Australian chef explores local food
BEN Shewry is one of the most celebrated chefs on this sunburned continent, a New Zealander who moved to Australia in 2002 and has since developed an immigrant’s love of his strange new home.
The cooking he performs at Attica, the elegant little restaurant he owns and operates in Ripponlea, one of Melbourne’s quieter suburbs, is precise and beautiful, lauded at home and abroad as a reflection of his growing understanding of the nation and its history: its ancient, indigenous ingredients transformed by his emotional reaction to them into something indisputably new and exciting, memorable and rare.
So salted red kangaroo and bunya-bunya emerge from Shewry’s kitchen: art on a plate, with a side of history. Also sprays of salt bush, shakes of Davidson plum powder, wattle seeds in many forms, jumbuck, Vegemite, snow crab, emu-egg sabayon and even a precise and witty take on the smashed avocado on toast you can find in nearly every restaurant in this city.
A meal at Attica can run to 20 or more courses and last in the neighbourhood of three hours. Easily half of that time could be spent learning from the servers what it is you’re actually eating, where it came from and how difficult it is either to prepare or to prepare in a way that makes it delicious.
“You can’t look things like that up anywhere,” Shewry told me during a discussion of how he develops recipes for the ingredients he finds. “There is no website. There are no recipes. You really have to work at it, experiment, think.”
On a recent Sunday night at home with his family, though, there was none of this high drama and art going on in the kitchen. Instead, Shewry, 40, was keen simply to grill a few cheese kranskies on the deck behind his midcentury modern home, then wrap them in white bread with charred onions and a squeeze of ketchup.
“A regular Bunnings sizzle”, he called it as he cooked, while his three young children stood beside him, hopping up and down in anticipation.
The words come fast in Australia, and to those who have travelled from afar they can be dizzying in their unfamiliarity.
It is not just those bunyabunya nuts harvested from pine cones the size of badgers, or the wattle seeds that come off towering acacia trees. A kransky is a Slovenian-style sausage, similar to a Polish kielbasa, brought to Australia by immigrants and given a new name. You can buy them plain or cheese-filled. Shewry reckons the better version to be the one with cheese.
Bunnings, meanwhile, is a large Australian hardware chain that offers space in its parking lots on weekends, so community groups can raise funds selling sausages from the company’s grills. They call these events sizzles. A Bunnings sausage sizzle is a national tradition here, perhaps as familiar to Australians as Boy Scout-led hot dog roasts are in the United States.
Shewry wasn’t cooking supermarket meat, though. The kranskies, fat and glistening, came from Gary McBean’s organic butcher shop a few kilometres away in the Prahran Market in South Yarra, the same outfit that keeps Attica in lamb and beef. The plain white bread did nothing to diminish their crackly, oozing flavour. The onions and ketchup may in enhanced it.
So this was Australian cooking as well, Shewry made a point of saying that night. (His wife, Natalia Shewry, followed the sausages with lasagna and salad.) And so was the Cantonese meal he had taken me to a few days earlier, at a lively restaurant in the middle of the immense Chadstone Shopping Center in Malvern East, the nation’s largest mall. Also, the bowl of pho we’d slurped at a dingy l i t t l e spot i n t he Springvale market, the pork souvlaki we’d eaten in the Greek neighbourhood of Oakleigh and the croissants we’d inhaled at Kate Reid’s astonishing Lune Croissanterie in the hipster Fitzroy district, washing them down with the flat whites that have helped bring Melbourne coffee fame.
“That is all my comfort food,” fact have he said after the kranskies, “what I really like to eat”.
But he wanted to be clear: Australian cooking, he said, ought to reflect more than simply the nation’s history of immigration – the forced transportation of British convicts in the late 18th century, the arrival afterward of Chinese miners looking for gold, and the rush of Europeans in the wake of World War II. It should also celebrate the 50,000 or more years of aboriginal culture that came first, and the ingredients that made that culture possible.
“What I really, really want to do at the restaurant,” Shewry said, “is to bridge this immense divide between what immigrants have brought to this country and what was already here.”
The gardens of the Rippon Lea Estate, a short walk from Attica, are central to that pursuit. A large farm built in the mid-1800s for a wealthy Melbourne businessman named Frederick Sargood, who ran it with his wife, children and a large house staff, the property is now in the care of the National Trust of Australia. Shewry and his cooks plant and maintain plots throughout the gardens and orchards and visit them daily to harvest, prune and keep up the ancient irrigation system that Sargood installed against the fierce Melbourne summer sun.
Here, then, are the cook’s leaves he serves at the start of each meal – delicate shoots of mustard and sorrel to swipe through house-made sour cream flavoured with balsamic and apple. And a pomegranate tree, shaping up heavy with fruit.
Here are carrots he will roast over pepper-berry leaves on a pellet grill behind the restaurant until they are dense and sweet and smoky. And there, a plum pine tree that in a few months will yield a fruit that Shewry needs to serve within three hours of harvest, lest it spoil. It rose beside its mate, tall, with lanceolate leaves and dark purple seed cones.
Few who come to Attica, he said, know what the fruit of the plum pine tastes like. He pointed at one, small, still growing. “It’s bitter now, and it will only be delicious for a few hours when it’s ripe,” he said. “But when you taste it?”
He spread his arms wide. “I want them to know: This is your country’s food,” he said. “All of this.”