Mother’s minestrone soup a ‘message of comfort via comfort food’ for Anna Funder

Anna Funder has cooked the meal a hundred times before, but she can never quite remember how to make minestrone soup without her mother’s recipe in front of her.

Australian writer Anna Funder at her home in Sydney. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

Anna Funder has cooked the meal a hundred times, but she can never quite remember how to make minestrone soup without her mother’s recipe in front of her.

“I got Mum to write down her recipe for minestrone soup on an index card when I was 19 and ­getting ready to move out of home. But, decades after she died, the index card is the only thing I have around with her handwriting on it and I refuse to learn the recipe – even though it’s very simple – because I like to get it out whenever I make it.”

When The Australian asked some of our best-known novelists, playwrights, journalists and critics which recipes were most important to them and why, the celebrated Australian writer chose her mother’s minestrone soup because the meal was a “message of comfort via comfort food”.

Her minestrone soup recipe – which will appear in Monday’s ­edition of The Australian ­alongside recipes by novelist Dave Warner, journalist Jack Marx and science presenter Michael Mosley – is a nod to her ­childhood and a balm for the ­winter chill.

“My parents were both really good cooks and very interested in cooking, and I think they’d find it quite ironic that I’m offering up something like this recipe, but it’s a loaves and fishes recipe,” Funder said. “It feeds a thousand for no money and it’s perfect during the winter.

“The soup is delicious, nutritious, foolproof, cheap and feeds lots of people. I’m about to give the recipe to my vegetarian daughter, as she moves out of home.”

Funder, whose literary prizes include the Miles Franklin Award, is working on the final stages of her new book, Wifedom, about George Orwell’s “forgotten wife”, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She is also working as an executive producer on the six-part series of one of her earlier books, Stasiland, in which she will be played by ­Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, who recently starred as Princess Dianna in Netflix series The Crown.

In Wifedom, Funder has drawn on the few letters O’Shaughnessy wrote to create a portrait of the woman who was married to one of the best-known writers and ­essayists in the English language.

“When I wrote the fictional parts of the book, (they were) based on these six ­letters she wrote to her best friend, a few to Orwell and to some others,” Funder said.

“I feel as though I’m in her head as I write them.

“I’m really just setting the scene with facts and using her real words.

“She is a fascinating, funny and brilliant woman. And apparently a very amazing cook even with wartime rations!”