Sweet And Sourmemories

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 6, 2004

Helen Greenwood, Helen Greenwood is a Herald writer.

Plenty

By Gay Bilson

Lantern, 320pp, $49.95

Chef Gay Bilson's memoir is a far cry from the staple cookbook, writes Helen Greenwood.

Gay Bilson has been involved with food for more than 30 years. In that time, she has been associated with three ground-breaking restaurants: Tony's Bon Gout, Berowra Waters Inn and Bennelong.

This is her first book about food, though Bilson has stayed true to her long-held vow never to write a cookbook. Instead, she has called it Plenty and dubbed it "digressions on food". Very clever: the subtitle promises nothing and alludes to everything. Is it a collection of essays, a memoir, a history or a cookbook? Well, it's all and none of these things.

In her prologue, Bilson draws an unforgettable, taut family portrait. Her spiky sketch of a child hungry for life reminds me of Nigel Slater's confessional autobiography, Toast.

"I would climb up into the apricot tree until the sixties arrived with the first raspberry," she writes. She powers on with her first section, "Restaurants". "I'd gone to bed with a cook and ended up with a restaurant and a baby," she writes about opening Tony's Bon Gout with her then partner in life, Tony Bilson. She evokes the rakish atmosphere and how the restaurant was a haven for artists, cultural mavens and politicians.

On Berowra Waters Inn, she ruminates on the notion of restauration; the difficulties of removing rubbish from a place accessible only by boat; the splendour of Glenn Murcutt's louvred windows. There are trips to France and Italy to discover "snipe and woodcock on skewers with polenta" and "the Filipo Lippi fresco in Spoleto". She says goodbye to Tony Bilson and writes a requiem for caviar.

Just as you're thinking there are no recipes in this book, Bilson surprises you with instructions for her famous brioche with poached bone marrow, braised shallots and red wine butter. The dish is prefaced with a flight of thoughts: the first time she ate it in France; how she included it in the banquet for the Seventh Symposium of Australian Gastronomy; her "1777 English sliver marrow spoon that looks rather like a medical instrument for scooping around a vagina".

Generously, she has other recipes, too, all permitted because they are "illustration" and "evidence" - the culinary equivalent of photographs.

Her chronicle of restaurants concludes with Bennelong. She relives the anxiety of coming back with all the eyes of Sydney upon her. She admits to needing to leave the gastronomic industry. But she has clearly left her mark and the tale of these three restaurants is moving and compelling and the most dynamic part of the book.

Having done her duty by history, Bilson moves into the personal and the particular. The writing becomes uneven as Bilson's tone and voice vary and repetitions slow the pace. She is also a prolific reader. Names such as Tom Stoppard, Evelyn Waugh, Walter Benjamin, Brillat-Savarin and Aldo Buzzi tumble off the pages and it becomes too much.

In the section titled Food, the most enjoyable pieces are her musings about sorrel and soup, possets and potted beef, jams and jellies. She starts on a fine premise of the importance of the sandwich, swerves off to recall crime novels with sandwiched-obsessed heroes and riffs on jazz and great fillings. But she throws so much into the mix it's all too rich to digest.

"Nests (weaving, pressing, collecting)" is amazingly poignant, a lingering love letter to her friend, the late Anders Ousback. "The point of Point", which explores the impact of chef and writer Ferdinand Point, is a fine attempt at translation, but doesn't nail the point. As the final section continues, Bilson's writing becomes livelier and her ideas more energetic. She does an informative culinary equivalent of desert island discs.

Plenty is not only a series of digressions, it's also a pilgrimage. Her symbols of devotion are her cabinet of nests, bowls and books. Her markers are many. The time when she was 11 and showered with such praise for the cream puffs she had made that she "felt like a princess and have been making cakes and pastries ever since". The memory of being 13, naked and on the roof of her Melbourne house reading Jean-Paul Sartre. Observing Janni Kyritsis's "patient repetition of the physical actions of preparation".

Lightness and levity don't figure in this journey - though the young Bilson, exhausted and sitting on a laundry bag after the dinner service, is as fine and funny an image as you could ever hope to read.

There are huge dollops of affection and generosity and flashes of righteous anger. As she puts it, "The exercise has brought forth the thundering past of old friends and acts of kindness, of connections and convergences of good meals and good cooking, of little furies and strong personal views."

© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

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