🍦Bron Lewis (bite-sized) 🥩

On comedian Bron Lewis's menu: Nan's crumbed lamb chops, Babcia's cabbage rolls, and the best frozen custard you could ever imagine. 

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TFM is produced and edited by Lauren McWhirter with original music by Russell Torrance. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Well the first memory is hers. It's the crumbed lamb chops.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Crumb lamb chops. She would cook them in the electric fry pan. Uh and because we thought she was a millionaire because she had one of those. And she would cook those and they would be so juicy. And I remember when we'd get to we'd we'd go to the pool and we'd come home. And if you could smell that, you think, wow, life does not get any better than this. And she knew how much we loved them. So she would, and even though they did get more expensive as time went on, um, she would still find a way in her pension to buy them for us. My mum never really liked lamb chops because they she associated them when she from when she was a child as being uh poor people's food. Because this was in the 50s and the 60s. It was uh humans didn't eat lamb. It w uh this this is mum's story, anyhow. In the riverina, that was for animals, and their you know, I guess beef was the what was what rich people ate. But Nan would send mum to the shops when Nan Mum was about seven years old, and she'd go to the butcher and she'd have her money and she'd say, I just need to get some lamb chops for the dog. And even though every single person in the town, a tiny little town of a couple of hundred people, everyone in the town knew that the Armstrongs did not have a dog. The man would wrap up these lamb chops and give them to her and say, I hope the dog likes it. And mum would pay the money bright red in the face, wouldn't look him in the eye, and then take these home. And Nan would crumb them, fry them, and mum was just had mum had deep shame around eating that. But uh me as a kid, I had no negative connection with them. All they reminded me of is uh just Nan's love, and they were delicious. And still to this day, if I see a crumb lamb chop on the menu, I will order it, but it is never, never as good as Nan's.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Second food memory. Now here we go. It's another Nan grand Yanana memory. This is Polish cabbage rolls. How do you pronounce them?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Guompki.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Guamki.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Guamki, yes. So my mum uh married, her second marriage was to a Polish man, and his mother lived in Australia as well, and we would go visit her, and there were some things that we couldn't understand. So I think uh my stepdad came into my life when I was seven, and we'd grown up with just you know, meat and three veg. That was always what mum served, or spaghetti bolognese. That was about as exotic as it got at our house. And then when we went to my Polish grandmother's house, my bobcha's house, she had quite a lot of Polish food, which is largely kids love. Like it's a lot of beige food, not a lot of veggies. They don't know a lot of veggies, lots of beige food, very starchy and stodgy food, usually fine for kids. There's some that we couldn't get our head around. For example, one day Bapcha said, I've got some donuts in a very thick Polish accent. I've made some donuts. And we were over the moon. Me and my siblings were we thought this is gonna be the this is gonna be like a party. We've never we never have donuts at our house. Mum never has donuts in the pantry. And then she brought out, we were expecting donut king ones, like the brightly coloured topping, like icing, the sprinkles. She brought out what looked like jam donuts, just no hole in them, just look like jam, jam donuts with icing sugar on top. We're like, okay, we've had jam donuts before, this will be fine. And still so excited, we all took a big bite out of this. Um, it's called Ponchkey, their donuts. They're called Ponchke. Took a big bite, and immediately we all kind of looked at each other. It's kind of like, you know, that moment where you see a glass and you think, oh, that's my that's my own lemonade, and you take a big sip, but someone has refilled it with water, and you're like, oh, this is awful. If you prepared for water, you would have been fine. Because you prepared for sweet, sweet, delicious lemonade. You think this is like I can't get bar, I can't move on from this. So when we had this big bite out of this ponchkey, which is not very sweet, they're not that sweet. I think the sweetest part is the actual icing sugar on top. The rest is there's very little sugar in it, and the jam, it's this plum preserve, which again is quite it's quite tart and not sweet. We jam the only jam donuts we knew were sickly sweet with that like bright, like almost fluorescent like strawberry jam in the middle that burnt the hell out of your mouth, ripped all the skin off the top of your of your mouth, but it was worth it because of the sugar hit. You think that's okay, it's an injury that will take two weeks for recover. But for right now, I've got so much sugar in my system, I'm gonna be alright. But with Ponchki, no, like very little sugar, so unsatisfying. My older sister, who's never been very polite, she just um put the jam donuts down on mum's plate and said to mum, that's disgusting. I'm not gonna eat that. And my mum, my mum, who was new to this family, was like, but because we saw Amy, my sister, get rid of her donut, her disgusting donuts so easily, we then all gave our donuts to mum. So it meant that mum had five donuts on her plate and she didn't want to see her new mother-in-law uh uh see this. So mum was shoveling donuts into her mouth every time Bupsha turned around. And uh so not all polished food is very good for kids, but we were surprised because the Guamke is this cabbage roll that is filled with basically just with pork, and it's got this tomato sauce that goes over the top, and it is delicious, absolutely delicious. And when I turned 10 years old, I some my dad who worked at an abattoir, he told me too many stories about um about how they kill animals. And I got when I was 10 years old and I'd lived 10 years of a uh meat-eating life where I love nan um lamb chops, but dad told me just enough stories to make me think, okay, I I can't do it anymore. So at 10 years old, I decided to be a vegetarian, which almost which was such an insult to my nan. And then and it was also so hard to visit her house and not eat the lamb chops. But then at when I was 21, my stepdad uh he died, and we all went to my Bupsha's house to I guess like after the wake, and when we were there, Bapcha had made Guamki, and in my I guess my grief, I thought I just need something that feels nostalgic right now. I need something to honour him, and I ate I think three Guamki, they're quite big. I ate three, I wasn't even thinking, I don't think I was breathing or blinking, it would have been quite a spectacle. And after it, about six hours later, I was so violently ill because I'd been 11 years since I'd eaten meat. And uh yeah, I think I was sick for about 48 hours, but at the end my sister said, Are you proud of yourself? Would you do that again? And I was like, Yeah, I would.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Let's get into your third food. I know I love this one. It's the Canberra memory. It's caramel and macadamia ice cream.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Yes, and uh to clarify, it is uh frozen custard. In Canberra, they love custard, they love custard so much. I don't know what it is, but there is a frozen custard place. It tastes all it is is ice cream. But I think that to try and be different, God bless them, is that said it's frozen custard, and there's a place called Gooseberries, it's New Belcon Mall, and uh I think it's still there, but it was definitely there when I was in high school, and we would catch the bus from school to the interchange, then cross this big bridge, trudge along, you have to go through this industrial part. Like you really need, you really have to devote your time to get this frozen custard. And I turned in there was two options you get uh chocolate custard or vanilla custard, again, it's just ice cream, and then you choose your flavours. And so I would go with my friends from high school, and they would choose MMs and you know, something sickly sweet and something else, something else. And I would, I thought I was a chef. I was like, no, you guys, it's too much. You guys are going over the top. It's just vanilla with caramel sauce and macadamia, and that's it. And they're like, that's boring, Braun. But in my head, I was the most sophisticated woman that's ever graced this earth. And since then, and since then, it's it's still my favorite ice cream ever. It's the only ice cream I'll ever buy, which is in the fridge, the connoisseur one, is caramel and macadamia ice cream. The kids now, unfortunately, have such expensive palettes because of this when it comes to ice cream that we'll uh yeah, if we if someone has like a chocolate paddle pop, they're like, What is that? I'm like, I'm so sorry, we're rich.