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Food

The Bourbon & Beefsteak in Kings Cross

A Romantic B&B

By Paul Ham
Outside a dead bar in Sydney’s Kings Cross, a homeless prostitute sags against a wall. A yellow neon light announcing ‘The Bourbon’ is turned off. The smudged window reveals only a damp cave – all that remains of this once glorious Sydney institution. The sounds have died with it: the howling laughter of soldiers on leave from the Vietnam War; the cackle of old prostitutes in the face
Our Animal Instincts for Eating Meat

Gourmet Gore

By Benjamin Law
Here is how you cook a pig’s uterus. First, visit your local abattoir’s Vietnamese section, where they will happily take requests for ‘special offal’ – which includes intestines, gall bladders, warm blood and reproductive organs. Sows’ uteri come blanched, with a similar colour and texture to tripe: creamy and soft but with a cartilagey bite. Braise them in pork stock, along with

Stardust Memories: In Search of Real Italian Food

By Peter Robb
Tony Bilson has done incomparable good for eating in Sydney over a long time. The gold-coated egg yolk was a Melbourne boy’s astute pitch at Sydney’s easily bored diners – he talked of “keeping them interested”. Yet you wondered whether Bilson, who has been thrashing around a bit lately, losing hats and speaking out sharply, didn’t feel a twinge of regret. Was that all it came to, 40 years on from Tony’s Bon Gout? After de
Food Technology and the Manufacture of Flavours

Taste-Making

By Anna Krien
Jeroen Rens and I are in a small room, wearing hairnets and fluorescent-orange lab coats, looking at plastic drink bottles inside a fridge with glass doors. Each bottle (the labels are removed but most shoppers could still recognise the brand) is filled with a coloured liquid and watched for signs of fading. “Most flavours are clear but you add colour to m
Fasting at a ‘Fat Farm’

Life Juices

By Helen Garner
At 5 pm on Boxing Day we sweep up the drive of the establishment my sister refers to as “the fat farm”. Its modest buildings are set in an old, deep garden: lawns, curved hedges, huge native trees. Our rooms give on to bushland that chinks all day with bel

Operation Tom Yum

By Ashley Hay
Perhaps it was because I'd just seen the trailer for the new James Bond movie, but I was hoping for trench coats or disguises when I sat down to lunch with a group of secret Thai-food tasters. Perched at one of the broad, high tables at Jarun Pompanya's Capita
Martin Jones’s ‘Feast’

Cooking Brains

By 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 patch of the same and breathing on it. She places twigs, leaves and rotting organic material on the clay and blows again. "She bega

Buyer’s Market

By Gay Bilson
Tasting Australia, a biennial event in Adelaide, is aptly named, for although it delivers a dizzying series of culinary entertainments for local audiences eager to get close to their favourite cookbook writer, who usually has a show on pay-TV which spawns coll

The Big Cheese

By Gay Bilson
In 1837 Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, ordered that a 1400-pound cheese be placed in the foyer of the White House for those who were hungry and voiceless. The cheddar cut at the traditional welcome for the well-fed and empowered participants