RECIPES MY MOTHER COOKED

If you can imagine the stories and conversations, the recipe swapping and kitchen hints that would fly around if you put Maggie Beer and Margaret Fulton, Damien Pignolet, Jill Dupleix, Ian Hemphill, Stefano Manfredi and a few dozen other prominent cooks and chefs and food writers in a room together, you start to get the idea of how much fun this book is.

Mixed with a solid dash of nostalgia, here you have Australia’s most passionate food-lovers sharing with us what has made them great today. Not only that, you get to sample the foods they loved as children: golden syrup dumplings as cooked by Maggie Beer’s mother, rabbit, carrot and prune casserole prepared the way Gabriel Gate’s mother did it in France, even less classical dishes such as Max Walker’s mum’s ‘hypnotic chook’.

Joanna Savill reveals why she loved her mother’s easy chocolate fudge cake, and Jill Dupleix her ‘granny’s goo’. Lyndey Milan remembers coconut cake made for birthdays while Charmaine Solomon still recalls her mother’s crab curry with nostalgia.

It’s all here in this unassuming book, a wonderful melange of homespun, hearty, and most of all tasty dishes, prepared with the only ingredient you can’t buy at the corner store – a mother’s love.

Recipes My Mother Cooked, 100 home-cooked recipes from the country’s favourite foodies, Allen & Unwin, 2010, softcover, rrpA$29.99.