Cooking

Not many cookbooks are published these days without photographs. We’ve grown used to bright shiny books, lavishly illustrated with glossy pictures alongside the recipes. Homecooked Feasts is an exception to the rule. No foodporn here, just a simple collection of favourite recipes from home kitchens around Australia.

The collection has been provided by listeners who responded to a call by the ABC’s local radio stations for people's favourite celebratory recipes for special occasions. The recipes flooded in, leaving Maggie Beer and Valli Little the unenviable task of choosing 150 of them for the book.

True to the spirit of radio, the reader must imagine what the finished recipe might look like.

The chapters cover familiar celebrations – Christmas, Australia Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays and anniversaries, weddings and homecomings.

Each recipe tells a story. There’s the Cool Yule Christmas Pudding Margaret has been making for 31 years – in a 70s green Tupperware container. There’s Mandatory Sauce that Jeanette’s cousin named one Christmas 30 years ago, and which Jeanette has made to go with ham, prawns, turkey or chicken every year since. Some contributors credit their recipes to a beloved Nana or Mum. Others have cadged them off workmates and made them their own. Others have brought them to Australia from homelands far away.

Many of the recipes have become family traditions like Nanna Hourigan’s No Fail Sponge. Contributor Kerry says, “This is my mum’s recipe. She had 11 children and was widowed when 8 of them were still quite young. There was never much luxury growing up in our house, but you would always know that Mum would make the effort to make you this beautiful sponge for your birthday. I now continue that tradition with my own children, and have taught my own teenage boys how to make it.”

Evrim shares a recipe for the red lentil balls made by his mum back home in Turkey. A watermelon and cucumber glut in the garden spurred Bronwyn to invent her salad. Paula’s grandmother who cooked on a station in Victoria in the late 1890s was introduced to a spicy tomato sauce and four generations of the family have made it every summer since.

Kids returning home after long absences are often quick to plead with Mum to make their old favourites.

This book is brimming with nostalgia and family love and as Ian “Macca” McNamara says in his foreword, it’s the love people like his mother put into cooking food that gave it a special flavour.