Gay Bilson
The Nation Reviewed
Cannibal Cookery: Channel 7’s 'My Kitchen Rules'
Gay Bilson
Dinner was a large bowl of freshly picked, steamed butter beans with a smidgen of olive oil, lemon juice and herbs. Still hungry, but later...
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The Nation Reviewed
Bread and Butter
Gay Bilson
For dessert we ate hot puff pastry with a filling of grated apple cooked with butter, eggs and lemon. It pleased the guests, although one...
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The Nation Reviewed
Flavour of the Nation
Gay Bilson
For our last breakfast on a tiny island in the Alappuzha backwaters in South Kerala, we had asked for kanji, a gruel of rice or millet....
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The Nation Reviewed
Impresario
Gay Bilson
At first glance, the 2010 Adelaide Festival program felt, well, small, in a sensible, tightly fused kind of way, with far fewer advertised...
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The Nation Reviewed
A Fava Fresca!
Gay Bilson
Early in October the broad beans began to appear, but were still so small that it was mere ritual to nip one or two off and eat them whole...
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The Nation Reviewed
Masterchef
Gay Bilson
It is like a sixteenth-century court: royal, papal, judicial – take your pick. The court makes its own rules and makes sure, by its self-...
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The Nation Reviewed
Bad Behaviour
Gay Bilson
My daughter, who is in her thirties, was doing the dishes. I began to dry. You can’t have a conversation with a dishwashing machine. We...
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The Nation Reviewed
Harvest
Gay Bilson
The South Australian autumn had been wet, and in the early morning the soggy earth steamed, especially under the pines in the Adelaide...
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The Nation Reviewed
Botanical Curiosities
Gay Bilson
The most enchanting display in the original and permanent collection of the recently re-opened Museum of Economic Botany in the Botanic...
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Cooking Brains: Martin Jones’s ‘Feast’
Gay Bilson
Near the beginning of William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors, an old woman makes fire, opening a ball of clay, placing it over an old...
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