We’ve invited Barbara Sweeney – cookbook connoisseur and founder of Food & Words – to pick out the best cookbooks of the year. Read on for Barbara’s guide to choosing the right cookbook for your loved ones this Christmas!
Food Culture
As a Sydneysider with a life-long attachment to Bondi Beach, my first pick is Icebergs Dining Room and Bar 2002-2022 (Simon & Schuster, $100, published 30 November), a large format, hardcover book that chronicles the life of Maurice Terzini’s Bondi restaurant, Icebergs. This book is about sea and sky, creativity and collaboration. It is about the making of a restaurant; from the design of the premises to the food on the plate, the cocktails mixed at the bar, and, most importantly, the treatment of the guests. Read about the making of the restaurant in its first 20 years and the people, food and drinks that make up the Icebergs’ DNA which, at heart, embodies the essence of Italian hospitality. The book’s design is clean and spare, lifting the images of the food, cocktails and photos of Icebergs’ unparalleled ocean vista, which appears throughout as a motif. Want to be a better restaurant customer? Read Terzini’s Treatise on Hospitality, page 214. Perfect for: sensualists.
My inner-Italian swoons on finding Vino: The Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine by New York wine lover and restaurateur Joe Campanale (Crown, $55). Campanale fell hard for Italian wine after attending a wine tasting as a university student. Since then he’s exhibited a voracious thirst for the country’s winemaking tradition, which includes 333 winemaking regions and 2000 endemic grape varieties. Read about Italian winemaking over time, travel the country from north to south, and meet the winemakers and their wines. Highlights include the tale of Timorasso, a native Piedmontese grape variety rescued from extinction, and the story of winemaker Pierluigi Lugano of Bisson in Liguria who ages his Bianchetta Genovese blend underwater for 18-26 months. Perfect for: anyone planning an Italian food
and wine road trip.
Wow. Just wow. Richard Christiansen’s Fridays from the Garden - Recipes and Stories from a Year at Flamingo Estate (self-published, $150) is a testament to the power of food to do good. Christiansen, an LA-based Australian and owner of the Owl Bureau bookshop was, like the rest of us, confined to home during the pandemic. In his first week in lockdown he heard about a farmer whose business supplying restaurants collapsed overnight, compelling her to leave her produce to rot unclaimed. In response, Christiansen started selling produce boxes out of the bookshop. When this initiative was closed down by the health department, he pivoted to a home delivery service, selling 75,000 produce boxes that year. Now he heads up Flamingo Estate, a business that provides good food and supports farmers and a range of environmental organisations, including the Jane Goodall Institute. The book is filled with Christiansen’s favourite stories and recipes. Perfect for: dreamers.
Same, same, but different is Alice Oehr’s children’s book Off to the Market (Scribe Publications, $25). Written and illustrated by Melbourne-based Oehr, the book follows
a mum and her daughter on their weekly shopping
trip to the market – no doubt Melbourne’s famed Vic Markets. Readers will meet various stallholders, encounter different varieties of fruit and veg and
learn about when fruits are in season (strawberries
are sweetest in early summer!). Lush pastel and
digital collage illustrations paired with a friendly yet matter-of-fact tone delivers a lovely shared reading experience for parents and little ones. Perfect for: those who love a feel-good story.
Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, then Home
(self-published, $60) is the creation of Ella Mittas. Monochromatic, inked in the colours of the Mediterranean, and wrapped in a transparent dust jacket, Ela! Ela! is more than a cookbook. It is an exploration of belonging and a vehicle for Mittas’ writing, photography and printmaking. The prose
is spare and heartbreaking. You can read a sample
of Ella’s essays in The Saturday Paper.
Perfect for: adventurous spirits.
You will definitely cook from Salamati: Hamed's Persian kitchen; recipes and stories from Iran to the other side of the world (Murdoch Books, $45) by Melbourne restaurateur Hamed Allahyari with food writer Dani Valant, because the recipes are alluring and approachable. You will be swept up by Allahyari’s story of growing up in Iran and of fleeing the country
in his early twenties to build a new life in Australia through food and cooking. Allahyari was one of the
first hosts of Free to Feed, an organisation that employs refugees to teach cooking classes, and he is now
the proprietor of Café Sunshine & Salamatea, a social enterprise community space. Perfect for: jaded souls in need of inspiration.
Cookbooks
Over the years, I’ve found there are two types of cookbooks: the one that leaps up and speaks to you without the need to look beyond the cover and the book that necessitates a deeper reading. With the first, trust your instincts. The latter is a reminder to never judge a book by its cover and to give every cookbook a chance to make it onto your bookshelves and into your heart.
I loved Pasta Grannies the moment I saw it. The brainchild of Vicky Bennison, Pasta Grannies is a video project featuring Italian women who make regional pasta dishes by hand, a traditional skill that is disappearing. The project has yielded two books and Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking (Hardie Grant, $45) is the second. Inside, you will find a how-to section on making pasta along with many nonna-approved pasta recipes, such as a chickpea tagliatelle from 91-year-old Angelina and an escarole pie from 97-year-old Feni (my favourite!). Perfect for: pasta lovers.
