Stephanie Alexander with Adam Liaw on 30 years of The Cook's Companion

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ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

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Australia's alliance with the United States has been the linchpin of our country's foreign policy for decades.

**Stephanie Alexander** (0:14)
We value the unbroken friendship between the Australian and the American peoples.

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But between the wars and the tariffs and the unpredictability, are we growing apart? You know who else didn't help us? Australia. Join me, Hamish MacDonald.

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And me, Geraldine Dugas. We ask, do we still need the Alliance? Search for Global Roaming on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
Hi, Natasha Mitchell joining you today on Big Ideas, a very special guest, Australia's culinary queen. She can make any meal an occasion.

**Stephanie Alexander** (0:50)
If I'm cooking for myself, I set the table. I set out a wine glass. I set out a water glass. I make sure the salt and pepper is there. And I cook something beautiful.
I do think the idea of a good food life is really very important. Only cook something that you like. Cook the things that you know you're going to enjoy. Treat food as something that's a joy.
And try to do it with some friends.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:24)
And thanks to her almost Biblical The Cooks Companion, Stephanie Alexander has helped us all find that joy and our confidence in kitchens across Australia.
The simple pleasures and the art of boiling an egg, baking bread or a lemon delicious pudding. Yes please. The book is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Will it make the shortlist for ABC Radio National's Top 100 Books, I wonder? Yes. Voting opened today for our 2026 countdown. This year we are asking you to choose your favourite Australian books of all time.
And you just have to head to the Radio National homepage. Look at the wonderful list there or add your own. Vote now. Fiction, non-fiction, kids books, cookbooks, all qualify.
To celebrate her brilliant book, Stephanie joins you today from the Sydney Writers Festival on Gadigal land with another much loved Australian foodie, TV chef, prolific cookbook author and newspaper recipe columnist, Adam Liaw.

**Adam Liaw** (2:30)
Hello everyone and welcome to Sydney Writers Festival 2026 I'm Adam Liaw and I'm delighted to welcome you all here to the 30th birthday party of Australia's, it says here one of Australia's most influential cookbooks, but it's not. It is Australia's most influential cookbook, The Cooks Companion written by the one, the only, Stephanie Alexander. Stephanie, welcome and congratulations.

**Stephanie Alexander** (2:59)
Thank you.

**Adam Liaw** (3:00)
I did the Sydney Writers Festival rules say contact your, the facilitator, that's me, contact the person you're interviewing at least by April and make sure that you've gone through all the questions. I spoke to Stephanie this morning and she said, don't tell me the questions you're going to ask me. So, this is how she and I operate. Of course, I have interviewed Stephanie many times before. But, congratulations on the 30th anniversary of this extraordinary book.

**Stephanie Alexander** (3:25)
It is an amazing accomplishment. Even I think that.

**Adam Liaw** (3:30)
It's getting bigger. Carrying both of these tomes up here is getting more and more difficult every year. My edition, the one that I first bought, 824 pages. This one, a whopping 1352 pages.
That's a lot of book.
How do you write a book that has the extraordinarily longevity of 30 years? You write a cookbook these days that's in the bargain bin six months later. You're still selling this at full tote 30 years after. Where did it start?

**Stephanie Alexander** (4:05)
Well, it started probably 60 years ago, really, or maybe even longer now. I reckon I've been cooking seriously and with great enjoyment for, dare I say it, probably 70 years. And there's an awful lot of stuff that I've learned. There's a lot of experiences I've experienced, a lot of marvellous people I've met, a lot of lovely places I've been. And I think to some extent, The Cook's Companion is a distillation of everything. I say I feel there's nothing much more to say, but I'm a bit scared of saying that because then I might write something else.
But it is certainly has tried to put into one volume more or less everything I have learnt about cooking and about food and about the people who love food.
And it did tend to be a lot of stuff.

**Adam Liaw** (5:05)
So let's go back to the first edition, 30 years obviously 1996
To me, it is a slightly, not unlikely book, because you were already a legend of Australian food at that time. But at that point, Stephanie's, your restaurant in Melbourne, had been operating for 20 years at the very top of the Australian food scene. And then instead of writing a book about Stephanie's The Restaurant, you write a book for all of us, for Home Cooks. What was that? Why did you do that? You know, the normal thing I would have imagined would be to write a book about the restaurant, the thing that I guess was the most famous restaurant in Melbourne at the time.