Carmen curlers, extra marital lovers, and some damn good food. The quartet of Bernard King’s 1977 seasonal cookbooks as camp texts.

    12 March 2025

    March 2025

    Through the course of 1977 Celebrity Chef Bernard King released a quartet of cookbooks, one for each season beginning with Autumn. King was an openly camp gay man on his television cooking show King’s Kitchen.

    Camp has been variously defined over the years. I borrow from these to define camp as a style and an aesthetic that is deliberately theatrical, frivolous, excessive, audacious, satirical and questions traditional modes of expression and practice.

    The quartet is unique among Australian cookery books for its content. It’s the content with which I deal here to show that the quartet are camp texts.

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    Small Mulch

    Paul van Reyk
    My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.