Annie Smithers

Annie, Kitchen Sentimental begins with the question of why cook? Is this a question that has sat with you for a while?

I think it's a question that most people ask me, why do you cook? I'm sure people have asked you about what you do. Why do you teach? Is it because you have a love of the French language? Is it because you have a love of educating and encouraging and inspiring people to learn something that you love, or you've taken to? Cooking is very much the same for me, it's something that I do.

I was reflecting on it this morning and it's something that I've said quite a lot; I'm in that extraordinary, extraordinarily privileged position of the fact that not only am I one of these people that lives to work as opposed to just working to live, but every day there is some piece of radiant joy that makes me love what I do just that little bit more than I did the day before. It's a very, very beautiful thing to do. And after all of these years and the trials and tribulations of living in commercial kitchens for 40 years, is that the root of my job – and it's taken me a long time to get to realise this – the real reason for what I do is that for those of you that come into my space, and I have you in our little space for three or four hours, my real function is to make you feel loved and nurtured, nothing more, nothing less, I'm not going to blow your hair back with food that's intricate and lots of tweezers and this and that because it's just me in the kitchen. It's a simple process where I just want you to feel loved and what better job than that.

Absolutely. I think I remember you putting me in my place when I first spoke to you and I said to you, oh, Annie, it's just so amazing, cooking is such an art form and you just said, I just cook lunch, Jo. And I thought, okay, you might cook lunch, but it's a different kind of cooking lunch than I do. And I think there is an art to cooking simple food really well and there's a series of events that end up with people feeling loved by your food.

The book is written chronologically. I think the first major influence was Stephanie. wWhen I did my apprenticeship at Stephanie's restaurant in Hawthorn, it was based very much on classic French technique. I still run the funniest little cooking classes when I've got the time that are demonstration only and they're really just these elongated conversations. You can't tell people all of these things when you write a recipe, they'll get bored or they won't read it or they'll skip over that bit or whatever. But the whole thing about technique is that it is the building block of really good cookery and it's about being able to take anything and knowing basic techniques allows you to use things and do things not only beautifully but efficiently as well. It goes all the way back to them. This style of food that I cook that is incredibly simple in terms of it looks really simple, but it might have things in it that have taken me days to create. But it's just the normal practice for me because I'm in there all the time poking around.

You do make that point that it is different to working in a kitchen as you do, to someone who's a home cook, who's putting meals up night after night for a family and having to think about what they're going to cook and then going to the supermarket and do all that kind of thing. There are some actually really nice hacks in there.

In writing this book, one of the things that became very apparent to me was that I left home at 17. I had my nice private school education, and left school wanting to become a cook. There wasn't really any career guidance for becoming a cook in my day. No one was going to help me with that. And the other thing that I really reflected on is that at PLC in 1983, it wasn't really an option to go to Ag College either. There was no way I was going to learn how to grow vegetables from my lovely private school education, but I could learn how to write though. And I learned a lot of history and that was very helpful.But I left home at 17 to become a cook. And it wasn't until my wife Susan and I bought Babbington Park and we settled there with her two daughters who were, at the time 14 and 16. So we dragged two teenagers from the city into the middle of nowhere with very little mobile phone reception, let alone internet. I realised that for all of that time in between, I had never been part of what I refer to as a regular family. And that's a regular family where not everybody works in hospitality. Where there is a mother and children and breakfast, lunch and dinner and snacks and more snacks, because one of the girls is very fond of snacks. And I realised with absolute horror that I had never really, and people say to me all the time, oh, you're so clever, look at you out in the kitchen cooking for 24 people and you're so clever. It's got nothing on what the regular caregiver does in the home every single day. Now, predominantly it's women, but you know, there are men there that do the caregiving and things. But for all of you who have cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner, organised school lunches, done this, done that, dealt with children that don't eat this and don't eat that, the tantrums, the things on the floor, the partner that's had a really bad day at the office and says, I don't want to eat that. I think your job is miles harder than anything I've ever done. I think that it is an extraordinary thing, the household management is much harder than what I do.

We started with the question of why cook. And I did then think, as you mentioned, you're quite busy, so, why write? Because this is your fourth book. And the last book Recipe for a Kinder Life was also very personal. It was very reflective and meditative as well. And it was all about living more gently and perhaps in a more mindful way with the seasons and appreciating what we have and what you grow. Kitchen sentimental reflects very deeply and honestly on your experiences. What made you want to write those down and share them?

