READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

14.   Jane Grigson. How her fruit book ever got into such a state is not purely due to glue. I would have laminated the cover because it was getting so much use. I could buy a new copy, always in print at $40, but will instead tie it in strong ribbon for the next consultation. Grigson is a writer I turn to when I get completely fed up with the Australian cliché about British cooking being all meat and three vegetables and aren’t we glad we graduated. When in fact we are, as with so many things, so bound to good things that are British, we don’t even notice. Furthermore, as Grigson makes perfectly clear in her friendly style, British cuisine has been a complex and evolving art, when it isn’t a science, for centuries. Our own adaptability to and absorption of cuisines outside our own purlieu owes much to inherited British enquiry at its best. When we visited family friends the Armstrongs of Rochester, they would serve Kir later in the afternoon. They are people of Kent, for whom...

12. Giacomo Castelvetro. This is technically about the oldest cookbook in the collection, first published in 1614. Its purpose is age-old too, to convince the English that they should eat more greens. Castelvetro is the forerunner of many authors in this series, an Italian introducing good Italian cooking and mysterious foreign ingredients to a suspicious audience. That he finds himself in London at all is due to his being that conflicted individual of the times, an Italian Protestant in need of protection. It’s a favourite period work, pounced on at a throwaway table of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library Service, Ivanhoe, Rosanna, Watsonia, Eltham sometime in the noughties. Gillian Riley’s translation, Jane Grigson’s Foreword, and the fruttivendolo artwork combine to make a fine History Play production. Castelvetro’s style is appealing. His concerns are health, balanced diet, simplicity of presentation, and freshness. (His entry on Rice indicates that risotto must still have been ...