Top chef’s debut book is a showcase of Tassie’s wild bounty
Acclaimed chef Analiese Gregory fishes, dives and hunts – and cooks – and in the process has rewritten the concept of the kitchen cookbook.
Lifestyle
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WHEN chef Analiese Gregory was approached to write a cookbook two years ago, she initially responded with a firm “no”.
The former head chef at Hobart’s acclaimed Franklin restaurant has cooked in some of the world’s best restaurants and worked alongside cooking greats including Gordon Ramsay, but she’s never been a fan of traditional cookbooks.
However, the 36-year-old realised that the publishing offer was actually the perfect opportunity to shake up the traditional notion of what a cookbook should be and create something less conventional.
The result is her debut book, How Wild Things Are: Cooking, Fishing and Hunting at the Bottom of the World, a collection of stories and recipes celebrating the beauty of her native New Zealand and her adopted homeland of Tasmania.
The publication, which is being launched at a sold-out event in Hobart on Tuesday, is being hailed as a blueprint for how to live, as much as how to cook.
It delves into the joys of travel, freedom, vulnerability and the search for meaning. And, with a stunning collection of images from Tasmanian photographer Adam Gibson – who captured Gregory fishing, hunting, diving and cooking in some of our state’s most picturesque locations – the book is as beautiful as it is educational.
“I guess I had started thinking about doing a book when I was in Sydney,’’ says Gregory of how the cookbook came to be.
“I was thinking it would be an anti-cookbook … with no food photos, or something like that.
“And then I got approached (by a publisher) while I was at Franklin, and at first I wasn’t in to the idea.
“But then I came around to it and started to really like the idea.
“I found as a chef I kept buying restaurant cookbooks because I felt should, but I found I was putting them on the shelf at my house and never reading them.
“Being out foraging and preserving, I found I was drawn to more experiential and more lifestyle-based books.
“So I wanted to create something that captured the essence of all the things I like to do and the places that I love.’’
She also wanted to show people from interstate and overseas “just how beautiful Tasmania is”.
So Gregory quit her job at Franklin, after 2½ years at the helm of the award-winning eatery – which had repeatedly ranked as one of Australia’s top restaurants – and decided to focus on creating a cookbook with a difference.
The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic just a few months later – which also led to the permanent closure of Franklin – was actually a positive source of inspiration for Gregory, as it forced her to spend more time on her farm in the Huon Valley and gave her a new appreciation for the 110-year-old farmhouse and surrounding 0.8 hectares she had bought a year earlier.
Spending more time in her vegie garden, surrounded by her chickens, pigs, geese and some “very spirited” goats, made her even more certain she was following the right path.
But Gregory admits the isolation of COVID also resulted in some interesting work hours.
“I find it difficult to work out how busy, or not busy, I am,” Gregory says. “I’ve spent a lifetime doing a lot of 16-hour days in restaurants.
“So part of me feels like, if I’m not doing a 16-hour day, I’m taking it easy.
“And I think, like everyone, I fell into a bit of a COVID hole.
“There were times when I was in the kitchen, testing recipes at 3am, after a Netflix binge and a nap. Time didn’t mean anything for a little while there.
“It’s the first book I’ve done, so it’s a big learning curve and obviously a labour of love as well.”
Many of the book’s images were taken on her farm, with the food cooked in her dated Westinghouse oven.
“I didn’t want to do a studio-based book,” says Gregory, who called on Tasmanian writer Hilary Burden, as well as Gibson, to help bring the project to fruition.
“Everything was shot on my lawn or at the beach … or wherever it was cooked.
“If I can do it in that oven, anyone can cook these things at home.
“And I guess that’s the basis of the book – the recipes are things I would cook at home for people who come over … they’re tried and tested things I make for dinner parties.”
Gregory feels more settled in Tasmania than in any other place she’s lived. Born in New Zealand, she was raised on a dairy farm. “When I was a child I remember on the farm they would hunt for hares and rabbits and possums and things like that,” she says.
“And we would raise lambs for food.
“I was mainly vegetarian and never really got involved … it was more in the periphery around me.”
At 16 she began training as a chef in Auckland and then headed to London at 18 to work for her father – chef Mark Gregory – ditching her vegetarian lifestyle along the way.
“When I started training as a chef, someone gave me the hard word that I needed to be able to at least taste everything,’’ Gregory recalls.
“I cooked a loin of venison and I totally annihilated it … it was more than well done, it was sawdusty and horrible.
“I had never really cooked meat before, I didn’t understand it, and it was really embarrassing, so I thought, ‘I need to learn to do this’.”
She is now one of the most talked-about young chefs in Australia, with a string of enviable kitchen credits to her name, including The Ledbury, Michel Bras, Mugaritz and Sydney’s Quay restaurant.
It was after moving back to New Zealand from Paris that she ended up in Australia.
“Going from Paris to suburban Auckland was too big of a stretch for me,” Gregory says.
“So I went to Sydney for the weekend, and ate in few restaurants, and I was blown away by the food. So I just hopped the ditch.”
She moved to Tasmania to work at Franklin but got more than she bargained for.
“This is the most settled I’ve ever been,” she says.
Gregory credits this sense of connection not only to the beautiful landscape and wealth of fresh produce, but also to the friendships she’s formed and new skills she’s acquired.
“I’ve learnt to dive since being in Tasmania,” she says.
“I’ve got a shed full of fishing rods. And an outdoor fireplace.
“A lot of things I came to realise I really like about life, Tasmania seems to encapsulate.”
Gregory lived in Hobart when she first arrived in the state and then in Woodbridge, before buying her own home in the Huon Valley.
“I found this particular house and I had a big thing at the time – and I still do – for original Tassie weatherboard farmhouses,” she says.
“I used to drive around the Tassie countryside and be like ‘ooh, that’s a nice one’.
“I came to look at this house, even though I wasn’t really considering buying a house. And I thought ‘oh well, the mortgage was going to be the same as I was paying in rent’, so I bought a house.”
She is in the process of gaining council approval to run a 10-seater lunch-only restaurant from her home, which would operate three days a week, as a way to share her patch of paradise – and love of food.
“It’s something that I came up with one day, lying on the couch during lockdown,” Gregory says.
“It was actually nice last year being forced to spend so much time here.
“The animals were happier than they’d ever been and I thought ‘it doesn’t make much sense to buy a rural farmhouse and spend no time here. What if I didn’t have to drive to town for work each day, what if I could work from here?’
“So I threw around some ideas and this one stuck and seemed to make sense.”
She is hopeful the restaurant will open later this year.
Meanwhile, Gregory is halfway through filming a TV show for SBS called A Girl’s Guide to Hunting, Fishing and Wild Cooking.
The eight-episode series is being shot entirely in Tasmania and showcases “all the things I enjoy and love doing around Tasmania”.
It’s not her first foray into television – last year she cooked alongside Gordon Ramsay in his National Geographic series Uncharted (now screening on Disney Plus), introducing viewers to Tasmania’s unique ingredients and food traditions, with Ramsay hailing Gregory as “a force to be reckoned with”.
But despite the high praise, Gregory admits TV is quite a challenge.
“It’s a bit of a struggle for me, to be honest,” she says.
“I spent my entire life in a professional kitchen and it’s a very different discipline to that.
“But it’s a very interesting journey. And hopefully I’m getting better at it as time goes on.’’
How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory will be available in bookstores from February 3. RRP $45
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