By Mark Dapin
Alex Elliott-Howery, the godmother of inner-city pickling, has three dads and two mums.
Elliott-Howery, co-founder of the phenomenally successful Cornersmith cafe and its associated picklery in Marrickville, grew up in a house in Rozelle with her biological parents and her mum's "bestest friend", John. "My mum didn't want to have a nuclear family," says Elliott-Howery. "She was adopted, so I wonder if that's part of that story. She wanted to create her own family." When Elliott-Howery was about five years old, her mother and father divorced and her father left the house. About six years later John's partner, Will, moved in.
Briny deep: Alex Elliott-Howery teaching preserve-making, cheese-making, bread-making and, of course, pickling at the picklery offshoot of the Cornersmith cafe.Credit: Kate Geraghty
"I didn't really realise it was an unconventional family arrangement until maybe early high school," says Elliott-Howery. "I went to Riverside Girls for a few years and met not-so-open-minded people and brought a few friends home, and they were, like, 'What the f...? What is this?' They hadn't met a gay person before."
I'm having lunch with Elliott-Howery at Eat Fuh, a newish Vietnamese cafe a few doors away from Cornersmith. When I rang her to arrange a meeting, she said the four words that always send me into panic – "Actually we've already met". Then I remembered her from that house 20 years ago, a bright, self-possessed teenager and the pride of her (many) parents.
"It was really communal living, lots of laughs,' she says. "John and Will were both very funny. John's particularly over the top: he works in theatre and costume, so he was always dressing up in the curtains and making me amazing cubby houses, and making my book-parade outfits as big as Ben-Hur. I had a great childhood. It was a very food-based household; there was kind of a celebration about food."
Will was a former restauranteur and editor of the Good Food Guide, and Elliott-Howery's mum, Elizabeth, was a great home-food cook. "Growing up in that household has made me who I am," says Elliott-Howery. "But I think it also made me rebel, because when I was 24 I had two kids within two years of each other, got married and went to the suburbs.
"John and Will are both my kids' grandads. My mum's now with a woman, so there are two grandmas on that side as well – three grandmas, really, because there's my dad's wife. So three grandads, three grandmas just on my side. Our wedding was hilarious."
Eat Fuh specialises in the national dish of Marrickville: pho. I order a bowl of classic pho tai, made from raw beef cooked in stock with aromatic herbs and noodles, but Elliott-Howery comes here for the tasty vegan pho. "I love Vietnamese food," she says, "except a lot of vegetarian Vietnamese is a bit shit."
The crowd at Eat Fuh is more fashionable, and perhaps a little less Vietnamese, than you might find in most of the noodle shops in Marrickville, but the soup is just as good. While we sink our duck spoons into the broth Elliott-Howery, impossibly grown-up with her fiery copper hair, black jeans and rust sweater, fills me in on the last two decades of her life.
She and her husband, James Grant, moved to Dulwich Hill, where Elliott-Howery found herself at home with two babies. She had graduated from arts school but "hadn't kind of invented myself yet", she says. "I almost thought, 'I'll just keep having babies because I know how to do it'. But I wasn't that good at it. So, in the fashion of my family, I just started throwing myself into cooking at home and got crazy obsessive – because I actually am a crazy obsessive – and I started research about the food system and ethics of food, and I decided that single-handedly I was going to make a change: no more supermarkets, no more packaging, no more out-of-season, no more food miles. So I had to teach myself how to make everything from scratch, and I fell in love with pickling and preserving."
She began to walk around her traditionally Greek neighbourhood, knocking on the doors of homes with fruit trees in the yard and offering to collect the fruit, use it to teach herself how to make preserves, then drop some preserved fruits back to the householders.
"I went with the kids so I didn't seem totally mental," she says. "Most people were really excited. They went, 'That stuff that's wasting, rotting in the back garden, makes me feel guilty every single day, so you can save it'. A couple of people sent me on my merry way. One guy told me to get f...ed. That's fair enough. The Greek men all wanted to marry me."
The word quickly spread around Dulwich Hill. "So I'd open my front door and there'd be a bag of chokos sitting on the front doorstep," she says. "It was hilarious."
Elliott-Howery and Grant – who was "in the coffee game" – decided to open a cafe. They almost signed a lease in Redfern, then noticed a thread shop on the corner of Illawarra Road, Marrickville. "You wouldn't even know it was there," she says. "The guy had no customers. He didn't even have any thread left, I don't think. He was standing in there waiting for us."
The couple leased the space and "friends and neighbours rallied round", she says. "My dad came down to do the tiling and lived in a caravan outside our house in the nude." Cornersmith opened about five years ago. "From day one, we were completely full."
Why?
"I don't know," she says. "We still don't know. I think mainly people are hungry for knowledge about food, and want to be making right decisions and don't know how to do it, and feel like Cornersmith gives them a little insight into it. Also our food is different to a lot of cafes – or it was then, five years ago. It's really fresh, but we're not about health food, we're not fad food, we're just about good home cooking. Really seasonal, very vegetable-, plant-based. I still haven't quite put my finger on what people like about it."
Cornersmith has a trading program, where local people bring in their own produce and the cafe barters it for pickles or coffee, then the home-grown food is either preserved or added to the menu. "I don't knock on people's doors anymore," says Elliott-Howery, "but they bring it to us."
Elliott-Howery runs classes at the picklery, teaching preserve-making, cheese-making, bread-making and, of course, pickling. "The pickling workshops are full," she says. "Everybody wants to know how to pickle." The Cornersmith cookbook was published last year, and Elliott-Howery and Grant are working on a sequel about salads and pickles. Meanwhile, a second branch of Cornersmith will open on a corner in Annandale later in the year.
A good pickle requires fresh, crunchy vegetables, says Elliott-Howery, but the secret is in the brine. "It's a bit absurd with all pickling," she says. "It was just a little idea, something I was doing in private at home when I was a bit mental with the babies, trying to find my identity; and now I have this identity – the crazy pickling lady. And my kids aren't that into it. They hate pickles."