Food

There are times when I really feel my 20th-century Australianness, and not always in a good way. Often it is when I am thinking about, or cooking, offal. With my suburban Anglo-Saxon upbringing, I was not brought up with even a notion of nose-to-tail eating. But I have developed a great fondness for the place the “offaly bits” hold in everybody else’s culture, and have tried to embrace them as part of my own. As with so many traditional offal dishes, it always seems to come down to finding ways to use absolutely everything from an animal after it has given its life.

Talk of nettles and most folk flinch, recalling run-ins in fields with shorts. The thought of eating or even harvesting them isn’t exactly met with exuberance. Like most things involving gardening, it draws an analogy with life, as I was once taught to “grasp the nettle”. If you aren’t committed and show fear by brushing them, they will sting; but if handled with confidence, the grasp will break the needle and you won’t be affected. Now I handle nettles without gloves in the kitchen. Hardcore.

I think the basic technique of choux pastry is a prime example of why cooking never loses its shine for me. It reminds me of the continuous mirror images that fascinated me as a child, a constantly repeating effect. But with choux it is always tumbling and turning and becoming something slightly different but equally delicious.

When buying quinces, a few imperfections are a good sign that the fruit has experienced fewer chemicals and industrialised processes. Quinces, like apples, because of their varieties, have a fairly long season. By the time you work from the top of Victoria down to the foot of Tasmania, and through all the varieties, you should have almost three months of fresh fruit.

There is something magical about the relationship between flesh, salt and fat. Long before refrigeration and factory farming, there was a time and a place for the life of an animal to end and its flesh to be preserved for the coming months. I have a great fondness for two such types of preserved meat from the Gascony region of France: duck leg confit and ventrèche.

When done with consideration, cooking can be a great way to show the oyster’s flavour. In winter, especially, oysters tend to have more of a muscle, and rock oysters can be treated almost like clams to show this off. This recipe uses smoked oysters in a Chinese-style chicken broth that riffs on the meatiness of the oyster. Next to this is one of my favourite things of all time – buttered cabbage and turnip – which gives it a bass note.

This potato terrine appeared on our menu over the weekend of our local celebration of the potato and such was the response to this unlikely hero that it reappeared the following week, a fate that has befallen no other entree in five years of operation. There is something strangely light about this potato terrine and it pairs beautifully with the fruit, the leaves, the crunch of the walnuts and the acid of the vinaigrette, with just the right amount of richness from the cream, eggs and cheese. It is the sum of its parts.

Cooking mackerel is a commitment. I cook them over coals using a Japanese technique, grilling with the dry heat above charcoal rather than through contact with the flame. You cook only on one side, through a wire rack. When the meat turns opaque two-thirds of the way through, with just a bit of crimson left and some caramelisation in the belly, it is ready to take off.

Pithivier is more a work of design than an absolute on how and what it’s made of. There are a few absolutes, though. It must be made with puff pastry. It must be circular. And it must have the rays of the sun etched into the top of the pastry so that, when baked, it represents a golden sun motif. Other than that, you can go your own way, fill it with all manner of sweet and savoury fillings, and make small ones or large ones.

Keeping vegetables whole and intact for as long as you can yields similar benefits to meat on the bone, but for me cooking in a self-sealing dome of salt – or clay and hay – is the pinnacle. In this recipe I serve the celeriac with mustard cream and salmon roe, but it is really adaptable. It would sit well with sautéed livers, for instance.