In an interview on The Top Cookery Books of All Time

Your next choice, The Cook’s Companion, is by Stephanie Alexander – one of Australia’s most famous chefs. What can you tell me about this book?

This book is too big. It’s the heaviest book in my collection. But for all its sins of weight, it has a very clever balance between information and inspiration. So, for instance, if I turn to ‘peaches’ or ‘pork’, it gives me enough background for me to know what I’m doing before I start on the recipes. But it’s not a heavy read. Stephanie is obviously a very experienced cook: she’s been cooking in restaurants for pretty much all of her life. But she wears that knowledge and experience quite lightly; she doesn’t hit you over the head with it. And I like the way she cooks; it’s quite robust cooking. I tend to turn to her when I come across something that I want to know a bit more about. I wonder, ‘What does Stephanie say?’ She’s very good on ingredients, and because she’s had years and years of experience, it’s very, very first hand. I find that invaluable, those years of knowledge.

The Amazon reviews do seem to absolutely rave about it: ‘The greatest cookbook every published’; ‘My cooking bible’, etc. But is it more ingredients rather than recipes?

It is a bible. And no, there are a lot of recipes in there. They vary from the basic classics, some very simple things, and then she’s got her recipes from her restaurants as well. It’s a colossal work. It must have taken her years.

Is it very Australian? I know there’s kangaroo in there.

There is certainly an Australian slant. If you struggle you can probably get kangaroo here in London, but I’m not sure I want to. Apparently it’s very lean…

In an interview on Simple Cooking

Next book? 

The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander, who owned a restaurant for many years, which was one of the best, if not the best, in Australia – and she’s a fantastic cook. I don’t know how long it took her to write but it’s the book that sold the most in Australia ever – not only of cookery books – so it’s a massive achievement. This book is a bit like a bible or a dictionary – it’s a huge book with so much information and you can go there for so much reference. She talks about the production of the food and the tradition and the culture. For example, you go to kumquat and then you will see where they come from, where they grow – originally it’s Japanese or whatever – and then the seasons, and she has a friend who likes to do this recipe and then that – but you have to be careful because they are very bitter, and a way to cut this bitterness is to do this. You see, it’s more than just a recipe, it’s very informative. 

What kind of tradition does she draw on? 

This woman had a bit of an interesting life also, because I think she stayed in France for two years to learn and to cook, and she went to Asia, and obviously in Australia you have a lot of influence: Asian, French, Greek, Polish, people for whom food is their passion. And the Australian people embrace all this, and have an understanding of it, and then it becomes part of their culture, so there is a lot of influence. The book’s really personal as well – obviously for reference you can search the internet and find most of what you want. But in Stephanie Alexander you have the facts, plus a bit of reading, and you understand a bit of her life and her friends, and things they are doing. Like they are doing an orange chutney, and she says: My friend is doing this chutney and what I like about it is when we met for a curry weekend ten years ago a friend of ours brought this orange and we did this chutney, and in Japan they do this. So this story plugs into the recipe, and you have a bit of human perspective.