Revisiting my grandmother’s kitchen

My grandparents were an indelible part of my childhood. Their bungalow in Melbourne’s east was a second home for us, and I grew up around their yiddishisms, their food and their life energy.

We visited them every week, but one particular day in the late 1970s stands out in my memory. Stepping into their usually nondescript bathroom, I got the shock of my life. Swimming happily in their pale yellow bathtub was a large, slimy and utterly alive carp, staring up at me with its googly eyes.

I knew my grandparents loved eating traditional Eastern European Jewish foods, but until then, I had never quite realised the bathtub-to-table process that was involved.

My grandmother would bring home the slippery fish in large swollen plastic bags filled with water from the fishmonger and tip them into the bath to keep them fresh until their moment of reckoning. When the time came, she would  knock them over the head with a hammer and use a sharp knife to scale them, gut them and push them through her grinder so she could turn them into gefilte fish and jellied carp.

Delicacy to some, but as a kid, it was the worst thing I could ever imagine eating.

Luckily she made up for it. Every birthday she would make us multi-layered hazelnut cream cakes filled with raspberry jam and adorned with chocolate cream swirls, while my grandfather shook a bottle of bubbly with a mischievous gleam in his eye before popping the cork to our squeals of delight.