The best cookbook is the one you cook from and the one you hand on, complete with splatters and scribbles, to the next generation. Whether you own a handful or a hundred, your cookbooks define who you are as a cook. You will have your own best-of list.
This has not been an easy undertaking. With my stomach in my mouth, here are a few of the cookbooks that have helped Australian cooks find their groove in the kitchen. All are worth owning, whether for the writing, recipes or influence they exert. This list is confined, mainly, to general cookbooks aimed at the home cook, with a few cheffy incursions. It works like a timeline, charting our awakening as Australian cooks and eaters.
20. The Margaret Fulton Cookbook by Margaret Fulton (1968)
Dinner parties were the thing in the late 60s and early 70s (as were after-dinner mints) and it was Margaret Fulton’s recipes for consommé and beef wellington – or filet de boeuf en croûte – that graced the tables of the day.
Australian cooks were turning their eyes to the world – as well as the world of food – and it was a diminutive Scottish-born Australian cook leading the way. This book, which featured on the bestseller list for a decade, was responsible for teaching a generation of Australians how to cook and made Fulton one of our first celebrity cookery writers. Her mantra was to always use quality ingredients and cook with care, which explains why the recipes in this book stand up today.
Cook: beef stroganoff
19. The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon (1976)
It was Charmaine Solomon who introduced the predominantly Anglo-Australian palate of the time to the wonders of charry, smoky satay, redolent rendang and sour soups. In her career, Solomon has written more than 30 cookbooks and this one is still in print 46 years on, mapping out 800 wide-ranging recipes from 16 Asian countries.
Cook: beef rendang
18. The Gretta Anna Recipes by Gretta Anna Teplitzky (1978)
If you lived in Sydney in the 60s, 70s or 80s and you wanted to learn to cook “continental” food, you enrolled in Gretta Anna Teplitzky’s cooking school. Teplitzky and her husband, David, self-published The Gretta Anna Recipes and it became an essential reference for home and professional cooks who wanted to flambé with the best of them.
You’re more likely to find a copy of The Best of Gretta Anna with Martin Teplitzky – published in 2015 – than the original, but don’t fret: they both include the infamous carrot cake recipe.
Cook: French onion soup, coq au vin
17. The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book by Pamela Clark and Maryanne Blacker (1980)
What can I say? This book is the stuff of legend. It set the standard for children’s birthday cakes and continues to do so – and has sold more than a million copies. Parents may shudder at the memory of their cake experiments, but for their little one, it’s a colourful blur of unbridled joy. A collector’s edition was released in 2011.
Bake: swimming pool cake
16. New Food by Jill Dupleix (1993)
New Food was met with great excitement. At last, a cookbook that reflected what we were really eating. Aussie chefs, having flirted with nouvelle cuisine, were asking themselves what it meant to be an Australian cook and Jill Dupleix did what she does best, distilling these fresh and exciting ideas onto the pages of her book.
Her credo, outlined at the beginning of the book is now commonplace: buy only what is fresh and in season. Do everything in your power to retain the original flavour of the produce. Have fun.
Cook: prawns with chermoula
15. Maggie’s Farm by Maggie Beer (1993)
These days we automatically connect the dots between food on the plate and from whence it came, but not so much back in 1993, which is what makes this book such a pleasure to read. In it, we meet Maggie Beer, her husband, Colin, and their girls, and learn about life at Pheasant Farm in the Barossa.
Recipes are arranged by season and ingredients and short essays appear on each. The enthusiasm and joy Beer has for food and cooking is infectious.
Cook: Tuscan grape harvest sweet bread, guinea fowl in lemon and garlic sauce
14. The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander (1996)
It’s become a bit of a game, but I look out for Stephanie Alexander’s book The Cook’s Companion in interior design magazine stories and in photographs of chefs where their bookshelves form the backdrop. Both the broad, bright orange cloth spine of the first edition and the rainbow stripe of the second are easy to spot, and the frequency in which they appear speaks to the book’s universality.
