Food

Coming to my Senses: The making of a counterculture cook by Alice Waters

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January–February 2018, no. 398
Mimi Biggadike reviews 'Coming to my Senses: The making of a counterculture cook' by Alice Waters

It is a colourful and turbulent life Alice Waters leads. Thankfully, it is turbulent in the fruitful sense, a process of regeneration and creation so nimbly edited into her autobiography ...

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The Oxford Companion to Cheese edited by Catherine Donnelly

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March 2017, no. 389
Christopher Menz reviews 'The Oxford Companion to Cheese' edited by Catherine Donnelly

The Oxford Companion to Cheese is an impressive undertaking with masses of fascinating and informed writing, and many illustrations on a delicious subject. It takes us from the origins of cheese – seventh millennium BCE – to the most recent technological developments. The scope is broad: as Catherine Donnelly notes in her introduction, there are 325 con ...

The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals book edited by Marcia Reed & Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance by Gillian Riley

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April 2016, no. 380
Christopher Menz reviews 'The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals' edited by Marcia Reed and 'Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance' by Gillian Riley

Food in history is a tantalising thing. Although we may have recipes, firsthand descriptions, and images, we can never be sure how things really looked or tasted. Much of the work of food historians has been focused on creative use of available sources, not to provide facsimile meals, but to gain insight into the cultural role of food of the past. Two recent books e ...

The Essence of French Cooking by Michel Roux & The Best of Gretta Anna with Martin Teplitzky by Gretta Anna Teplitzky and Martin Teplitzky

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November 2015, no. 376
Christopher Menz reviews 'The Essence of French Cooking' by Michel Roux and 'The Best of Gretta Anna with Martin Teplitzky' by Gretta Anna Teplitzky and Martin Teplitzky

Why is it that some recipe books fill you with enthusiasm to fire up the stove the instant you open them while others remain on the shelf, consulted rather than cooked from? Is it the text, the photographs, the design, or because they come from the pen of a trusted cook? In the case of The Essence of French Cooking and The Best of Gretta Anna with Marti ...

The English and Australian Cookery Book by Edward Abbott & The English and Australian Cookery Book Companion: 1864–2014 Sesquicentenary Edition edited by Edward Abbott

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January-February 2015, no. 368
The English and Australian Cookery Book

Given the deluge of cookery books and unrelenting television programs, it is hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t a single Australian cookery book. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the first: The English and Australian Cookery Book, a volume published anonymously in London, and compiled by ‘An Australian Aristologist’, Edward Abbott. Abbott (1 ...

Christopher Menz reviews two new Australian baking titles

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September 2014, no. 364

The Australian sweet tooth and ongoing love of cakes and desserts is evident in two recent publications. Both cover the basics as well as offering more ambitious fare; they are good places to start if this is your thing.

Phillippa Grogan’s eponymous pâtisserie in Melbourne, established in 1994, offers the type of baked goods presented in this publication: ...

The Bloomsbury cookbook: Recipes for life, love and art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls

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June–July 2014, no. 362
Bloomsbury Jam

In the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary (1915–19), an entry in June 1919 mentions England’s possibly ruined strawberry crop. ‘This is a serious matter for us as we have just bought 60 lbs. of sugar, & had arranged a great jam making. Strawberries are 2/ a lb. at this moment. Asparagus 6d & 7d, & yesterday at Ray’s I ate my first green pea ...

The Agrarian Kitchen by Rodney Dunn & New Classics by Philippa Sibley

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March 2014, no. 359
Heterodox peas

Two quite different books from two very different chefs illustrate some major trends in cookery writing and publishing in Australia. One is by a city chef who runs a restaurant, and the other by a country chef who runs a cookery school.

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One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France by Anne Willan

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December 2013–January 2014, no. 357
One Soufflé at a Time

Not everyone’s father sends his daughter a brace of pheasants while she is studying economics at Cambridge. With a choice of two gas rings on which to cook them, Anne Willan eviscerated and plucked the birds, then used one gas ring to cook a pheasant casserole and the other to make a caramel custard that she ‘steamed over a galvanised tin laundry bucket’. She ...

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

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October 2013, no. 355
The raw and the cooked

If Michael Pollan were a terminal illness, I’d be in the fourth stage of grieving. He has had a brilliant and successful run until now, producing seven books in just over twenty years, taking up a university teaching position (yes, food-related), writing long articles, mostly for the New York Times, and all the while cooking and thinking his way to se ...

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