David Herbert’s Christmas menu and surprising new career
Beloved food writer David Herbert spent 20 years guiding readers through the best of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Join him for a festive feast – and discover details of his surprising new career.
Of all the letters, emails, cards and messages David Herbert received when he retired after two decades from his weekly cooking column, two in particular have stuck with him.
“I received such a huge amount of correspondence at the time I couldn’t respond to it all,” Herbert says on the phone from his home in Malton, in the northern England county of Yorkshire. “I used to cry sometimes reading the emails. One was from a man whose wife had died. She had always made my chocolate cake, and he wrote to me to say now he was making the cake for his family because she wasn’t there to do it any more. And another was from a lady who said she always carried my tomato soup recipe around in her handbag because she knew how well it worked and she never wanted to be without it.”
It’s fair to say it was a bittersweet parting when Herbert, 64, retired in 2021 from the column he had held at The Weekend Australian, most recently at The Weekend Australian Magazine, since the early 2000s. He made the choice, he says, because time had moved on, and he felt it necessary to let a new voice connect with a public he had cultivated for so long.
David Herbert's Christmas menu
A David Herbert Christmas feast
David Herbert serves up a magnificent festive spread with everything from roasted lamb to the best Thai prawn salad.
Try David Herbert’s classic shortbread biscuits this Christmas
These classic biscuits should be satisfyingly crumbly and dry, with a melt-in-the-mouth texture.
Be merry this Christmas with this boozy parfait
For Christmas, serve up one of David Herbert’s festive recipes like this boozy cherry and passionfruit parfait.
“After never missing a weekly deadline for 20 years, I felt it was the right time to let someone else, someone younger, someone living in Australia, take over,” he says. “I never wanted to repeat recipes that I had done in the past, and food trends and new ingredients always offered inspiration. But I had run out of ideas about how to cook a chicken.”
Plus, he says, “I wanted someone else to have the experiences and opportunities that writing a weekly column had given me. I also felt that I didn’t really have a current understanding of lots of new ingredients and pack sizes that were appearing on supermarket shelves in Australia.”
Enjoy the feast:
Indeed, unbeknown to most of his loyal legion of readers, Herbert – a professional cook whose previous positions included food editing and being a private chef for Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull – filed the column from his then-home in London, where he also contributed to other magazines.
“I’ve lived and worked in England for almost half of my life at different times,” he reveals. “This time I’ve been here for 20 years. In the 1990s I worked as a cook in a large country house – Queen Mother for afternoon tea scenarios. And since arriving again in 2004, I worked initially for [food writer] Delia Smith and then at Condé Nast for eight years.”
It was a busy and fulfilling career, he says, but over the past few years he began to find himself both overwhelmed with work and underwhelmed by city life. He decided on a significant life change, moving out of his London home and stepping back from the media.
“These days I live in the north of England in a big old Victorian house built in about 1840 with a large garden. I moved from London about four years ago – you get more house and more wall space up in the north. But I still cook every day. And restoring the garden and planting a large vegetable patch, cutting garden, orchard and flower borders has kept me busy.”
More than that, though, Herbert has given his life over to a passion that predates even his love of cooking. Namely, collecting. “I collect ceramics, painting, furniture and decorative items from about 1915 to 1950,” he says. His particular speciality is a 1920s British collective known as the Omega Workshops, an affiliation of artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group. For more than 40 years, Herbert has assiduously collected pieces from the school, ranging from vases and furniture to paintings, screens and textiles, amassing what London’s Financial Times described as “one of the finest Omega Workshops collections in Britain”.
“From 1913, the Omega Workshops employed some of the most radical avant garde artists of the day to design and produce items for the home, from printed fabrics, rugs, painted furniture, ceramics, lamps, trays, clothing inspired by Post-Impressionism and Cubism,” Herbert enthuses. “I have the largest private collection of ceramics from the Omega Workshops, much of which gets loaned to museums for exhibitions, as well as a couple of rare painted tables, a chair once owned by [poet] Edith Sitwell, and some hand-painted lamps and rugs.”
He says the obsession began when, as a young man growing up in the NSW town of Nelson Bay, north of Newcastle. It was a small seaside town where, as he says in his new book, “my spare time was spent fishing and thinking of new ways to cook my daily catch”. It was a simple, happy childhood, leading to an arty teenage era during which he derived great joy from visiting a local independent bookshop. Here, an informed owner steered him towards a series of books about the 20th-century English arts and ceramics, in particular the Bloomsbury Group.
“This obsession started way back in the mid-1980s, long before I worked in food,” Herbert muses, adding that he became so enamoured of the work, he immediately started looking for avenues to start his own collection. “It was never enough for me simply to see these pieces in books, museums and art galleries – I wanted to own them and live with them too,” he says. “It was the wonderful use of pattern and the spontaneous, artist-driven modernity of the interiors that first attracted me and I became smitten.”
These days, Herbert’s house is stuffed with collectibles and objets d’art, which he sources through obsessive attendance at country auctions across England and beyond, a little like a “real life Antiques Roadshow”. “It’s a very full house,” he laughs.
More than that, though, the collecting has resulted in a career pivot of sorts: he now buys and sources pieces for a range of high-profile clients, including “a New York restaurateur, a couple of Australian actresses and a fashion designer”, he adds, with a laugh. “They’re all friends really. It’s fascinating spending other people’s money.”
Herbert says part of the reason for the move out of London to Malton was to have more space for his collection, which had begun to feel crowded in the city. Also, he heard that Malton was a market town with a big reputation for good food. “It has a butchery, a cafe and bakery and coffee roastery, but that’s about it. The food [in the north of England] is … awful, really.”
But his love for his new house, and collecting, makes up for any culinary disappointments. He says he follows certain rules when buying new pieces, including their practicality.
“What I collect must have a place in my house. It’s not there as a trophy or investment. If an item isn’t decorative or functional in some way, I probably won’t buy it. My approach is that of a passionate collector, and not of an academic or design historian, and my personal reaction to any work of art is primarily sensual and intuitive – any grander ideas must always play second fiddle to my response to the physical presence of an object. So my house is full of ceramics, a passion developed in childhood, paintings, rugs, decorative furniture and hand-painted lampshades.”
Although busy with collecting, Herbert says he still misses writin the column at The Weekend Australian Magazine, and particularly the interaction with readers.
“I don’t miss the deadlines though,” he adds. “It took me a few weeks to stop worrying about having to think up some new recipes. Now, I don’t miss that. But I do miss the readers and their encouragement and feedback.”
He returns to Australia frequently, mostly to visit his 89-year-old mother, who lives in Newcastle, and to catch up with friends and eat.
“Australia is too hot for me now. I can’t cope with the long, hot days. I will get my UK passport next year. But I always love going back to Oz. I have a lot of friends there and I miss the food, the restaurants, the cafes, yum cha.”
His new book, Even More Perfect Cooking, is an updated collection of 300 of his most popular recipes from across the decades of writing the column.
“The original Perfect cookbooks, which I wrote about 20 years ago based on my newspaper column, were discontinued after about 10 years. Expanding and updated them was always something I had wanted to do, giving readers an updated, practical, useful book full of well-tested recipes. When I was approached [to do the book], I was thrilled and it didn’t take too much arm-twisting to get me to do it. I added about 80 new recipes. It is, as always, a celebration of home cooking with not too many ingredients or lengthy methods.”
The Australian Plus members can enter for the chance to win 1 of 12 places in an intimate cooking class with David Herbert. Find out more here. T&Cs apply.
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