To sell 15,000 copies of a cookbook in the Australian market is an achievement; to sell 500,000 is a phenomenon. This book is Alexander’s opus, the sum of more than 25 years in professional kitchens and 40 years of cooking.
Cook: Vietnamese chicken and mint salad, lemon delicious pudding
13. Bloody Delicious by Joan Campbell (1997)
Joan Campbell was the straight-talking food editor of Vogue Entertaining Guide, a food magazine launched in 1978 that went on to exert enormous influence on the emerging food and restaurant scene of the 80s and 90s, inspire Australian cooks and chefs, and make household names of the many chefs and food producers who appeared on its pages right up to 2014, when it ceased publication.
Bloody Delicious is an incredibly generous book that makes you want to cook food for the people you care about. Best of all, it bears the hallmark of the very best cookbooks: acknowledgment of how the author came by the recipes in it.
Cook: chicken liver parfait with green peppercorns, frangipani cake, and pecan wafers
12. Bill’s Sydney Food by Bill Granger (2000)
Bill’s Sydney Food feels a little dated 22 years on (it was refreshed in 2020 with the publication of Bill Granger’s Australian Food), but it makes this list because it was where the recipe for those infamous ricotta hotcakes first appeared. They are the best and still feature on Bill’s cafe menus.
Cook: ricotta hotcakes
11. Thai Food by David Thompson (2002)
You can’t help but admire chef David Thompson and all he’s done to turn us on to Thai food. His approach to the cuisine is scholarly and pedantic – both evident in Thai Food, the second of three books he has written – and the resulting dishes, for those of us lucky enough to have eaten in his restaurants, taste glorious. The original publishing proposal was for a book on Thai snacks, but it was this hot pink-wrapped masterpiece that emerged. This is a book to read from and dream.
10. Plenty by Gay Bilson (2004)
Plenty is not a cookbook, although recipes are included in it: sorrel soup, caesar salad, and chocolate pots, for example. It makes the “best” list because it is one, if not the best collection of essays about Australian food and cooking by a writer who thinks deeply about food and eating and writes about it well.
Plenty is no longer in print, so look for it in second-hand and specialist cookbook shops. You will be well rewarded for your efforts.
Cook: creme brulee
9. Let it Simmer by Sean Moran (2006)
Some cooks are blessed with an innate ability in the kitchen and Sean Moran is one of them. Matthew Evans, a former food critic and now Tasmanian farmer and restaurateur, summed up the appeal of Moran’s food thus: he is “the man you’d entrust to cook your last meal, balancing home-style comfort with modern tastes: his flavours make me go weak at the knees.”
His restaurant, Sean’s Panaroma on the beach at Bondi, is quintessentially Australian, as is this book.
Cook: polenta with braised fennel and olives, good chook with creamed corn, baked custard
8. Mix & Bake by Belinda Jeffery (2007)
This is one for the bakers. It edges out other equally beautiful and inspiring baking books for the sheer fact of its reliability, as Belinda Jeffery is renowned for testing and retesting recipes until they are just right, which makes for appreciative neighbours. Chocolate recipes are a specialty, but Jeffery also enjoys a good fruit cake. Mix & Bake’s enduring popularity saw the book revised in 2017.
Bake: one-pan macadamia and chocolate chip brownies, lime and cream cheesecake with raspberries, toffee almond slice
7. Simple Chinese Cooking by Kylie Kwong (2007)
Of the six books by the Sydney chef Kylie Kwong, Simple Chinese Cooking appears to be the most enduring, demystifying Chinese cooking with step-by-step instructions and photographs that illustrate the various cooking techniques. Many of the recipes evoke a nostalgia for eating in Chinese restaurants in country Australia.
Ah, childhood memories of san choy bow, sweet and sour pork, and crispy king prawns with honey and garlic. What’s most important about this book is how it clearly demonstrates Kwong’s creative unfurling, as she moved from the food of her ancestors to one she can call her own, bringing both her Chinese and Australian identities to the table.
