October 2025
One is perfectly safe in asserting that the art of cookery is the art of civilisation.
In this Australia of ours, the lack of imagination concerning excellent wine and good food is lamentable.
‘The Chef Suggests. Strange and exciting dishes with delicacies of the table for to-day and to-morrow’ ‘Compiled and collected’ by John D. Porter and published in 1949 has sat among my cookery books unregarded for several years. Chancing to take it down for some research, I was unprepared for what I found but delighted that I had found it. It struck me as unique among Australian cookery books with its combination of recipes, a guide to wines and pairing wines with dishes, and vignettes on culinary and hosting practice. At the time of its publication it garnered praise in London:
AND there’s been London acclaim for an Australian author in recent weeks. Andre L. Simon in the spring number of his London gastronomical journal, “Wine and Food,” had nice things to say about John D. Porter’s Australian-published “The Chef Suggests’. Says Andre L. Simon ‘This is the first book written by an Australian and published in Australia that may be considered a serious attempt at lifting the approach of the people of Australia as a whole to their daily food from the lower ranges of mere feeding to the higher levels of gastronomy.’
“C.B.” writing in the Australian magazine The Bulletin said it was ‘Probably the first book published in Australia to elevate Australian food and wine into world class as material for gastronomic pleasure…’
High praise indeed. Yet the book or Porter doesn’t come up in conversations, articles, or papers about Australian cookery books, at least none to my knowledge.
This article aims to redress that.
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