Oh, somebody probably offered me money. No. The lovely Sally Heath who commissioned Recipe for a Kinder Life asked me. Recipe for a Kinder Life was originally meant to be a little book about living sustainably. And somehow COVID arrived and I had lots of time and it turned into this little whatever it is. Sally returned to me a couple of years ago, and she said, how do you feel about writing a book about food as the representation of love? I said, sure, sure, yeah, that'd be great. No worries. And then a bit later on, a contract arrives on the email and you sign that and then all of a sudden the deadline is being talked about and you think, oh, I have to write a book. It was very challenging because when I actually started about thinking about writing this book, I thought, I can't write this book. I cannot write a book that is about food as the representation of love, particularly with my boring Anglo-Saxon heritage. My mother was a great cook. She did lots of cooking classes, but I don't have any food background. I didn't have a nonna or anything teaching me little pasta tricks or an amazing Vietnamese grandmother who taught me how to do this and how to do that. I have none of that heritage. I am just of very, very boring Anglo-Saxon stock. And that is furthered by the fact that because I've been in hospitality for 40 years, I don't really go out much. I cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all of you at mealtimes. So I don't really eat properly. I don't go to Christmas parties or weddings and I'm so glad for that these days that I don't have to go to all of those things or street parties. And I thought, I've got no business to be writing this book. And I said to Sally, look, I'm really concerned about this. I don't think it's for me. We workshopped a series of chapter headings and I sat with those for a while and a lot of them still exist in there, some of them don't. And then I applied each of them to a feeling that each job that I'd had in my life gave me, so each restaurant was allocated a title or a chapter title. And I went from there because I think that, as I've said, for me, my job is to make you feel loved. Ergo food is love. So it is to me very much the representation of love. But I just had to get there. It took a while.

Kitchens have always been, or they have been since the sixties, part of popular culture. And there is a fascination with kitchens, and I think even more so now with successes of things like The Bear on television of this funny world we live in. It is very specific what we do, and everybody cooks and everybody eats, but somehow when it's transposed into a commercial kitchen, the rules change slightly.

We had a chat earlier because I rang Annie earlier today and said, I've got a question I'm going to ask. And she said, oh no, not really that one. But now she has said I can ask it. It struck me reading this book that it's a really excellent potted history and excellent perspective on some really well-known restaurants from a few years ago up to now. And it struck me that the title Kitchen Sentimental, it did remind me of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. And I said, was there anything in that? And she said, no, not really.

I do a radio segment on Radio National with Jonathan Green on Blueprint for Living, and it's called Kitchen Rudimental. He's actually married to Sally Heath, who's my editor. So he actually hated the title Recipe for a Kinder. He didn't like that one, so he got voting rights for this title and he suggested Kitchen Sentimental. And my first reaction to it was yours, no, it's too close to Kitchen Confidential. And then I thought, oh no, look, if it will help sell a book. But the other thing is that the working title on the manuscript on my computer is A Love Letter to my Kitchens. I am pretty sentimental about them. Not all of them. Some of them aren't very nice.

I listened to a podcast you did with Anthony Huckstep on a really amazing competing podcast to Conversation with a Chef called Deep In the Weeds. And you talked to him about a decade of Du Fermier. I just loved the way you said this, so I played it several times and transcribed it. You talked about restaurants as having the beautiful capacity to become what they want to become or what patrons want them to become because they're living breathing entities, like yeast. You can kill it pretty easily, but if you let it grow and if you look after it, it forms into its own crazy little individual personality. So now you've had Du Fermier for 11 years and you've had all of those experiences of those other restaurants. What went into shaping your restaurant?

