Here’s one for the department of worlds colliding. A few months back our good friend Judy Campbell was in Natchez when she stumbled on a curious thing. Her mother-in-law, Alma Campbell, had just died, and Judy was cataloguing contents at Edgewood, the historic Natchez landmark that had been the elder Campbells’ family home. On a bookshelf she came across a cookbook entitled Compliments to the Chef, Recipes from the Australian Club. Judy remembered that her in-laws had visited Australia in the early 1980s and since the Australian Club has a location in Melbourne—the city in which I grew up—she thought to pass it along to me. From my current vantage point twenty-five years and about nine thousand miles removed from Australia—let alone the Australian Club—I have to say that Compliments to the Chef makes fascinating reading because from both culinary and cultural perspectives, it’s remarkable to see how far we’ve come.
From its presence on the bookshelves of a Mississippi mansion to its hundred-something pages of hollandaise-drenched artery-cloggers, Compliments to the Chef is a relic of a bygone era. Inside, after flipping past pages decorated with the club’s coat of arms, photos of oak-paneled dining rooms and the reproduction of a dinner menu honoring one Sir Hector MacDonald [KCB DSO], we meet the chef himself. From his gleaming whites to his towering toque, rosy red nose and mutton chop sideburns, Chef David Knott looks as if he’s just taken a break from strangling geese in the kitchens of King George V to pose for the camera.
From his gleaming whites to his towering toque, rosy red nose and mutton chop sideburns, Chef David Knott looks as if he’s just taken a break from strangling geese in the kitchens of King George V to pose for the camera.
Leaning over a half-acre of gleaming mahogany, with a glass of claret in one hand and a portrait of a bewhiskered codger with a chestful of medals behind him, Chef Knott looks the very model of an old-world chef imported to a provincial capital to cater to the well-to-do. Flip forward a few pages and his dishes confirm it: Guinea Fowl with Apples and Calvados, Braised Oxtail, Medallions of Beef Bordelaise, and Lamb’s Kidneys Dijonnaise are accompanied by photos showing glistening cuts of meat rising from moats of hollandaise, béarnaise, or demi-glace sauce. The amount of cream, butter, and vermouth in these dishes make Galatoire’s menu read like the winning entries in a vegan bake-off. Between recipes the book offers anecdotes from the club’s history—a visit by the Price of Wales in 1920; a crisis in 1914 when war with Germany interfered with the club’s supply of sixty-year-old brandy; a duel fought in 1851 between one Sir Thomas Mitchell (the Surveyor-General of New South Wales), and club founder Stuart A. Donaldson, after Donaldson accused Sir Thomas of “extravagance.” Combined with whimsical line drawings featuring elderly gents poring over menus, tucking into racks of lamb, or dozing in leather armchairs beneath copies of the Financial Times, the cookbook provides an interesting glimpse not only at the sort of folk who the Australian Club admitted as members, but also at the lengths to which they would go to pretend they were in England. Despite being surrounded by some of the most productive fields and fisheries, and one of the most heterogeneous populations, anywhere in the world, everything they wanted to eat, see, and do was English or French. I tried to find out more information about Chef David Knott or any other notable members of the Australian Club from the early ‘eighties but came up empty handed. Presumably they’ve all died of heart failure.
Unlike the elder Campbells, who must have visited as guests of a member, I never set foot inside the Australian Club. It is strictly private and my family would never have had the credentials. But even accounting for the fact that things have changed a lot since I left twenty-five years ago, the aesthetic this cookbook conveys, and the dishes it offers, don’t reflect the Melbourne I remember at all. By the early eighties Melbourne was home to well-established Greek, Italian, German, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Indian communities; and already had a reputation as a great dining city. Lots of my fondest childhood memories are of Friday night family feasts at one of the many Mediterranean or Asian restaurants that made Melbourne a wonderful place to be hungry. So it’s interesting to note that not a single dish representing any one of those communities appeared on the Australian Club’s menu at that time.
The nineteen-eighties were an interesting time in Australia. The former British colony was undergoing a long-overdue realignment, shifting its focus from impossibly distant England, to take more of its cultural cues from the Asia-Pacific region that represented not only its geographic reality, but also its economic future. With the benefit of hindsight the men, (yes, it was only men) cloistered in the Australian Club, tucking into their roast lamb and braised oxtail, look like a dying breed. Cookbooks tell you so much about the past. I’d love to see what’s on the Australian Club’s menu today, but I bet they’d still not let me in the door.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher