Come join Fergus for a drink!

[Fergus Henderson :] ‘The child of Elizabeth David and George Orwell.’ - A.A. Gill

Fergus Henderson will be in Melbourne for a day or two & we’ll be having a chat with Fergus about his books over a Fernet Branca at the European this coming Monday 21st May.

Fergus caused something of a sensation when he opened, with Trevor Gulliver, the restaurant St John in London in 1995.

Set in a former smokehouse near Smithfield meat market, its striking, high-ceilinged white interior provides a dramatic setting for food of dazzling boldness and simplicity.

As signalled by the restaurant’s logo of a pig (reproduced on the cover of Nose to Tail Eating) and appropriately given the location, at St John the emphasis is firmly on meat. And not the noisettes, fillets, magrets and so forth of standard restaurant portion-control, all piled up into little towers in the middle of the plate: Henderson serves up offal and secondary cuts in big, exhilarating dishes that combine high sophistication with peasant roughness.

In addition to wide ranging critical acclaim for his approach to ‘Nose to Tail’ Eating and the celebration and rebirth of British traditional foods in a restaurant context, Fergus is also an Andre Simon Award Winner for his wonderful book Nose to Tail Eating.

Fergus will be signing copies of both of his books, and rumour has it there might be mention of a new book to come.

What: A Drink with Fergus
When: Monday 21 May 6.30pm
Where: The Tea Room at The European, 159-161 Spring St

Bookings are Essential

Tickets are $10 per head which includes a glass of Fergus’ favourite tipple, Fernet Branca

To book call us on (03) 8415 1415 or email us

Since we saw the early review copy of Charlotte Wood’s Love & Hunger: thoughts on the gift of food back in March, we have been eagerly awaiting its release instore so we could share it with you.

Usually new releases are either full of glossy pictures with celebrity chefs festooned on their covers delivering sometimes an over sumptuous visual feast or text rich, almost dour, practical tomes designed to educate rather than titilate.

To our surprise and pleasure, Love & Hunger is neither.  Almost oddly positioned as neither a cookbook nor a polemical statement, Love & Hunger manages to be a cookbook for the kitchen, a gentle read for the bedside table and a positive affirmation of the pleasure of cooking for family & friends.

Charlotte Wood is a highly regarded Australian novelist and journalist based in Sydney for whom food and its place at her table with family and friends is one of the most important parts of her life.  This collection of 27 essays gently and sensitively explores the rich complexity and spiritual sustenance that good food with family & friends imparts to our lives.  Each chapter  explores, a different aspect of ‘the gift of food’ with a number of recipes ‘attached’; all of them good, none of them complex and many wonderfully comforting.

Love & Hunger is beautifully and simply written (as one would expect from an author with such critical recognition; another of her novels, Animal People is currently listed for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award).  There were many moments when reading, we nodded in heated agreement with the almost commonsense views espoused.  As one other reviewer noted, it’s rare for a cookbook to move you to tears; be warned you may succumb.  Wood’s scholarship is also in evidence (she is currently a PhD candidate looking at food in literature) as many of her accurate observations are elegantly woven into a gentle but compelling argument

If there is a criticism to be made, we would only want more….

The title of the book comes from this paragraph, from MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me - which is the epigraph Charlotte has used for this book.

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.”

Love & Hunger is published by Allen & Unwin and is available as a paperback for $29.95 instore or online and as an ebook from www.ebooksforcooks.com.au for $9.99