Well, the other analogy for that is they're like children. My father always said to me, I don't really care what you become or do. I just want you to be happy. And I think restaurants are a bit like that. I have always struggled with my mental health. It has never been my strong suit. I'm one of a lucky percentage of people who is psychiatrically, psychologically and pharmaceutically enhanced so that I can sort of get through the day. But it's something that I actually take very seriously, and I talk a great deal about. It is a theme in the book because I do feel that there's a great need to talk about these things so that people don't feel alone. I think the more that we talk about these experiences, that we relate to them. And so all of those experiences over the 40 years, and I include the time that the little shop has been running, it shifts and morphs a bit because, it costs a lot more to run a restaurant. So we've had to put an extra shift on, I've written a book that I'm taking seriously. So I've squashed the restaurant hours into a pattern that they haven't been into for a long time. But what it has become for me is an incredibly safe space. So when I'm fractured and anxious, and the world's really big, and the pressures are really hard, if I just walk into that room and I start doing something because it's become native to me what I do. Everything I do comes from here. And it's just that sense of, it just brings peace and calm to me. So I think that that's very reflected within the restaurant itself now. And it's small, it's manageable, it's predictable. I was just saying to Jo that I've had a horrible week because my main kitchen hand rang in Monday week ago with Covid. So I've washed lots of dishes this week, and when I wash lots of dishes, it means I don't get lots of other things done. And you feel a bit behind the eight ball, and it's all a bit hard. And I'm a bit sad and it's sort of a bit sooky, but the reality of it is that it, it is of a size that those things are manageable. And if I have to wash the dishes a few shifts, it really doesn't matter. I just sook a lot. But the whole world doesn't end. So I think that the, the lessons of 40 years of cooking have created this little space that, and people often say to me, it is very homely. People cry sometimes. We always find that really lovely. It just brings out an emotion in people that I think perhaps they just sense that it's safe. The big world out there doesn't feel very safe all the time. So I think that's a beautiful thing for it to have become.

But I really liked this at the end because, as you say, you do go through some of the hard times and the good times. And I really like this passage here that I'll just read out.

"Despite struggles with my mental health, my weight, my capacity for personal relationships, my ability to run a business. Finally I was starting to find a way through as a cook. I realized I couldn't please everybody all the time. It's just not possible. And as a person, it was pretty much the same. Some people just don't like you, and that's okay.I settled into a life where I always left the black dog on the doormat as I unlocked the restaurant door and tried to be the very best version of myself as a cook. Each time I stepped into the kitchen, knowing that like nature, this was not a fixed point. I was not an automation, I was flawed and a febrile human just doing the best she could, knowing that if I loved all the processes of the plated food I put in front of others, they may love it too."

Oh, did I write that? I think that this notion of being the best that you can be on any given day is incredibly important to me. Last year I had the great honour of being the pop-up restaurant at the National Gallery for four months. A lot of people were a bit dubious about it. The gallery restaurant is run by a catering company. The catering company struggles for staff as much as the best of us. And as a result, they, particularly on the floor, they had a very, very young staff. And not only was it a very young staff, but it was a very international staff. It was mainly made up of new Australian residents or visa workers. Now, this is not my beautiful restaurant staff that know the ins and outs of every Burgundian vintage from the last 20 years. They were staff of a completely different level and people said, your reputation's going to be trashed. Well, no, it's not. What we went into and what it finished up with is that, I think by the end of it is that each and every one of those people, particularly on the floor, because the kitchen was a slightly more institutionalised arrangement of practices, but I really honestly believe that every single one of those kids on that floor did the best they possibly could every day they were there for me. And I can't ask for anything more than that. If that's the best you've got, it has to be enough for anybody. I just think it's a very beautiful thing to live by.

Annie asked me to pick up on some themes as I read the book. And clearly the themes are love and cooking and food. But I also really loved, there are three women who stand out on your culinary landscape as great mentors and inspirational women. And you describe them as the women who dared to dream and their capacity to throw everything at a dream and realise those dreams. And that was of course, Stephanie Alexander, who the book is dedicated to, Carol White from Lavandula Swiss Italian Farm in Daylesford in Alla Wolftasker from the Lake House in Daylesford. And I really love that at quite crucial times, you went to Carol and she seemed to have such a lovely, soft, nurturing way of approaching things. And I just think how glorious to have those kinds of women in your life.

