Changing tastes

It was thanks to my needing an assistant when I was about to go on maternity leave from my job on the Ceylon Daily News some 50-odd years ago, that the youthful, irrepressible Charmaine Poulier (as she then was), fresh from Holy Family Convent, came into my view. I picked her out unerringly as the most promising material and never had occasion to change my mind. Of course, I had no prophetic powers to foresee that she would attain the dizzy heights she did after emigrating to Australia in 1959 with husband, Reuben Solomon, and two small daughters, Nina and Debbie.

Today, I am thrilled to learn that Charmaine has been awarded the highest accolade of the Order of Australia Medal and is in the illustrious company that includes two others of our own – author Yasmine Gooneratne and social worker, Lorna Wright.

Charmaine, with her gift for words and her boundless enthusiasm, became an instant hit on the CDN women’s pages, of which there were three a week. Her column, “Oceans of Notions”, became very popular as did a later feature of hers entitled “What’s cooking?” She was very pleased to be asked to edit the latest edition of the enduring “Daily News Cookery Book”, which assignment she carried out with aplomb. We didn’t dream then that she would someday conquer the culinary world with her own “Complete Asian Cookbook” and follow it up with well over 30 other works on the art of cooking, a more recent addition being her mammoth work, “The Encyclopedia of Asian Food”. So it’s not surprising to read that she was been given the AOM ‘For service to the Food Media’, particularly as the author of Asian cookery books.

My son in Australia sent me, sometime ago, the transcript of a radio interview with Charmaine by George Negus in 2005, which he had downloaded from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website and printed out for me. In the preamble, Charmaine is described as “one of the architects of the revolution in Australian eating habits. Her books on Asian food have changed the way Australians eat and cook. Her first, `The Complete Asian Cookbook’, was published in the early 70s and has sold over a million copies, and her `Encyclopedia of Asian Food’ is used all over the world.”

In his interview with Charmaine, George Negus says that “The kitchens of Australia have never been the same after Charmaine Solomon’s easy-to-follow recipe books. Charmaine introduced our taste buds to Asian cooking and we’ve never looked back since.” Yet Charmaine herself insists that she hadn’t given a thought to serious home-cooking until she came to Australia, because in Sri Lanka there was always somebody in the kitchen to do the regular cooking. Charmaine was a dab hand at fancy cakes and confectionery, but cooking a rice-and-curry meal was something she hadn’t undertaken.

Once settled in Australia, however, it was a different scene. Husband Reuben has a stock joke which Charmaine herself likes to repeat. Says Reuben: “We came here and Charmaine couldn’t cook. It was touch and go. I touched her on the shoulder and said, “You cook or I go.” (He stayed, of course, to be her devoted helper and ally). “I wouldn’t have done it without his help and encouragement. He’s been the wind beneath my wings,” Charmaine says.

Referring to herself as “Just a home cook”, Charmaine told George Negus that because she made so many mistakes when she started to cook for her family, she realised that new cooks need to be told exactly how much of anything – salt or lime juice or whatever – should be put into a dish. So, when she started to write cookery books, she decided firmly that she would write her recipes in such a way that “nobody else would ever make a mistake.” She adapted the chillie content of her recipes to suit Aussie palates and also brought down the fat level.

Charmaine’s love-affair with cooking has remained as constant as her love for her clarinet-playing husband of 51 years. After going to Australia they had two more children, both of them boys – Gary and Andrew.

They are a close-knit family and the grandchildren have no doubt been well-nourished on grandma’s delectable cooking. Music and food are two very popular topics when the Solomon clan meets. I have had the pleasure of sitting in her home in Sydney where, to my surprise, I spied plantain trees flourishing in a corner of the garden. Charmaine explained she was determined to have the genuine article (plantain leaves) in which to wrap up her lamprais packets! Despite her rise to celebrity status since that long ago time when we happily rubbed shoulders at Lake House on a daily basis and had so much fun together, Charmaine has remained the same good friend over half a century, still unaffectedly natural and honest in her interactions, still vivacious and irrepressible.

Hers is perhaps the only non-literary name to be included in the second volume of Yasmine Gooneratne’s work, “Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing”. I can think of no better way to conclude this salutation than by quoting from Yasmine’s tribute to Charmaine. “‘Cooking is no less an act of love than writing a sonnet’ is the opinion of one of Sri Lanka’s most internationally known female authors, the cookery writer Charmaine Solomon………….Her essays on the culinary traditions of Asia, composed with verve and imagination, have the emotional range and atmospheric power of poetry for any reader who appreciates good cooking………….her magnificent chapter on the cuisine of Sri Lanka is capable of bringing nostalgic tears to the eyes of all but the most profoundly alienated of expatriates.”