EATING HEAVEN

Honey and Almond Slice

Pairing certain foods in cookery has a long history. The combination of honey and nuts is one of the most enduring. In ancient Arabia, Egypt and China, early cooks caramelised nuts and dried fruits in boiling honey to make temple offerings, medicines and balms, and as an early act of preservation. In the story of…

Catalan teacake

There is much that I remember about València — the ancient port city of Spain on its Mediterranean coast. I remember the plazas and gardens, the extraordinary architecture and markets — but it’s a cake I recall most easily. It was in the Fitzroy-like neighbourhood of Ruzufa, just south of the city’s historic centre. One Sunday,…

Zucchini and Green Bean Salad with Pistachio and Lemon

Salad has never been my thing. Menu in hand, my beloved gravitates to a salad every time, but not me. I remember dad dismissing anything raw and leafy as ‘rabbit food’ and for years the prejudice stuck. More recently, for the sake of good health, I’ve embraced the leaf with a more open mind. The…

Tucci on soup

“I am a soup lover. To me soup may be the greatest culinary invention. It can be made with two ingredients or two hundred and twenty-two ingredients. It can be served hot or cold. It can be cooked fast or slow. It can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It can be vegetarian, vegan,…

A.A. Gill on dinner parties

“The real sin of dinner parties is that they usurp the most basic human goodness of hospitality and succour and turn it into a homunculus of social climbing. But they also confuse two distinct occupations: cooks and chefs. Cooks do it at home for love. Chefs do it in public for money. Dinner parties are…

The benign intimacy of a spoon

“A spoon is naturally soft in the mouth, rounded and smooth, and with that comes a certain gentleness. There is tenderness to a spoon … A spoon is hospitable … A spoon can do little harm.” Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts (2024)

Annie Smithers’ confession

There are moments in the best memoirs that are deeply confessional, as you’d expect, but not in a self-indulgent way. Instead they provide the gift of vulnerability to which readers connect. These memoirs allow us in, not only to the writer’s life but our own. Annie Smithers’ Kitchen Sentimental is just that. Annie has been…

Ruthnum on curry and authenticity

“The Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani immigrant cooks in 1970s England who added tinned tomatoes, ginger, garlic and chili to tandoor-forged chicken to make tikka masala weren’t undoing centuries of tradition: they were innovating and adapting a living cuisine that has sustained itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by absorbing them. The inauthenticity of…

Shewry on Australia’s ‘national cuisine’

“The question that I’ve been asked hundreds of times is: what is our national cuisine? All along, the answer was simple and right there in front of us, tugging at our hearts, unacknowledged, wilfully ignored. Although I shouldn’t have to, I’ll say it here for the record: Australian food is the food of Aboriginal and…

Fish Molee – Fish in coconut milk

Sometimes the taste of fish is lost in a dish that’s full of spice. The subtle flavours common to many fillets are overpowered. Not so this one … not for me anyway. I’m told it’s an Anglo-Indian recipe common in Kerala on India’s tropical Malabar Coast. Some speculate Portuguese origins, but its popularity has spread…

Tucci on faith, reverence and ceremony

In his book What I Ate in One Year, Stanley Tucci recalls a meal he shared with two friends in the heart of Rome. It was not Italian fare but French. L’Eau Vive is run by French Carmelite Nuns in a old palazzo, an upstairs room with vaulted, frescoed ceilings. Part way through the entree,…

Chopping board

I have a new chopping board and I don’t like it. My old board was ready to retire. It served me well for a decade. We were close. But the rubber stoppers on which it rested had decayed and the patina of its wood grown weary. I looked for its replacement for months, and finally…

Crumbs: a sense of closure

“Crumbs are precious. The last, minuscule fragment of cake or cookies or toast. Diminutive, but not insignificant. How anyone can leave them on the plate is beyond me. Mopping the final vestiges of cake with a damp finger and bringing them gently to the lips is as important to me as the first forkful. It…

Murgh Makhani – Butter Chicken

Here’s my second curry to originate in the northern city of Delhi. Apparently it’s a relatively recent invention — it didn’t appear until the 1950s. A restaurant specialising in tandoor-cooked chicken came up with the recipe as way of using the chicken and juices leftover from service. I’ve heard it’s now one of the most…

Bhuna Gosht — Lamb curry with stir-fried spices

My earliest memory of curry was the small tin of Keen’s Curry Powder that appeared in our pantry in the early 70s. It was topped with a lid you had to prize off with the wrong end of a teaspoon. The deep yellow of its turmeric made it look almost radio-active. Along with mum’s recipe…

Gopnik on taste (and queues)

A queue outside a restaurant is a potent thing. I’ve noticed in my neck of the woods there are lines forming everywhere. There’s that ramen cafe just around the corner, a Thai hole-in-the-wall at the top end of Bourke, and dumplings in a grubby laneway off Collins. Melbourne’s weather might change by the moment, but…

Rosemary and memory

“Rosemary is a smell I come across often, and one that warms me somehow. I cook with it: roasted nuts with rosemary, roast lamb and rosemary, roast vegetables and rosemary. It’s neither a happy nor a sad smell, now, but the sprigs worked their intended magic: I remember. Rosemary is a smell of hope and…

Deliciously ugly

We had beef stew tonight, though the name undersells. I used a Maggie Beer recipe with a more embellished title. The end result was delicious. The combination of red wine, vino cotto, orange zest, kalamata olives, fresh herbs and six hours of slow cooking resulted in a rich, warming end to a wintery Saturday. It…

Custard Tart

There are two types of people in the world: those who love custard and those who don’t. The custard lovers are good people — decent, nurturing and kind. The others … well, enough said. I like custard. I always have. In whatever form it comes, custard is the most palatable form of reassurance. There’s that…

The innocence of peas

“In the vegetable world, there is nothing so innocent, so confiding in its expression, as the small green face of the freshly shelled spring pea. Asparagus is pushing and bossy, lettuce is loud and blowsy, radishes are gay and playful, but the little green pea is so helpless and friendly that it makes really sensitive…