Brown Stew, which had a similar list of ingredients, but also stewing steak, and dripping;

Marmalade Pudding, which he still cooks in wintertime;

and Roly Poly, which involves something called Suet.

These four dishes came from a book of Grandma Blanche’s called Teach Yourself to Cook, published by The English Universities Press. Also in the series were Teach Yourself Household Electricity, Teach Yourself Astro-Navigation, Teach Yourself German and Teach Yourself More German, and last, but not least, Teach Yourself To Fly.

Papa possessed none of the more applied and manly volumes, but with Teach Yourself to Cook in his swag, he lurched around the countryside after Grandma Blanche’s death, laying bricks, killing rabbits and stealing vegetables from gardens. He got too much creek-water in his system and was so skinny you could hook your hands up under his ribs.

When he came to Melbourne, the city was getting ready for the Olympic Games. There were going to be fencing competitions in St Kilda Town Hall and weightlifting at the Royal Exhibition Building. On Swanston Street all the street-stalls had been vacated, or relocated, or put out of business via fines. It was a time of flags and gloves. Queen Elizabeth was everywhere: in profile on penny pieces, in touched-up photos in Women’s Weekly. No one could say she wasn’t lovely: the hint of blue in her eyes; her pale, smooth English skin.

On St Kilda Road, the plane trees spewed out their spores and made the commuters sneeze. Papa went for a walk and saw little inscrutable changes afoot in Melbourne. Places that looked suspiciously like art galleries (Papa was not sure) were popping up in buildings that had been haberdashers or dental surgeries. A woman in a black skivvy and green-and-red peasant skirt swished past on ballet slippers. A door banged open in the side of a wall and three men came laughing down some stairs, carrying musical instruments.

One day in late October, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Papa approached a restaurant called la Coccinella, having haltingly translated the half-English, half-Italian advertisement for a kitchenhand taped to the glass. He had applied a large quantity of hair oil. He had borrowed a suit from the Salvation Army. He knocked. A tram clattered past like a centipede in lead boots. The door opened. ‘Then my real life began,’ says Papa.

You were fifteen, Ornella, and you didn’t like the new kitchenhand; you hated it when Nonno promoted him to first courses and desserts; you hated it even more when your parents decided to ‘adopt’ him. Papa says this like a fact, but surely a nineteen-year-old boy’s too old to be adopted! In 1956, a nineteen-year-old boy was a man. They must’ve felt sorry for him. He was small, and a little bit dirty, and he looked like he needed caring for.