’s birthday. And I remember that date because it’s compulsory to remember immediate family birthdays, isn’t it?

At reading group – it’s no doubt one of the reasons for our longevity – we never have set texts; we just bring along whatever we happen to have been reading. Except occasionally. Like now, at Philippa’s suggestion, we are (re)reading the first volume of Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, in the new translation, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, which I hadn’t read for about twenty-five years. I’d remembered Proust was funny, but not quite how funny: I’ve been laughing out loud. And I hadn’t quite remembered the high-wire risks he takes in leading the reader along a drawn out and many times qualified and re-qualified and refined and polished image in his perseverance to ensure he evokes something with sufficient precision. It’s not an anodyne read. Entering this reverie requires concentration. Sitting up in a chair, properly awake, not sliding down the bed, slipping towards unconsciousness.

Proust’s famous memory-jogger is a piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. I want to mention three memory-related events.

The first is a creative journaling workshop I went to in Castlemaine several weeks ago – there will be others, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly to anybody interested in writing. Run by Simmone Howell and Lisa D’Onofrio, the workshop was a day of playful engagement in writing and memory. It was thought-provoking and enjoyable. There was no pressure to share work written during the day, but lots of people felt comfortable enough to do that. We could draw and paint and talk and even walk as well as write. A big sign for me that something is fun is that time flies by, and this day disappeared in a flash. Simmone and Lisa alternated the exercises, each one introduced in an inviting, well-considered way. One of my favourites was the writing that followed our mapping or drawing of a house or place from childhood.

The second is a blog post I read here a while ago at Baxter Street, writer Jen Storer’s lovely blog, which, in mentioning certain cosmetics, pulled me back into the seventies so fast I had whiplash. Pot’o'Gloss, Prue Acton Navy Blue mascara and Mary Quant crayons. That yellow tin box with the black signature daisy on the lid was in my hands. Favourite colours worn to stumps. Those crayons come pretty close to being my madeleine. I can smell them. And they peel memories.

The third thing was Terence Malick’s utterly gorgeous film ‘Tree of Life’ a confronting, beautiful, demanding film that asks us to consider memory, and humanity, and the nature of existence, and death, and which constructs the most luscious imagined ‘memory’ of the central character’s childhood. It’s Proustian; and it is a film that requires something of us. Some chewing. Some digesting. Hooray! Not everything needs to be pureed to death. There were lots of walk outs in the screening I went to. And my post-film bedazzled state was bitten into by the mutterings and grumblings of people who did not like the film leaving their seats with hurrumphs – ‘that wasn’t a film’, ‘who was Sean Penn meant to be?’.

In Jake Wilson’s review of the film in The Age 2/7, he recalls the Paul Eluard line used by Patrick White as the epigraph to ‘The Solid Mandala’ – ‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’

‘Find me.’

‘Follow me.’

I loved it.