Annie Smithers: Annie's Garden to Table; and Guy Grossi: Recipes From My Mother's Kitchen

Christopher Menz Anyone who has dined at Annie Smithers’ eponymous restaurant in the picturesque town of Kyneton, eighty-five kilometres north-west of Melbourne, or read her food columns in TheAge, will understand her commitment to growing, sourcing, cooking, and presenting the best available local produce. She achieves this with a simplicity that belies the care and hard work needed to create culinary perfection from raw ingredients. Annie’s Garden to Table: A Garden Diary Featuring 100 Seasonal Recipes (Lantern, $49.95 hb, 256 pp, 9781921382345) reveals some of her secrets and much of the sheer slog involved in producing dishes of such quality. As the subtitle indicates, the book is arranged as a diary with recipes. Smithers presents her creations – kitchen garden notes and appropriate recipes – commencing in August of an unspecified year through to the November of the following. In this, she more than covers the full annual cycle of preparing, planting, growing, harvesting, and cooking. Smithers’ engaging personality and enthusiasm pervade the prose. Here she is at the end of her entertainingly morbid account of taking her home-reared geese to the slaughterhouse in December: ‘I had one last request: please leave my ganders’ heads on so I know which one is which.’ Smithers’ prose has a conversational informality that makes for pleasant reading: some judicious editing might have tempered her overenthusiasm for exclamation marks, an unfortunate trait she appears to have inherited from her mentor, fellow cook and endorser of this attractively produced volume, Stephanie Alexander. Not many of us have a gardener, and Smithers was fortunate to find Simon Rickard, whose creation and management of her three-quarter-acre kitchen garden is so efficient that it supplies nearly all the fruit and vegetables for the restaurant. While this volume is clearly a testament to the success of that horticultural venture, the difficulties facing the gardener are constant. Anyone thinking of digging up the back garden or spare paddock, or annexing part of the balcony, be warned: don’t underestimate the hazards of excessive heat, rain, pests or the inevitable problems associated with different soil types, timing of planting, and selection of appropriate varieties. Gardeners will want a great deal more technical detail than is given here, but they can at least luxuriate in Simon Griffiths’s superb photographs of Smithers’ garden. Having dined several times at the justly acclaimed Kyneton bistro, I can attest to the success of Smithers’ approach to food and its presentation, so acutely attuned to the restaurant environment. The author shares some fine recipes: I can’t wait to cook the boned Roast Goose and the Pickled Tongue Salad. The Barbecued Quail and Baked Fish with Tomatoes have already become additions to my repertoire, though I have now polluted the latter recipe with the additions of a hint of chilli and a drop of Pernod. However, given the flooded market, aren’t we entitled to expect more from a new cookery book? Just how many more recipes for crème brûlée, sauce béarnaise, cheese soufflé, or profiteroles does the home cook need? With such superb ingredients to hand, Smithers may feel justified in publishing so many standard classics. But this does not explain why, in a book dedicated to the best home-grown or locally sourced produce, a recipe for an otherwise delicious-sounding Chestnut Layered Sponge calls for sweetened (presumably tinned or in a jar) chestnut purée. Superb chestnuts are grown abundantly in north-eastern Victoria. At the time of writing, magnificent new season chestnuts have appeared in the markets. For more adventurous and truly inspirational recipes from those who approach food in a similar vein, go to books by the incomparable Richard Olney (Simple French Food, 1974) or nearly anything by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Annie Smithers Guy Grossi’s Recipes from My Mother’s Kitchen (Lantern, $49.95 hb, 272 pp, 9781921382529) is another volume in the immigrant culinary literature genre. Grossi – an ‘icon of Italian cooking in Australia’ and ‘the country’s leading authority on Italian cuisine’, according to the half-title page – is best known for the restaurant Grossi Florentino, in Melbourne, and for his television appearances. The Foreword is by Jerry Lewis no less, whose ‘own personal favourite’ tomato sauce recipe is included, should you want to cook like the stars. This is a perfectly nice compilation of recipes, admirably suitable for home cooking. Mrs Grossi is clearly a marvellous cook, and she looks like a very pleasant woman, judging from the ubiquitous photographs. There are fairly standard recipes for Pesto Genovese, Osso Bucco, and Zabaglione that are available anywhere, but also many interesting dishes that reveal her inventiveness, taste, and personality: roast chicken (lots of garlic and rosemary), pickled mushrooms, and a delicious-sounding Salmon Ripieno (salmon stuffed with scallop mousse). Some of the texts that introduce the recipes do not work in translation from the spoken word to the printed page. They are peppered with infelicitous comments such as ‘Mmm, chicken-and-homemade-mayonnaise sangers!’, ‘Portarlington mussels – wow!’, ‘The things we’ll do for love, hey?’, and ‘It is a savoury dish, but oh so sweet!’ Complementing the recipes is a plainly told narrative of the author’s parents, their lives in Italy and new beginnings in Australia. The story is oddly dispersed throughout the recipes, making it hard to follow. Odder still is the fact that just when the Grossi family story becomes interesting it stops with the school-age Guy in the kitchen playing around with gnocchi. Apart from an unilluminating page further on about Italian Easters and Christmases, we learn nothing more about Mrs Grossi, or Guy, or anything really. Can we expect another instalment (More Recipes from My Mother’s Kitchen) so that we can find out what happened next, or did Grossi simply run out of steam, defeated by the celebrity publishing schedule? I felt that Mrs Grossi had been short-changed by not having her full story told. There are many other fine books available in English on Italian food, and Recipes from My Mother’s Kitchen is not of the standard that we expect from this normally excellent imprint. For more comprehensive coverage of Italian food from writers who present recipes within the context of Italian culture, Marcella Hazan’s several volumes or Elizabeth David’s Italian Food (first published in 1954 and still in print) are hard to beat. CONTENTS: MAY 2012

Christopher Menz

Christopher Menz

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