Life as a book that has been put down

There are certain classes of books I am allergic to: self-help books, management books, new age books, airport novels, chick/lad lit and anything with the words chicken soup, seven, habits or globalisation in its title. To this can be added cookery books. Judging by sales, there are people who buy these books and cook from them but I am not in their legion. Nor do I like looking at book plates of improbably good looking food whilst ordering in the takeaway. Food should be simple and edible, beyond this I ask nothing else of it.

So I was a bit surprised to find Gay Bilson's Plenty in my hands. Something attracted me to the book, perhaps because it is part memoir, part philosophy and only incidentally a cookery book (though Bilson clearly thinks a lot about food). The most interesting thing for me was the book as a culinary history of Australia. Like many people who grew up in the 50s, Bilson disses the gruesomely English food culture of the post war generation. In the 70s, Tony Bilson, her then husband and she set up Bon Gout, a French inspired eaterie and these sections of the books are the most interesting perhaps because it captures the 70s intellectual culture of Sydney in which the food was merely an interesting adjunct (Bilson herself was young with small children, so much of this I think must come from the up for anything attitude of youth, this section also put me in mind of another article I had read which discussed the toast and tea "non foodie" culture of 1920s Sydney bohemia). Bilson then moved on to Berowra Waters Inn. Having been to the Hawkesbury, I can vouch for the beauty of the region and the madness of setting up a restaurant that could only be reached by water. It seems to have been a lot of hard work and Bilson also takes us behind the scenes, in a way Orwell did in Down and Out in London and Paris, with her experience with cooks, grease traps, grocery trips et al. Nevertheless, the restaurant itself hardly seems appealing, a sort of temple to high food and also symbolic of the 80s. Pretty much similar is her attempt at running Bennelong at the Opera House where she also seems to have fallen foul of Sydney's food critics.

The present seems to have found Bilson on her own in McLaren Vale - its a much simpler life, if still filled with food (natural given her occupation) in tune with the age's preoccupations with local and slow food. In some ways this section seems far richer than the preceding sections because it has a sense of achieved wisdom and perspective. The book itself has a tone of candour and Bilson also intersperses it with her other precoccupation, literature. To arrive at this destination at 61 speaks of a life of thought and reflection making this one of few books that so elegantly combines life, food and philosophy.

The Age review here.