Pair Alcohol With Food. John D. Porter and ‘The Chef Suggests

17 October 2025

October 2025

‘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.

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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.