Another author bent on saving fast-disappearing skills is Fiona Weir Walmsley, a farmer from Gerringong on the NSW South Coast. On Buena Vista Farm, Walmsley and her husband tend an ever-expanding herd of dairy goats, make cheese, run a commercial farm kitchen, raise laying hens, meat birds and pigs, keep bees, keep a small coffee grove, grow cut flowers and run a cooking school. Many would think that Walmsley’s devotion to making family meals from scratch – on top of all those farm responsibilities – is madness. But, in fact, there’s strength and power in making your own butter, yoghurt, crackers, bread, biscuits and cakes, jams and pickles and more, which she demonstrates in From Scratch (Murdoch Books, $45). Through these ‘from scratch’ recipes, Walmsley makes a convincing argument for reclaiming the resourceful part of ourselves that we’ve lost to the industrialised food system. Perfect for: food activists.
When it comes to cookbooks from great Australian female cooks, we’re spoilt for choice this Christmas! There’s Karen Martini’s COOK (Hardie Grant, $100); Alice Zaslavsky’s The Joy of Better Cooking (Murdoch Books, $50); and Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart (Plum, $60). Tenderheart is a reclamation of Lui McKinnon’s Chinese ancestry and is ripe with hybrid flavour combos. This is a 500-page, 150-recipe ode to the vegetable kingdom and to Lui McKinnon’s dad, who worked in Sydney’s Flemington fruit market during the week and waited tables in a Chinese restaurant on weekends. Perfect for: plant-based eaters and those who cook for them.
Another Plum title (this PanMacmillan imprint is producing some lovely cookbooks) is Around the Table: Delicious food for every day from the popular Melbourne author Julia Busuttil Nishimura (Plum, $45.00). If this is an example of the delicious food Busuttil Nishimura cooks for her family every day,
I want to move in. Perfect for: cooks seeking solace
in comfort food.
It is said that you’re lucky if you get two or three recipes from a cookbook that you love and incorporate into your repertoire. My copy of Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things by Noor Murad and the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen team (Penguin, $50) already has 13 post-it notes stuck to the pages. Burnt aubergine pickle, sweet potato with crispy tofu, blueberry and cream cheese crostata… Will this man never falter? Perfect for: Ottolenghi fans (and there are millions of us!)
Another UK cook with millions of fans is Heston Blumenthal. In his new book, Is This a Cookbook: Adventures in the Kitchen (Bloomsbury, $50), the Michelin-starred restaurateur invites the reader into a conversation about the nature of cookbooks and recipes. The book represents a change in Blumenthal’s purpose: from understanding food through chemistry, to incorporating a more intuitive approach. Alongside each recipe, from bacon butty to fish cakes, is an illustrated commentary that teases out the nuances of the recipe. Perfect for: cerebral and curious cooks.
This list contains an inordinate number of references to Italian food and wine – but can you blame me? If you are not already enamoured with the food of Italy, A House Party in Tuscany by Amber Guinness (Thames & Hudson, $65) may pique your interest. It has all the goods: a beautiful house, food, wine and art. Read it, and you may even find yourself signing up for a course at the Arniano Painting School. Perfect for: creative spirits.
Croissant addicts have been longing for the release of Kate Reid’s debut cookbook, Lune: Croissants All Day, All Night (Hardie Grant, $55/Special Edition, $100) – and here it is. Reid’s ambition was to perfect the croissant and here, she shows us how she did it, step by clinical step. It does not hurt that she has a background in aerodynamic engineering. This book is to pastry what Josh Niland’s books are to fish cookery. If you’d prefer to just head straight to the source, visit Kate’s Lune Croissanterie (stores in Melbourne and Brisbane). Perfect for: the perfectionist and patisserie students.
First, Cream the Butter and Sugar: The Essential Baking Companion (Murdoch Books, $60) is the debut offering from Melbourne food writer, Emelia Jackson. Biscuits, cakes, tarts, pastry, fillings and toppings are all covered and the photographs are luscious. Raspberry passionfruit tart or double chocolate eclair, anyone?
Perfect for: the afternoon tea host.
FOOD WRITING
Now that the festive season menu is done, it’s time to choose a beach read for the post-Christmas break! The below picks will keep even the serious sun-lounger occupied for hours.
A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisolm (Monoray, $33), follows the author, a young Englishman newly arrived in Paris who is consumed by his desire to become a writer. He has his hero’s book – Orwell’s Down And Out in Paris and London – tucked into his back pocket as he walks the streets of the city, stopping for café and stoking his dream. However, when Chisolm hits rock bottom (no money, barely a word of French and nowhere to live), he finds himself a job as a waiter. He goes on to chart the highs and lows of the year he spent working in one of the city’s mid-tiered bistrots, an ‘inefficiency-riddled structure … manned by underpaid and underfed slaves’. Chisolm is a talented writer with the skill to draw you in and insist you stay the course. Perfect for: those who like behind-the-scenes drama.
Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal (Reaktion Books, $40) by self-styled culinary archaeologist and Norwegian food writer Andreas Viestad is told from the diner’s perspective, specifically, from the comfort of a table at La Carbonara on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. Selecting ingredients from the La Carbonara menu (bread, oil, salt, pasta, lemon), Viestad provides a food history lesson, spanning Roman and Italian history. There are hints here of Margaret Visser’s revelatory book Much Depends on Dinner (1986). Perfect for: food or trivia nerds.