A Mynah Challenge For A Gourmet
THE SUNDAY AGE
Sunday March 24, 1996
IN A previous incarnation as an advertising copywriter, I was once recruited to sit on a jury charged with selecting the best print advertisements in Australia. The winner, I recall, was a snappy full-page pitch for a kitchen exhaust fan.
It was created, as we used to say, by Lionel Hunt of Melbourne's Campaign Palace and showed the product surrounded by oceans of white space with a snappy headline above and a couple of lines of copy below.
We envied Lionel his ability to persuade clients not to spray their ugly logos all over the page, thus ruining the impact of our work. In this example of his work, the brand name was unusually unobtrusive.
Now, a kitchen exhaust fan is not an intrinsically interesting object, but it can look, if not dramatic, at least intriguing when depicted in striking isolation on a broadsheet page.
I particularly remember the headline: OK GARLIC, BEAT THIS! Throwing out an irresistible challenge to the potential consumer, it also promised 100 per cent removal of the whiffiest of cooking smells.
Lionel's ad came back to mind the other day when my seldom- used kitchen exhaust fan had to deal with something more unusual than homely garlic - a family of Indian mynah birds.
I wasn't cooking them. Just trying to get them out of the fan tunnel where they'd squatted, making themselves as comfy as I am in my modest pad.
I don't dine in much these days. But the other evening I decided to cook up a bit of spag. Did all the preparations. None of your naff tinned tomatoes for this gourmet. Bought the genuine articles, plunged them into boiling water, removed the skins, chopped them up. Chopped up some garlic, too. Lots of it.
Dived into the cupboard to find some 10-year-old chilli flakes.
One jar seems to last a lifetime. Got the sauce simmering.
Smelt great. Put a big pot of water on to boil for the pasta.
It was about this time that the windows of the flat and, more importantly, my spectacles began to mist up so I decided to press the idle fan into service. Pulled the rip-cord to expose the fan blades and threw the switch.
The machine sputtered into fitful life. Didn't sound right.
And it wasn't drawing off the steam the way Lionel had promised it would. Must be something blocking it, I thought, so I clambered up on to the sink to investigate.
The gizmo was blocked all right. With grass and feathers woven into a whirlpool-like nest. I tried prodding it. I got a pair of kitchen tongs and tried to pull the foreign matter out but the blades of the fan made it impossible.
How about removing the blades? Fumbled for and finally found a screwdriver, got half the fitting dismantled and then struck trouble. Why am I doing this, I thought. All I was trying to do was fix supper, not carry out maintenance work on an electrical appliance. Maybe I'd accidentally touch a wire and end up as nicely browned as the garlic in the pan below.
I had a brainwave. I'd just set alight the nest and switch on the fan. So long mynahs. It would, I thought, only take a second or two for the tinder-dry grass to turn to smoke.
At this point, I should explain that although I like almost all of God's creatures, I don't have a lot of time for the Indian mynah. Like the equally ugly and messy sacred ibis, it's a species that has invaded this continent and is causing environmental damage.
Direct action was needed here to scare them off. I put a match to the grass and the empty nest went up in seconds. A little too fast, I thought, so I grabbed a bottle of tonic water, gave it a quick shake and, using it as an improvised extinguisher, squirted it through the fan blades on to the mini conflagration.
It worked. But the minute I switched off the fan, the charred remains of Maison Mynah were blown back in to speckle the sauce below.
I went out for dinner that night but the mynahs got the message and have not returned. And I now keep the fan in good working order, just so they don't get any more territorial ambitions.
They certainly proved more challenging than ordinary garlic.
But OK MYNAHS, BEAT THIS! doesn't have quite the same ring.
© 1996 THE SUNDAY AGE