Gastronomic Guru Sings The Praises Of A Load Of Old Tripe
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday March 20, 1998
Tripe, baked custard, fishfingers, roast chicken with bread sauce, crepes and lemon sugar. Not a menu from a country pub circa early 20th century, but more a fin-de-siecle food revolution, according to well-known foodie Jill Dupleix.
More than 500 revolutionaries yesterday supped on similar fare (minus the tripe and the fish fingers) in the unlikely surrounds of the Regent Hotel ballroom as Dupleix argued the merits of corned beef vis-a-vis some of the more unseemly creations of modern gastronomy.
"Corned beef can just about solve most of the world's problems on its own," she assured her gastronomic groupies at the Herald/Dymocks literary lunch.
In contrast, she cited the unhappy occasion when she found a salad dressing combining truffle oil and Thai fish sauce. Dupleix walked out of the restaurant (bad news when a food critic does that) and dashed home to cook herself some real tea.
The discerning Dupleix has now cast her eye over 2,000 years of cooking and gathered the most comforting and delicious recipes - updated to her own tastes - into a book, Old Food .
The explanation for this endeavour, from a woman who has chronicled all the coups and caprices in cooking for decades, is that it's the end of the century and time to take stock of those recipes really worth taking through into the next.
The book was also a rebellion against the "bastard food" she found herself eating repeatedly as a reviewer for the SMH Good Food Guide (the restaurants included in the guide are exempt from this tag), which was uniformly "three inches high, made from ingredients sourced from far and wide, with no provenance, no history, no reason . . ."
She also took a brave dig at those she hopes will buy her new book, suggesting that cooking - and reading about cooking - will become an increasingly elitist activity "like gardening, and the far more popular pursuit of reading about gardening".
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald