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ARTS AND CULTURE

Stephanie Alexander and the family table

  • 02 August 2024
  I own a handful of recipe books. Over the years I’ve offloaded piles of them, donating them to op shops and school fetes. These days I’m more likely to Google a recipe to use the seasonal produce I pick up at my local Saturday market, the herbs defying the odds to survive in my small garden, or to use up what’s in my fridge or pantry.

But there are a few cookbooks I can’t quite bring myself to part with. The Women’s Weekly Kid’s Cake Book, circa 2002, has tested, frustrated and delighted me as I worked through many of the cakes. The echidna ice cream cake, lazy ladybird, the castle, jungle fever, the ghostly galleon, and the fairy godmother ‘Dolly Varden’ cake come to mind (until my kids decided they were happy to have a supermarket mud cake). I’ve kept a cookbook from my Ballarat parish, which offers an insight into some interesting 1970s delights. Apricot chicken anyone? And then there’s Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion, which took Alexander four years to write and was first published in 1996.

I received the massive orange bible that is The Cook’s Companion when the first of my three children was 18 months old. The timing wasn’t great. I spent the better part of the next 15 years using minced meat in a dozen different ways, pasta and easily prepped meals to be served during the juggle of work, school, sport and life. Once the kids had gone to bed, I often sat skimming through the 816 pages, bookmarking interesting bits with the orange marker ribbon.

In it, Alexander champions fresh and seasonal produce, which not only tastes better but is usually kinder to your wallet. She makes no apologies for not including nutritional advice. ‘I believe that noticing differences in depths of flavour, texture and juiciness and appreciating, for example, the smell of warm strawberries produces more food lovers and fewer fast-food addicts than attempts to convince the latter to abandon ‘bad’ foods because of their nutritional paucity,’ she decrees.

Much later, I was drawn to recipes that met a need or resonated with me. Too much parsley in the backyard and I would turn to page 494 for the best tabbouleh recipe. Before my passionfruit vine turned up its toes, I used to make the passionfruit curd. We grew up with a giant quince tree in the middle of our chook run, so Alexander’s
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