Australia’s QUEEN of CUISINE
Maggie Beer champions the sophisticated tastes Down Under
With three television series to her credit, numerous cookbooks and delectable foodstuffs on national grocery store shelves, Maggie Beer is an Australian icon — and a beloved one too, if people’s candid reactions are anything to go by.
Pop by her farm shop in the Barossa Valley in South Australia. If she’s there, she’ll happily pose for photos with anyone who asks. She’s gracious, warm and friendly. And did we mention stylish, too?
Even middle-aged men who don’t count themselves as foodies have the warm and fuzzies when queried about the 70-yearold Beer. She’s just that kind of person.
That would also explain how her career, which has spanned 40 years, shows no signs of abating. She’s a judge on the TV show The Great Australian Bake Off, her Maggie Beer food product line continues to expand, and she’s created a non-profit foundation to improve food in agedcare facilities across Australia.
Beer recently chatted with The Vancouver Sun at her farm shop where, seated at a table in the restaurant’s sunroom with calming bucolic views of the “dam” (what we would think of as a man-made lake), she set the record straight about Australian food.
“I think the greatest misconception about it is that it’s not good, that it’s still Anglo-Saxon dominated,” Beer says. “Real food people know it’s good. The misconception only applies to people who haven’t been here.”
Beer, who is not formally trained as a cook or chef, grew up in a family that was passionate about fresh ingredients — something that she says was unique at the time.
“I started cooking with my family at about (age) six — I was taught to pick the freshest pumpkin, the freshest fish. We opened our own oysters, cooked every bit of offal, and that was unusual. For me, I just grew up thinking everyone did that,” she says.
Beer says it was the big influx of Italians and Greek immigrants after the Second World War — and later the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians — that really altered the national palate, especially as the Mediterranean nations and Australia share similar climates for growing fresh produce.
And it’s the Mediterranean cuisine and ingredients that resonate most with Beer.
“I am a totally produce-driven cook. I totally admire produce-driven cooks. We are relating to the ingredients we have at hand,” she says.
Though the big shift came 40 years ago, Beer says it’s really in the last 10 years there’s been a huge escalation in the quality of Australian food that she attributes to three factors: the success of Australian chefs at home and abroad, the media, and farmers’ markets.
“There’s a trickle-down effect. Australians travel a great deal. We’re quite a sophisticated society,” she says.
But for Beer, it always comes back to the produce.
“We can (grow) anything here,” she says. “We’re such a large country and we have so many microclimates. The quintessential Australian food is different in every place.
“So up north where it’s hot, it should be mangoes, chilies and limes. Melbourne has a different climate. Sydney has a different climate. It should be a salad in the heat of Sydney made out of macadamia, avocados and wonderful things from the sea. There is no such thing as an Australian dish.”
And grow everything, Beer does. Well, almost.
She and her husband Colin have been raising pheasants and other fowl for decades. They also grow grapes, peaches, apricots, olives, quinces, apples and pears to go into the sauces, jams, pates, verjus and ice creams the Maggie Beer brand produces in Tanunda, South Australia. And they also buy from many other local growers to keep up with the production demand. “We’re farmers,” she says. And ones deeply connected to their community — something Beer relishes and felt was missing in her upbringing outside Sydney.
In the Barossa, everyone knows Beer and her family. She says it’s always a relief to return to the farm and the valley from her travels.
“I’m connected,” she says. “Coming to live here was the greatest gift of my life.”
She pauses briefly and corrects herself, laughing, “Oh, I think Colin probably was.”
As the temperatures are dipping in Vancouver, they’re soaring in Australia leading up to the Christmas season. So the question begs: What’s for Christmas dinner Down Under with the Beer family?
First it will be cocktails and appetizers on the patio.
“We will have yabbies (a type of crawfish) outside if the oysters are spawning. It’s always lunch for us,” she says.
“It’s quite poultry-based because we have our own geese and my daughter does those beautiful chooks (mature, free-range chickens). But we always have yabbies if they’re available.”
Though they’ll do some type of roast bird, that’s where the traditional English-influenced Christmas feast ends. Beer is not interested in having everything roasted and boiled when it’s 40 C outside and when it could be fresh, like a lobster and melon salad or, of course, those yabbies and oysters. And maybe a little pavlova or perhaps a chocolate kumquat tart for dessert.
Whatever is on the menu, one can be assured it will be a flavourful feast at the Beer house this holiday season.
When The Vancouver Sun tour group arrived at the gracious cellar door of the Peter Lehmann winery in the Barossa Valley for lunch one overcast November day, no one knew it would be the kind of meal where you would want to lick your plate clean or that it was the final meal that Aileen Proudfoot would be cooking for the winery.
The 16 Sun readers knew they would taste some fine Lehmann wines under the tuteledge of former head winemaker Andrew Wigan, but the delicious meal tinged with the emotion of Proudfoot ending a 17-year run with Lehmann made it a memorable occasion for all.
In South Australia’s Barossa Valley, wine and food are inseparable, informing the creation of one another.
And for Proudfoot working with the Lehmann winemakers, specifically Wigan, was an educational experience for almost two decades.
“When you work with a winemaker you learn every day,” Proudfoot says.
Early in her professional cooking career, she worked for food doyenne Maggie Beer. Not surprising in an area that isn’t hugely populated and where everyone seems connected.
“She’s a natural cook,” says Beer of Proudfoot. “And a beautiful person, too.”
That affection is mutual and Proudfoot credits Beer for giving her a break when she needed one. Not surprisingly, they both are passionate about fresh ingredients.
“I like to cook like her. It’s fresh, it’s clean, it’s seasonal — lots of butter,” she says, laughing. “It’s simple as well, but it has flavour.”
It was Proudfoot’s talent as a gardener that brought her to Peter Lehmann, not the lure of the kitchen.
“I was asked to come here to fix up a garden, then they asked if I’d do another one and then they asked if I could do lunch.”
Proudfoot kept those gardens — vegetables, flowers, herbs and an orchard — going over the last 17 years, which supported what she produced from the kitchen.
Fittingly, the recipe she made for that last lunch was a Maggie Beer recipe for Rolled Chook (free-range mature chicken) with a few of Proudfoot’s own tweaks — as cooks are known to do.
The roast potatoes that accompanied the chook were perfection. Her secret? “I boil them until they’re almost cooked and I only finish cooking them in that last three-quarters of an hour before you eat them. Tender but not too tender and then I put them into a warmed butter.”
Then she finishes them in the oven.
Retiring only days from her 68th birthday, Proudfoot wasn’t going to get too wobbly — although a standing ovation almost tipped her.
Mostly she’s a woman with a lot of gratitude.
Such that she wants to use her experience with food to help others.
“I have a lot of people to be thankful to,” she says. I’ve been paid, now I want my food to give something.”
That something is cooking workshops with people coping with depression.
“I’m going to use my food to tell a story. I’ve already had many beautiful responses. You can do good things with food.
“It’s not going to be sad. It’s like the phoenix.”