Winters of Content

Anyone who has read her 2021 book Recipes for a Kinder Life, will know the meditative rhythms of their life in Lyonville. But before the pair’s custodianship of the property, Annie lived with her enormous British blue cat in a cottage in Malmsbury, a small town in the neighbouring shire, where she taught herself how to grow and harvest vegetables from her own land. The acreage where she now resides is a big step up, but the same principles of small-scale, regenerative farming prevail. Everything that is served at Annie’s restaurant, the famed du Fermier in nearby Trentham, is grown on this plot.

She has been cooking there for more than a decade, creating a new, daily lunch menu for diners five days a week. It’s only Annie in the kitchen, thus the 24-seat threshold to her country dining room. Her French-style food is honest, warm and reflective of her perfect technical training in Melbourne institutions like Stephanie’s and Pearl. It’s the kind of cooking that transcends the social media zeitgeist.

It’s an unseasonably frosty December afternoon when we visit the hilltop home. Indoors the fire crackles and outside, among the towering foxgloves and rows of vegetables, photographer Yaseera Moosa captures Annie in between smatterings of rain as she talks through microclimates, her passion for the dirt and the special weather she has made from a life nourishing others.

Do you think you're a radical?

Yes, I do. While the concept of a menu du jour, a paddock-to-plate thing is a well-worn trope these days, it wasn't so fifteen years ago when I started gardening. Now, particularly with regional restaurants, it's economically sensible to run a set menu that doesn't have any waste. Eight years ago I was an outlier, so I suppose that leads to a bit of radicalism. But what I'm more radical about is the fact that I set a financial parameter around the business and I have an attitude of taking what I consider my fair share, as opposed to always looking to make more and more money. I have very firm parameters around what it costs to run the business and operate within that box. That enables me to guarantee proper jobs on either end of the scale, so either a solid part-time job that someone can augment with other work, or a full-time job that’s around that 38 hours a week. I think that approach of being realistic about how much it takes to run the business versus how much money we could take is a fairly radical point of view in this era of bigger-equals-better.

Do you feel like there's something that you're giving up in order to be able to set that financial boundary?

I don't think I'm giving anything up. If I go back to the turn of the century… I went back to Melbourne for six months to work with Geoff Lindsay at Pearl. It was an era when I'd been in the country for eight years and it was the start of the celebrity chef; they were all starting to be rock stars and I thought I'd missed out. So I went back to Melbourne to see if I had and I found that it wasn't for me. I really did feel at that point, if this is what it took to be recognised for what you do in a kitchen then I don't want to do that. I think that freedom of being able to say, I’ve had a look at that model and I don't think it's for me. is what I gained.

Every day is a bonus, really. All the funny opportunities that have come my way are really bonus stuff. I feel like it's the opposite of missing out, I think I lucked myself into a profession that I love 14 years on.

Has your has your definition of hospitality kind of changed over the years, then?

Absolutely. I think the main thought I have now is that for the customers who are in the dining room for somewhere between two and four hours, it's my job to make them feel loved and nurtured in that time. That is very different to sort of egotistical I-am-chef of years ago, that wanted to impress people and get accolades. Now I just have this sense that it's as close as I can get to inviting them into my home (and charging money for it) and for them to feel loved and looked after for the time that we have them. And if they leave and say, that was really lovely and they'd love to come back, then that's the best gratification I can get: that someone wants to return. It means I've done my job and my team have done their job.

The idea of cooking for people and hosting them like you would in your home, does that change the traditional commercial kitchen dynamic? Especially when it's just you.

I do have a dishwasher at times and I've just taken on a very keen young man a couple of days a week. But [being solo] changes the dynamic because it is very personal; the person's name on the restaurant actually being the person cooking for the guests. But the most revelatory thing that I found is that it explained to me the notion of passing the buck. When you're on your own in a kitchen, you've got nowhere to turn if something goes wrong. In a large kitchen, if you are the senior person in the kitchen and something bad goes down, there is a tendency to kick it along the line. Someone will get blamed for it and then someone will blame the next one down, someone will blame the next one down and no one ever really takes responsibility. So when you work completely on your own, you realise that those sort of negative emotions or faults or blame don't actually get you anywhere. They actually waste time and energy. It's much better to just get on with it, sort your shit out and move on. It was incredibly illuminating for me to realise that a lot of the behaviours you see, not just in kitchens but in workplaces, is if there's someone else to blame you don't take responsibility for things. So it's been a very character-building thing to do. And also your understanding of both kitchen and workplace psyches.

How do you deal with those mistakes?

The garden is full of failure. It fails because of weather conditions or mechanical failure or operator errors, which has illuminated just how fragile the food system is and how easily it can be disrupted. Freak weather, too, which we're getting more and more of - remember the ten dollar lettuces? I'm incredibly aware of the epic nature of failure, where you can lose a whole row of carrots because kangaroos suddenly decided to eat them. That’s six weeks’ carrots. That may not mean much to anyone else, but it meant a lot to me. But failure in the restaurant? You think on your feet. It pushes you creatively and tests your skills to work stuff out.

And I think that's true with so many creative processes and practices as well. working it out, but also then incorporating either those mistakes or that learning back into what you do next.

