Recent Cookbooks on My Shelf - April 2025

Cookbook Reviews for Your Long Weekend - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath!

Two editions of Extra Food Chat in a row! You must be thinking, Kath what is your schedule for this newsletter?! Unfortunately the schedule is as fluid as my health allows, and while I aim to do two of these Extra newsletters a month, I don’t tend to aim for two weeks in a row! I hope you don’t mind me popping into your inboxes so soon.

However, April has been a bumper month for new cookbooks so I thought sharing was the only reasonable thing to do.

I hope you are enjoying your long weekend if you are in Australia, or the just the weekend for everyone else. Please let me know your thoughts on the below cookbooks, are any of them in your collection?

This newsletter is a bit of a long one, so please click through at the prompt to read the whole thing on web browser if requested. Ok, on to the cookbooks!

*Thanks to Murdoch Books for gifting me copies of The Baker’s Book and The Australian Ingredients Kitchen.

The Baker’s Book edited by Ruby Goss (Murdoch Books*) - This is a fun book, filled with a wide variety of sweet recipes (and a few savoury bakes too), compiled by Ruby Goss from a number of cooks and chefs from around Australia. Many of the contributors I’ve never heard of before, many seem to be Melbourne or Victorian based with bakeries so I think that’s why I was unfamiliar with many of them (there are now many more bakeries on my Melbourne ‘to visit’ list for a future trip however!). I really enjoy the bright illustrated cover, the clear inviting photography (with an image per recipe!), and the profile on each contributor. There is some helpful information in the introductory sections, plus a recipe guide for how complex a recipe may be so you can easily gauge if you are in for an everyday bake or a project. I do think how complex a recipe is, is a little more individual than the recipe key suggests, but it is really helpful to have indicators like this regardless.

There are many baking projects in this book, so it’s a great one for those to love to challenge themselves in the kitchen and learn new skills. The fact that the recipes have been contributed by many chefs and bakers with a variety of backgrounds and interests means the recipes are really varied, and there is such a lot to choose from. I also think since there is such variety in this book, this is a great addition to the cookbooks collections of those who wish or need to keep their cookbook collections space efficient or smaller. By adding this book to your collection you are getting the recipes and wisdom of many, with only adding one book to your shelf. This book feels like such a sweet collaborative effort from many of our favourite bakers and a cheerful addition to any cookbook collection. I am hoping to make the Pistachio Amaretti (p.42), the Lemon, Thyme and Honey Madeleines (p.73) and the Spinach, Leek and Smoked Cheddar Cheese Slab Pie (p.199-200).

The Australian Ingredients Kitchen by Elder Bruno Dann and Tahlia Mandie (Murdoch Books*) - It’s really great to see an increase in cookbooks being published that champion Indigenous Australian voices, but also ingredients. Not knowing about the food culture of Indigenous Australians is yet another unacceptable consequence of Australia’s white colonial history that we must strive to change. The Australian Ingredients Kitchen is one of the latest books leading that change, a collaborative effort between Elder Bruno Dann of the Nyul Nyul people, and Tahlia Mandie, founder of Kakadu Plum Co. Tahlia and Elder Bruno have been working together via Kakadu Plum Co prior to working on this book together, and their shared love and respect for Indigenous land, culture, food and each other is evident on every page of this book.

I was particularly taken with the location photography in this cookbook, along with Elder Bruno’s life story which he has generously shared. The cruelty with which Indigenous Australian’s have been treated even as recently as the 1950s, is something that shaped Elder Bruno’s childhood after being taken from his mother at four years old. Elder Bruno was eventually able to reconnect with some of his family, and the land which he pays much respect to. The difference with which Indigenous communities treat the land compared to the ways brought here by colonialism, are stark, and this is evident in how Elder Bruno speaks of the land and how he and others treat it. Without people like Elder Bruno, access to and understanding of Indigenous ingredients would be scarce.

The recipes in this book champion such Indigenous ingredients, using recipes which you might otherwise be familiar with. There is a helpful explanation of commonly used bush ingredients at the beginning of the book, with many of the dried herbs and spices are available from Kakadu Plum Co. Recipes which have caught my eye are the Bush Tucker Fish Tacos (p.52), Bush Fish Curry (p.64) and the Wattleseed and Lemon Myrtle S’mores (pp. 166-7).

Baking Beyond the Paywall: My reviews of The Food of Spain, Pocket Pickler and 5 Ingredients Mediterranean are below for paid subscribers.

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