Cook: prawn wonton soup
6. Falafel for Breakfast by Michael Rantissi and Kristy Frawley (2015)
Like all the other cooks on the planet, I love Yotam Ottolenghi, but sometimes it’s good to have an Aussie reference to Middle Eastern food and this is the book I rely on for that for its unfailingly reliable and delicious recipes.
It’s also where aficionados of Rantissi and Frawley’s Sydney cafe, Kepos Street Kitchen, will unearth the culinary secrets of their hot smoked salmon and potato salad and chocolate halva brownies.
Cook: lamb burgers with Middle Eastern coleslaw
5. Best Kitchen Basics by Mark Best (2016)
It was impossible to resist including this cookbook in a list of the best, for obvious reasons. But seriously, this is a book of austere beauty and interesting twists from the mind of the renowned Sydney chef Mark Best.
Even though some of the recipes are exacting, there’s plenty to appeal to home cooks who want to stretch themselves. The book features recipes for 31 common ingredients, from apple to yoghurt.
Cook: dried chocolate mousse
4. Australian Fish and Seafood Cookbook by John Susman, Anthony Huckstep, Sarah Swan and Stephen Hodges (2016)
For a continent girt by sea, there were remarkably few locally produced cookbooks devoted to fish and seafood before Australian Fish and Seafood Cookbook arrived on the scene. Created by four talented fishy folk, the book provides an A to Z guide for fish and shellfish and many suggestions on how to cook it well.
It’s a remarkable and beautiful-looking book with a broader scope than the recent releases the from fishy wunderkind Josh Niland. There’s no competition, though: if you love to cook fish and seafood, you need them all – this book and Niland’s two.
Cook: fish pie, harissa-painted Murray cod
3. Street Food Vietnam by Jerry Mai (2019)
Be warned, the photographs of the Vietnamese street food that author Jerry Mai (a David Thompson alumnus) cooks for this book pop right off the page, triggering an instant Pavlovian response. It’s a tough call: get into the kitchen immediately or, if in Melbourne, head to one of Mai’s restaurants (Phở Nom and Bia Hoi Bar) to quell the raging desire for banh mi or noodles.
This is one of the best kinds of cookbooks: the one that sizzles with excitement and propels you to take culinary action, coaxing us to Vietnamese food enlightenment – bowl by bowl of fragrant, herbaceous pho.
Cook: five-spice calamari
2. Chinese-ish by Rosheen Kaul and Rosheen Hu (2022)
If there was one brilliant book to come out of the lockdowns, it was Chinese-ish. The story started when the Melbourne-based friends Rosheen Kaul (chef) and Hu (illustrator) came up with the idea for a zine that would introduce reluctant cooks with a bit of time on their hands to learn how to cook classic Chinese food using pantry staples. Their self-published Isol(Asian) Cookbook went on to become a fully fledged, real-life cookbook – and left many Sichuan sausage sanga addicts in its wake.
Cook: creamy tofu noodles
1. First Nations Food Companion by Damien Coulthard and Rebecca Sullivan (2022)
The unique flora and fauna that has nourished First Nations people for more than 100,000 years gets a mention in historical colonial documents and early cookbooks (fern syrup and native currant jam feature in an 1843 recipe collection printed in Australia) and yet remain a culinary mystery for many of us. Why?
Food writers such as John Newton (The Oldest Foods on Earth, 2016), Vic Cherikoff (The Bush Food Handbook, 1997) and Jean-Paul Bruneteau (Tukka: Real Australian Food, 1996), as well as chefs such as Sydney’s Peter Gilmore (of Quay fame) – none of them First Nations people – edged the conversation towards the mainstream, along with many pioneers in the agricultural industry. Hurrah for this landmark book, which combines Adnyamathanha man Damien Coulthard’s cultural knowledge with Rebecca Sullivan’s interest in the local food economy and a desire to feed her family well. Both authors show you how to buy, grow, cook and eat from the amazing pantry on our doorstep.
Cook: macadamia butter, quandong and Davidson’s plum iced vovos
This article was amended on 10 October 2022, to make clear that Damien Coulthard is of the Adnyamathanha people, not Rebecca Sullivan as well.