Yes. Another theme that I touch on is that in hospitality, you have a tendency not to make a lot of friends. The lifestyle is one is that is sort of like camping. You make friends in that restaurant, then you move to another restaurant and it's so consuming that there's not time to backtrack. So you bond with the next people and you bond with the next people. As opposed to say my older sister who went to university and is still friends with the same girls that she went to school with in Year Seven. She has this enormous length of friendship with all of these people. I think I've got two real friends in my life. They're both famous. And one of them is Stephanie. Stephanie initially was my employer, she was my teacher. She has mentored me over the years, but underneath it all, and now she will be turning 84 this year and I'm 58, there is this very deep friendship. And while it's not like a marriage, and I used the word marriage because I remember when my parents split up and they'd been apart for quite some time, I said to mum, you know, do you miss dad? She said, no. And then she said, what I do miss is the history of shared experiences and the conversations. So I've always thought of that with my friendship with Stephanie is that we have had so many shared experiences over the last 40 years and we have a running history and a running future and incredibly entwined interests. Thats a very special thing to have.

Alla is a different kettle of fish. By coming and working in the country at Lake House, I went up there in 92, it introduced me to the country and made me realise exactly where I wanted to be. And Carol saved me. Carol White is a woman who, again, is a very strong female character. She had separated from her husband, she had a couple of young sons. And she fell in love with this incredibly fallen down Swiss Italian property out in Shepherd's Flat, which is just past Hepburn Springs. And she rebuilt it. She was a nurse, she gave up that and she just actually rebuilt it and she organised people and she did all of this. And then she turned it into a small business and that business got bigger.And when I left the Lake House, I rented Carol's cafe space for a couple of years. I'd been completely broken by the industry and I questioned whether I could ever cook again. And it was not the cooking that was the problem. It was whether I would ever cope with the pressure again. I rang Carol and I cried. I cried a lot, and she took a chance on me.And then through a series of very kind and generous steps sort of rebuilt me. And I am forever grateful. And she has the most beautiful little weathered hands. Carol's hands are the most beautiful thing to me.

You describe them in the book, you talk about taking her hands and I just could imagine them. There are some beautiful recipes in here and the recipes match the chapters. I am intrigued by recipes. I think sometimes we might think that chefs and kitchens, they don't need recipes, but recipe creation is really important. And I listened to you on Kitchen Rudimental, and you are working through some Elizabeth David recipes yourself. How did you choose the recipes that went into the book and how do you fine tune the ingredients that go into those for home cooks to replicate?

A wing and a prayer. If you write a book that has recipes in it, they need to be approachable. But I think there was a bit of leeway in the fact that they span quite a period of time. Theres a sticky date pudding recipe in there from when I was at The Mill in 1989. And I vividly remember there was an article in the Good Weekend, and it had this fabulous diagonal cream stripe across the top. And I thought that was the most sophisticated thing I had ever seen. The recipes that came to mind for each of these things were what was my favourite at the time. And then I think about, what was the favourite era? As a chapter, I think the recipes for the time that I was at Alphington House. Now Alphington House was a tiny little wine bar that was next to the Lemon Tree Hotel. I talk about the history of the Lemon Tree, because again, pre-digital, there's not a lot of history written down about the Victorian food scene and how we got from there to here. And it's incredibly important, and it's something that Stephanie and I talk about a lot. The woman that owned the Lemon Tree set up this wine bar next door to her. It was great. And she asked one of her ex-head chefs from the pub, a man by the name of Ian Hewitson who had cooked there when he first came over on the boat, and he had done a consultancy on the menu at Alphington House. Now this is 1988, so it's a long time ago. And everything on that menu that he had us cooking in this wine bar scenario would be perfectly current today. Everything. There was this wonderful dish on there and the recipe is in there, and for me, it encapsulates that little time in life. It was a dish of a half bulb of slow roasted garlic. You wrap it, you cut it in half, and you put thyme and lemon and salt and pepper and a bit of olive oil on it. You put it back together, you wrap it in full, you slow roast it for a couple of hours at a really low temperature. Then you take it out and you've got some beautifully dressed leaves, some grilled ciabatta, this half a thing of roasted garlic. And we had a pot of whipped Walter Burke goats' cheese.Remember Maria and Walters down the road in Carlton, then he got into making goats cheese out in the Yarra Valley. I've still got stickers from the goats cheese on my knife roll at the time. I think that encapsulates a real time in Melbourne when we were eating incredibly good food. And Ian's menu stands completely the test of time.

