‘Daily life contains the small joys you need’: Virginia Trioli on the search for happiness

For ABC broadcaster Virginia Trioli, life – like good food – is not always about the main event.

Virginia Trioli on ABC radio.

I have long thought about writing a cookbook, a guide to and celebration of the side dishes, the extras – the sauces, the stuffings, the dressings, the salads and vegetables – that are the most memorable part of a meal for me.

My eyes always go to those side dishes: a little bowl of gently charred and slightly soured eggplant, or a dreamy polenta, or a perfectly dressed salad of bitter and soft leaves. They make me happiest of all.

I’m quite fond of a roast turkey (a critically underrated addition to your general entertaining repertoire, by the way, mostly relegated to overburdened tables on 40-degree Christmas days), but what I’m really after is the stuffing: that soft and savoury side dish of herbs, good bread, nuts and fruit.

Virginia Trioli.

The main dish can go on a bit much, to be honest (who needs all of that fish?), but the fine puddle of meunière – butter and lemon and wine – that the fillet is sitting in? I’ll take a jug of it.

I know you know what I mean: I see you, dragging a finger through that lovely sauce, looking around urgently for a bit more bread to soak up the dressing. Actually – forget it: just hand me that spoon, will you?

The book was a cute idea. I could see the elegant colour pages, the best recipes. Stories from my years of reading and re-reading the hundreds of cookbooks I have collected over decades. Memories from the places I’ve been lucky enough to travel to, the wonderful decades of Australian food culture I’ve been witness to. Small dishes, clever sauces from around the world. It would be a book to celebrate the bit-players at your table: no main-character energy allowed.

Then the world fell in, and all of a sudden, the idea of a life-saving side serving, an extra dollop of sauce, just that little spoonful of joy, seemed to be a much more powerful, much more deeply experienced thing.

The last few years have made even more sense of this side-dish instinct.

Virginia Trioli and husband Russell Skelton in 2019. Picture: Fiona Byrne

Sometimes the main course of your life can be a hard-going and unappetising thing: sometimes it can be absolute rubbish.

Your working life, your family, global catastrophes, personal tragedies both ordinary and unexpected – all of it. You can have so little control over any of it, and the only choices you do seem to have are often rather small ones: minor, seemingly insubstantial decisions that may add a bit of pleasure to a dense and demanding situation.

Just enough joy to get you across the line.

These moments of grace come in unassuming ways. Sitting outside, hands curled around a cup of coffee made just the way you like it, the sun full and dazzling on your face. That first slice of warm cake, stolen and eaten standing up in the kitchen as you prepare a surprise afternoon tea for your otherwise grumpy teenage kids.

An unexpected phone call from an old friend, not heard from in years and yet you are straight back into conversation, right where you left off. The perfect song on the radio just as you hit the open road, big sky country unfolding in front of you. A blackbird’s call, clear and hopeful before the sun gets up.

Life and recent years have made me a seeker of thesemoments of joy, moments of grace, and these bits on the side have come to mean so much more. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our way of eating has moved in this direction too. The entree-main-dessert formulation now seems a little old, a little heavy: instead, we have evolved to prefer a collection of shared small plates – a food mosaic of all the little delights that make up a great table.

Virginia Trioli with ABC News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland. Picture Stuart McEvoy

Memory and food are powerfully connected for me: places I have eaten in and the dishes I have chanced upon form the language that tells the story I want to remember.

The significant circumstance attached to that memory – experienced as a younger person, or a person in love, or a person nursing a broken heart – becomes a hero dish in itself. A madeleine of many memories.

Is that why the power of food memory is so strong? That unexpected experience, perhaps many years ago now, that you’ve tried to hunt down and replicate so many times, mostly without success? Local prawns eaten out of the back of the car on a remote Queensland beach that have never tasted the same since; the perfumed hit of a real summer strawberry; your first taste of a true Italian linguine vongole in a tiny trattoria you’ll never find again.

The persistence of memory and of the food histories we cherish and chase form the heart of this book.

The magical processes of cooking have become a kind of life guide for me too: the unmixable components that somehow come together, the elements that hold and those that separate; the things that need heat, pressure, even charring to become what they need to be; the salt that amplifies, the salt that ruins; the sour that makes sense of the sweet. It’s an inexhaustible metaphor, and I would resist it but for the blunt force of its truth. All the world is in the kitchen, its processes, failures and transformations, and it is the laboratory of the one thing that defines my understanding of what I’m here to do, and what matters to me most: that it’s all about connection.

The years I have spent cooking and preparing food for the people I love, a craft that started for me as an eight-year-old, represent the work of winding and weaving the connections that stabilise and fulfil me.

In the rest of my life, I have always considered my task to be that of a conduit: connecting people to each other’s experiences, to ideas and to complexities, rendering them understandable and meaningful.

Virginia Trioli.

My many years working on television and radio programs has wired that notion of connection even more powerfully: presenting shows like ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on both Sydney and Melbourne radio meant leading but also becoming part of a real-time community that lives to respond, wakes to connect, and does so at the always vulnerable and affecting hours of the early morning.

My vocation to hinge conversations continues to be deeply important for me, and it is all of a piece with the act of creation and connection that is a life of cooking.

This is a book of life experiences, travels, memories and investigations into the sweet and the sour, the bitter and the sharp, of a life of small chosen moments of joy: the important moments in my life, in all our lives, that make sense of what we find ourselves doing, and that are sometimes the only things that make life possible at all.

This idea is one that I share with the Japanese concept of ikigai – your purpose in living. Ikigai’s fundamental concept is understanding that a happy life isn’t a long-term project that one day will be achieved and complete, but is really an accumulation of small daily experiences, small joys that are taken where they can be found, and that add up to become the life you have chosen.

Virginia Trioli's new book, A bit on the side.

Daily life, even the mundane moments, can contain the small joys that you need to live that happy life. I’ve been so fortunate that many people, experiences and times in my life have taught me that too. I’d like to share them with you here.

This is an edited extract of A bit on the side by Virginia Trioli, Macmillan Australia, $37, out now