Jane and Jimmy Barnes share the “joy” of embracing Australia’s multicultural menu in new cookbook
After teasing us for years with photos of their family feasts, Jane and Jimmy Barnes finally share their favourite recipes in their new cookbook.
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THE long-awaited family cookbook from our first couple of rock, Jane and Jimmy Barnes, is a love letter to the invaluable influence of migrants on the evolution of Australia’s food culture.
Where The River Bends offers another intimate portrait of the family who found a new audience with their unfiltered social media moments from the Janes Barnes Band performances to the rocker’s daily bunch of flowers plucked from their garden in the NSW Southern Highlands.
Through its “recipes and stories from the table of Jane and Jimmy Barnes”, it charts how ethnic food cultures shaped their family feasts.
“When people start to kick up about immigration and refugees and too many strangers coming to this country, I just say, ‘Look at what you’re eating’,” Jimmy said.
“Look at what they have brought, the culture and the joy and the richness that food has brought to this country.”
While Australia’s “traditional” roasts are regularly a centrepiece of their table, Jane’s collection of recipes also reflects the national trend towards boosting our vegetable intake.
Several family members eats a plant-based diet and the River Bends garden is a year-round source of produce for the Barnes kitchen.
“Through all those migrant cultures we learned how to cook the great produce we had here. We always had great vegetables, great fish, great seafood, but we didn’t really know how to cook it well until we took on all these influences,” Jimmy said.
He is insistent the key to getting children to eat what you want them to eat – yes, even vegetables – is “early introduction.”
“Make them taste good,” he said. “Put them in a pasta primavera or a ratatouille that will be exciting for them to eat.”
Jane knew there was some expectation her first cookbook – after years of sharing her meals on social media – would be heavily weighted with Thai recipes.
MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo famously begged for her Thai chicken curry recipe.
But Jane gathered culinary influences from all over their world from an early age. After her parents split when she was four, her mother Phorn fell in love with a young Australian diplomat John Mahoney who brought her and sisters Jep and Kaye to Canberra.
“I learned a lot about ‘Australian cuisine’ during my years in Canberra, but I learned
even more about food as a result of Daddy John’s job. Every few years, our family
would relocate to a different part of the world. We lived in Rome, Moscow, Malaysia, New Guinea, Japan, Kiribati and Malta, with breaks in Canberra in between,” Jane writes.
But missing from Where The River Bends is the first meal Jane ever cooked Jimmy after they started dating in late 1979.
“I still cook him apricot chicken a few times a year,” Jane said.
“Back then Margaret Fulton’s cookbook was the bible; remember prawn cocktails and chicken kiev, pepper steak and steak Diane?”
The Barnes are strict about their meal time routine. Whoever is in the house – family, friends, bandmates, co-workers – is assigned a job, whether it’s helping to cook or set the table.
“When our kids were younger, we would pair off with Jimmy and Jackie, me and Elly-May, Mahalia and EJ (Eliza-Jane) and you would have to style the table, prepare the menu and go and get the ingredients,” Jane said.
“A lot of that came from being on the road so much and having to grab burgers or fish and chips so when we are at home, and we’re all together, cooking and eating together is important.”
While the stunning cookbook photos paint an idyllic picture of those family food sessions, they do not show the typical behind-the-scenes dramas of grandchildren having tantrums or the resident bees attacking Jimmy, the rocker encased head to toe in a protective suit.
“Where it gets dangerous when he’s around is when they land on me and even if I’m not in danger, he’ll freak out and run up and try to flick them off me,” Jane says, with a laugh.
“You can’t flick 10,000 bees; they’re going to charge you.”
Where The River Bends: Recipes and stories from the table of Jane and Jimmy Barnes, by Jane and Jimmy Barnes and published by HarperCollins, is on sale November 3 and is available for pre-order now at Booktopia.
RECIPE
Charcoal barbecue marinated pork skewers (moo ping)
We often barbecue this pork in pieces, skewerless, and serve with fresh herbs and flowers wrapped in lettuce leaves, with a sauce of dried chillies and nam pla (fish sauce) on the side. Jimmy is our charcoal king, so he has the job of cooking these. It’s all in the grilling, he says. He does a pretty perfect job, having learned from years of watching the moo ping man in the Hua Hin markets passionately tend to his pork skewers, turning them just at the right time, once the pork starts to caramelise and blacken on the edges.
[MAKES A LOT – GREAT FOR A CROWD!]
1kg pork neck or pork
fillet, sliced (see
Cook’s Notes)
MARINADE
4 garlic cloves
3 coriander roots, cleaned
⅓ cup oyster sauce
⅓ cup condensed milk
sea salt and freshly ground white pepper
To make the marinade, use a mortar and pestle to pound the garlic cloves and coriander root. Mix in the oyster sauce and condensed milk, and season with salt and white pepper.
Combine the pork and marinade in a shallow dish. Cover and marinate in the fridge for at least 4 hours, or overnight if possible.
Thread the meat onto skewers. If you are using wooden or bamboo skewers, make sure you soak them in water for an hour first, so they don’t burn on the grill. It takes patience to thread
the pork onto the skewers, so enlist a willing teenage slave perhaps. It is well worth the effort.
Preheat your chargrill or barbecue grill plate to medium-high heat. Cook the skewers for just a couple of minutes on each side, until cooked through and starting to caramelise on the edges. Move them to a cooler part of the grill as they cook, as needed, and keep moving them all so they cook evenly. Serve as part of a feast, or just with some nice fresh salad.
COOK’S NOTES
Ask the butcher to thinly slice the pork in large bite-sized pieces – not cubes but slices. Pork neck is hard to handle, quite fatty, tricky to slice and is quite an effort to put onto skewers, but it is the best cut for this dish. Pork fillet is tender and much more lean, of course, and just as delicious in a finer way.
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Originally published as Jane and Jimmy Barnes share the “joy” of embracing Australia’s multicultural menu in new cookbook