As well as eating really good food or cooking really good food, now that I talk to chefs, there's a lot of talk about wellbeing and the way to behave in the kitchen. And there's a passage that really stood out for me. Its in a chapter called The Dangers of Cooking with Anger or Spite. And I think maybe watching things like The Bear or Boiling Point or some of these TV shows or Gordon Ramsey or whatever, we get the idea of a chef being angry and stressed and taking it all out on people. And then I read this passage and I just thought it's so perfect because there's a book that's translated from the Spanish called Like Water for Chocolate. And it's about a woman who when she cooks, her emotions go into the food, and then the people who eat that feel those emotions. I'm a great believer that that could be a thing. And then I read this and it was so great. So I'm just going to read it to you.

"A conversation I had with one of The Age food critics has stayed with me forever. We were discussing a meal that had been served at one of the hottest and most notable new restaurants of the time. And the critic uttered words seared my soul. They went something like this. You can see the skill and commitment everywhere. The room is delightful. Everything is perfect from the napery, the glassware, the flatware to the decor, the food looks masterful. And even on sight you can interpret the levels of skill and commitment involved. The aroma is coming from the plate are exquisite, but as you put the food in your mouth, it can barely be swallowed as you can taste the rage with which, with which it is being cooked. These words, this concept, this taste of rage, is there any wonder they've stayed with me as a cautionary tale?"

I think that also goes back to what you read before about leaving the black dog at the door. There is a space in any form of professionalism where you can't go into a classroom full of rage. It's not going to work. It doesn't work with cooking. We discussed this at work the other day when we were talking about Carol being my saviour, and we were talking about it within our boundaries of hospitality world. I said, well, I don't think it IS hospitality world. I think it's every connected workplace. Now, my mother was a teacher for 50 years. I'm very familiar with the staff room, very familiar with the fact that staff room cannot always be a nice place, but I presume that's got better too. But in every industry there will be someone like that person who cooked with rage and there will also be someone like Carol White who is a saviour to other people. I think it's more about the human condition, but it's told through my lens of the kitchen, which may or may not make it more interesting for the people who read it, but it is what we all go through. And the fact of it is, for whatever reason, my life has not always been easy. I'm of a personality type that, I'm a highs and a lows person and I've learned to love that and I've learnt to accept it, but it doesn't make navigating the world always very easy. Its that sense of accepting who you are and having that desire to do the best you can on that day. It may be very different to what it is yesterday and it might be very different to what it is tomorrow, but that's all you can be asked for. And to try and find joy and happiness in it all because it would fail if I went into that kitchen and got really cross with things. It just wouldn't work. Things burn, or bad things happen. I knew I had Covid because I went to work and I was a bit tired and I burnt the bread. I burnt the bread for the first time in about nine years. I put the bread in the oven and something went wrong and I burnt the bread. I thought, what's wrong with me? By the time I got through lunchtime, I actually went out and had dirty cigarette because I was feeling so woeful and I couldn't taste it. I didn't go back to work for about four weeks. I think that illustrates the fact that when you're not on, some things go wrong.

Well, as you can see, I've got lots of pink notes marking the passages I loved. I'm not going to read them all. You can read them for yourself. But there are also some really lovely photos of in the book here. Here is little Annie, for example, and she's looking wistfully into middle distance. Underneath youve written: Sitting on the kitchen bench in my childhood home in Park Orchards, possibly contemplating my future in food, probably trying to stay out of trouble.

In the childhood section, there's actually a suite of recipes for a dinner party or a birthday dinner for 8-year-old Annie. It's really funny and I'm a real nerd about food and I'm a real nerd about food history. But one of the things on it was avocado vinaigrette. Now in the seventies, every house had these little, usually handmade pottery avocado vinaigrette dishes. We were talking about this at work, we were doing a photo shoot for it. We have a lovely young lady named Jody. She is 38. She's old enough, but has never heard of avocado vinaigrette and she can't imagine how awful it would it be to eat. Don't you smash it up and put it on toast or something. I say, no. You cut a little cross hatch in it, you fill it with a really delicious vinaigrette, and you put lots of salt on it and it's delicious. So here we are with this wonderful thing about the reason that they're all so wrong or they can't afford houses is they eat too much avocado when the fact is that we were all eating avocados by the halves in the seventies. Food history.

There's a lot of food history in here and there is a lot of love and thank you so much for coming and sharing it all wth us.