Markets 
Potatoes. Flour. Egg. Salt. Parmesan cheese – the fancy type, presumably. The kind that comes with its own set of paperwork from the Italian government, attesting to the fact that it was faithfully attended to by a choir of meditating Franciscan monks, who chanted to it daily as it aged for three decades.
It must have been the cheese.
Without it, the thimble-sized bowl of gnocchi I bought from the Royal Easter Show might’ve involved five bucks’ worth of ingredients, with the wind at its back. Throw in another five for parts, labour, and the silly white chef’s hat worn by the guy behind the counter, who (hopefully for his future employment prospects) actually had nothing to do with its preparation.
Ask anyone: I am not a person noted for her ability to do maths or make gnocchi. But whichever way I have spun it to myself since then, I have not been able to make five and five add up to $23, which is what I paid for what turned out to be a listless scoop of greying potato that tasted uncannily like an apology and the Clag Paste I ate when I was four.
Even as I was handing the money over (ignoring the shaking fists of the ghosts of both my Italian grandmothers, who wouldn’t have spent $23 on gnocchi if the alternative was being waterboarded), I was keeping a good thought. (It was either that or question the bill and risk the wrath of the marauding hordes behind me. It was lunchtime and apparently everyone was in the mood for pasta.)
The gnocchi are probably handmade, I told myself soothingly. It’s cheaper for the sellers if they make it that way. That guy behind the counter wouldn’t be wearing a silly white chef’s hat as a marketing gimmick. Look! He’s juggling fresh spaghetti as we speak. These gnocchi are so expensive because we’re near all the fresh produce. The chef probably plucked a couple of new potatoes off the display and rounded up a couple of broody hens from the livestock pavilion, so the eggs were especially fresh. You’re paying a premium for quality, you bleeding cheapskate!
Friends, if I know nothing else in this world, understand this: I know what gnocchi from the packet tastes like. I am also an expert in what it tastes like when you forget it’s on the stove and end up cursing a blue streak because it gets clumpy and tough and sticks to itself like a support group for potato tumours.
This was packet gnocchi for your life.
My first response (“of course it was, you idiot”) was overtaken by a brief period of indigestion because the only thing worse than paying $23 for a thimble of potatoes is binning a $23 thimble of potatoes, so I choked down the lot on principle.
But in the intervening days, I’ve had plenty of time to sulk about what the current cost-of-living crisis has done to my willingness to justify price tags I would once have considered the punchline to a particularly sick joke.
To wit: the Royal Easter Show has always been expensive. The food at all live events is. Insert something about petrol driving up the price of everything. It’s expensive to pay someone to cook. Large-scale catering is never very good. (Incidentally, why is that? How is it that, in a week where humans have successfully transported stem cells to the dark side of the moon, we can’t reliably produce anything more complex than chips on a stick and our idea of feeding the masses still involves underdone lamb, and rubber chicken?)
I don’t know the answer to any of this, but I do know one thing. Having made my annual pilgrimage to the Easter Show, I have decided, forthwith, to steer clear of gnocchi, the fresh food tent, and anything involving parmesan cheese, just in case.
Next year, I will be eating out of the showbag pavilion, because as we all know, that’s where the real bargains can be found.
Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.
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