I'm a great believer in failure being the greatest teacher. I don’t think you learn a lot from success. It ties into what I was saying before about money, and having just enough. I suppose I've taken a lot of risks but because I've never had [financial] backing and I never had a pot of money to spend, I had nothing to lose. You tend to take different sorts of risks than if you were cashed up with somebody else's money. If you're successful all the time, you just think you’re a swinging dick. But if you fail and you've got to pick yourself up and re-do it, then that’s really you doing that. It can be something as small as: it’s nearly midday and the dessert hasn't worked out. You've got to say, well, what am I going to feed them for dessert today? And that has happened to me. But the response mechanisms kick in. And that's when the experience of all those years, all those things you've seen and catalogued quietly, that's when it all really comes into play.

Going back to what you said earlier about the fashion for farm-to-table cooking now compared to when you started fifteen years ago, it seems that you think about cooking and growing and living a lot more philosophically than most other chefs we hear from publicly, especially in your book Recipes for a Kinder Life. Could you share some of that philosophy?

About my passion for the dirt?

Yes!

If anyone says to me, ‘How was COVID for you?’ I will now say that La Niña was much harder for me than COVID. As somebody who grows the food that they cook, it had a much greater effect on me. In a funny sort of way, thank god for COVID because I would have had to buy a lot of stuff in if we’d stayed open. By growing food you are linked to the patterns of things that happen to the climate very differently to if you just order stuff from a green grocer and your boxes arrive at the back door.

It's also something that's very obvious when you keep animals. We keep cows, sheep, goats, geese, ducks, chickens. None of those animals are slaughtered for meat because Susan is vegan. What that's done for me is reminded firstly, how these animals need to be cared for as much as any other sentient being on the planet, and secondly that they’re a life and that life has value. For me, it means that I am much more pedantic about waste; when I do cook meat and poultry I want to use everything I possibly can from these creatures so that that life was not taken in vain.

When it comes to the actual farming of the land, we are custodians. When you look at what we've done over the last 160-odd years you just think, ‘I can't repair this.’ I've got two options: I can either return it to land for wildlife, or I could utilise this incredibly good soil that is an hour and a bit out of Melbourne for positive food production and input.

And the other thing that I think is really pertinent in our region (the Hepburn Shire) is the hilly areas of Trentham, Daylesford, Lyonville all became very small farms after colonisation. These farms are very synonymous with all the tiny little acreages that you often see in European settlements where somebody has 200 acres and they grow everything to support all the families in the village. We don't foster that as much as we used to. But I think that it is something that needs to happen, it will improve our food security but also the way that we care for our land in the near and distant future.

Does does writing occupy a different part of your self-expression as cooking?

They're pretty fluid. Writing’s a space that you have to get into. I’m writing my new book in bed, I just go to bed and write. I’m on my Easter break so I spend half the day out in the garden and then I come inside, have my lunch, make a cup of tea, get into bed and I write for the rest of the day.

Proust wrote in bed.

Well that’s very nice, I didn’t know that.

Can you tell me what your new book is about?

It’s about food as the representation of love. It took me a long time to get my head around how to write this, so it's more memoir. I'm sort of rooting through all the restaurants I've worked in over the last 40 years but each little reminiscence then leads into another section. I just finished a chapter on the dangers of cooking with anger and hate. One day I might write something that’s not about food, but right now they go hand-in-hand because it’s what I know.

My next question was going to be ‘Has love changed the way you think about cooking in the last five to ten years?’, so you’ve pre-empted me there. I don't know if you can answer that, maybe you're still working it out.

Love has changed the way that I feel about cooking and food. I'm married to a vegan. And I'm married to a vegan who loves to eat really good food but in no way is she obsessed by food. Food is a fuel for her. She is somebody who lives with restraint, whereas I just want excess everywhere. I just want to eat and drink and have a good time. Being married to her doesn't mean I'm any less consumed with food, I suppose I just understand a great deal more about the fact that it's not for everyone. Over the years the relationship between cooks and food has changed. Back in the day before digital life, you just thought that everybody in the world read Epicure on a Tuesday and if you've got a review then everybody would know what a star you were or everyone would know that you’d had a bad review, when in fact the circulation was a couple of 100,000 people. Love has reminded me that the obsession with food is not everybody’s and that’s okay.

When it comes to cooking and writing, I see a link between the concepts of seasonality and creativity. Something about cycles and making and nourishment and sharing, as well as the search for commonality, I guess, and common ground. Do you see that too?

Yeah there's a very strong resonance with cycles for me. There's the cycles of the seasons, there's the cycles of my day-to-day existence. For example, in summer when the days are long a lot of my days are very long because there's a lot to do and you've got the daylight to do it. Whereas in winter, I'm like some sort of bear. I get up and I go to work, I come home and put the chickens away and that's about it because there's only so many daylight hours that you can use; so I live very much to the length of the day and that creates its own cycles. It reinforces the fact that traditionally there is less to do in winter than in the peak of production time. In a funny way, it's a very natural way to exist.

If you're a season which one would you be?

I think I'd have to be winter. I love the darkness, I love the blackness, it fits with some of my mental health catastrophes. I love the fact that it gives you licence to let your shoulders down and step down for a minute. There's not a lot of options in the hospitality universe to just say, ‘Oh, it’s okay for me to not go full tilt.' And on a seasonal basis, winter allows you to do that. It allows you to just sit and look and plan the rest of the year. I think because I've been so busy for so long that all I really want to be is winter-time.