Edmund Mason, Mrs Irving and the first Australian cookery book

18 June 2023

Jacqui Newling, Paul van Reyk and Alison Vincent

First published in Petit Propos Culinaires 125, April 2023

The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the Upper Ten Thousand – by an Australian Aristologist is usually given the place of Australia’s first published cookery book. The ‘Australian Aristologist’ was Tasmanian politician Edward Abbott and the book was published in London in 1864.

This claim has now been challenged. While doing research on an unrelated topic Paul van Reyk came across a front-page advertisement in the first edition of the Parramatta Chronicle and Cumberland General Advertiser, a four-page broadsheet.

Read more.


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Big Mulch

Paul van Reyk
According to Mum, my first attempt at cooking, at 6 or 7, was a ‘curry’ of leaves and twigs stirred up in kids' versions of earthenware pots still used in Sri Lanka - chatties. I've broadened my repertoire since, and upgraded the utensils, but stuck with leaves and twigs, Now, though, they’re likely to be spices and herbs used in my specialty, the food of South Asia – Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. I eat it, I cook it, I cater with it, and I take people on tours to find it – at home in Australia and back in South Asia.

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