Not a common cookbook
PERHAPS you are after inspiration for setting up a smallholding, want a souvenir of a Friday feast at Fat Pig Farm or the Gourmet Farmer television show, or just want to live well at home. Either way, Matthew Evans’s new book The Commons has you covered. It is his 15th book, and perhaps the one of which he is most proud. Although it covers one year (up to the besieging smoke, cinders and wakefulness during last summer’s bushfires) there are contributions from every of the 10 years spent learning to be a farmer, the last eight of them at Fat Pig Farm at Glaziers Bay near Cygnet.
Just to make it interesting, he and his partner Sadie Chrestman throw in running a restaurant to which as many as 48 people come to a long lunch every Friday to eat only meat, vegetables and fruit grown on the farm they’re sitting in.
In the mixed farm, the garden is Sadie’s responsibility. and Matthew looks after the animals. The cows, which occupy about 20 hours of his week, are his labour of love.
And he says pigs are a great way to find out how patient you are: “Moving pigs is like trying to round up a bunch of preschoolers using cabbage as the motivator,” Evans writes. “It’s a good way to start a row with your partner, although now the agreement is that ‘what’s said while moving pigs stays in the paddock’.”
At a Friday feast in September a friend in our group remarked that she could bake vegetables just as delicious at home. Yes and no.
Working as a restaurant critic in Sydney, Matthew harboured the suspicion that the best food was being cooked not in restaurants, but in homes all over the country where vegies and herbs were harvested 20 minutes before they were served.
His Tasmanian experience has confirmed that suspicion. There is nothing cheffy about the feast food. Rather, he writes: “We are trying to serve the best home-cooked food a restaurant can produce; we are about capturing flavour.”
That includes vegetables picked at their absolute peak. So often they get responses such as “so that’s what corn tastes like!” The sweetest potatoes, he writes, are those picked before the top has died off. They have “a skin that comes off with a harsh sideways glance”. When vegetables are grown for sale, the producer will want them big so there are fewer to the kilo.
Vegetables picked for taste can be very small — as were the swedes, carrots and brussels sprouts with prosciutto we ate at the feast (the brussels sprouts recipe is in the book).
And even if you grow your own vegetables, would you be able to match the variety? There are 70 garden beds on the farm, each about 15m long. On our menu were 20 different vegetables from the garden. The restaurant also thrives on using ancient cooking techniques, where it’s the cooked and raw materials that decide the flavour. Wood fires the Bessie the Essie oven in the restaurant, the outside pizza and bread oven and the firepit, installed in the series just finished. They all introduce a different character to the food, says Matthew.
The cook is trying to understand the wood, which has a deal of natural variation. As Evans says: “It’s the antithesis of Thermomix and set-and-forget cooking.”
Vegies cooked in your electric oven will not taste the same as the sprouting broccoli and squash grilled over the firepit. All that said, feeling you could achieve the dishes at a Friday feast is exactly what you are supposed to feel.
Raising pigs, chooks, cows, goats and a market garden might well be beyond what you can achieve, but as Evans says: “we do not want the food to be the unattainable bit”.
And that is what the new book is there to help you achieve. There is much in it that is old-fashioned – spotted dick, parkin, Garibaldi biscuits (do kids still call them fly cemeteries?) and baked apples with a twist — and home-made marzipan that’s as easy as.
After devouring every page, I have listed 23 recipes I want to get into — an outstanding hit rate for a cookbook for me.
The Commons, (Hardie Grant Books, rrp $60), will be launched at Terror Australis Writers Festival at Cygnet Town Hall on Sunday, November 3, at 3.15pm. Free entry. In Launceston, Bianca Welsh will talk to Matthew Evans at 6pm at Petrarch’s Bookshop on November 11.