Annabel Crabb - Special Delivery: Favourite Recipes to Make and Take

Introduction

Food is a language. Within its rolling landscape of dialects and exotic tongues, so many things can be said.

In my accidental second career as the host of a political cooking show, I take dessert to the homes of politicians, and the message of the dessert is clear, or I hope it is: I come in peace. (They cook for me, too, of course, which is the main game. Usually with great enthusiasm, though its a long filming day, and occasionally towards the end Im sure I detect a note of: Okay, lady. You and your fleet of cameras can leave any time now.)

But the best things ever said by food are conveyed in quiet tones, between friends and family, when the message is so much more than just, Heres a casserole. Its I care enough about you to spend a bit of time making something delicious that you can eat immediately, or put in the fridge and have later, or even better that I can also have a bit of while we open the nice bottle of red that I have what do you know! also brought in my basket.

Tanya Plibersek once told me that cooking big dinners for her friends and family was a way of telling them that even though she wasnt always around they were important to her, and worth lashings of her time. And time is the issue here, isnt it? If youre a busy person, then spending time making something for someone you care about is more than a gesture. It means I know you are worried about your mum or I know you have invited twenty people over for lunch and, while I do not for one second doubt your ability to cope, I thought this fresh bread might help.

Food isnt necessarily a big language; it doesnt have the hyperbolic peaks and troughs of Italian, or Germans guttural heft. Sometimes, it is the most rudimentary lingua franca . A jar of muesli. Or a single serving of soup on a workmates desk. It can be quiet. But it can say a lot.

My oldest friend in the world is Wendy Sharpe. We met when we were toddlers, in the Adelaide Plains town of Two Wells, in South Australia. My memories of her, even from the early days, are food-related. The day she brought a mango to school (a rare and exotic thing for 1970s Two Wells). The day we cooked spanakopita with our Greek teacher. Cooking with our own mothers and aunties for shearers smokos; epic catering events, nourished by trays and trays of the sorts of cakes and slices you could never not want to eat. Sleepovers at Grandma Bennetts house, making tortellini alfredo and nicking peaches from the bottom fridge. My mum, Christobel, making Wendys wedding cake a croquembouche that Mum rehearsed in various weather conditions so thoroughly that for a while you couldnt enter a shed on the farm without finding a few stray choux buns practising being exposed to heat.

Over the years, weve sometimes lived in the same city (Adelaide, London, Sydney). And when this happens, we strive to live within streets of each other, so as to facilitate the tottering transit of cakes, pies and structurally inadvisable salads. When my first baby was born in London, Wendy provided a full week of flawless in-home catering: a neatly packed basket slipped inside the door to our flat, twice daily. The first dish an oven-ready mushroom and gruyre tart I can still taste today. Thus was a post-partum catering tradition born between us; six lovely children, and countless deeply appreciated dishes.

For the last five years or so, weve lived in different hemispheres. This is a serious bummer, as we cannot cook for each other any more, or not without attracting strong interest from the Customs service anyway. But food is still a good language. Our email exchanges are relentlessly food-related. Wendy, who by training is a scientist and a technical editor, bombards me with chemical explanations of why things taste good or why they go soggy in the fridge. She is an experimental, natural, perceptive genius in the kitchen, and the nicest things I ever cook tend to come from her ideas. Ditto the nicest desserts on Kitchen Cabinet , for which Wendy is an enthusiastic consultant. Sometimes she really has to talk me into something like the lemon verbena posset and then, when I finally relent and make it, its so confoundingly fabulous that I feel like a goose.

This book was written by correspondence. Its a selection of many things Wendy and I have taken to each others houses, and some we would have taken if we didnt live on different sides of the damn world. Plus dishes that have said Congratulations or Cheer up or Lord, this meeting might be grim lets have some cake while were at it to countless of our friends and family and workmates; and some that have said Open up and let me in! to politicians. It was written, in English, about a language far more global in scope. I hope you enjoy it.

Annabel Crabb

There may be some cynics out there, wondering why a political journalist has written a cookbook. And asking, not very quietly, can that Crabb woman actually cook? Well, the answer is yes, she can! And really, really cook. Of course, she does the basics: a tasty pasta bake, an impeccable soup, and her work with gingerbread is peerless. And, for heavens sake, she bakes to relax. But what Annabel specialises in is the complicated, bordering-on-impossible dish. She is never happier than when attempting the culinary equivalent of the 4 reverse pike off the 3-metre diving board. The polenta-dusted, 20-cent-piece-sized English muffins for Lilliputian quail-eggs benedict? That was just the start of her teeny-tiny-food phase.

At the other end of the scale, there was Quercyan cake. Any dish that requires moving the sofa in order to create enough floor space to assemble it can only be filed under f for folly. After the making and rolling out of a vast swathe of translucent pastry, she sprinkled it with filling, rolled it tight and then coiled the lot into a huge tin. It took a day. (Coincidentally, a decade on, I moved to a place a few kilometres to the north of Quercy, and I could not find a single soul who had ever heard of such a cake.)

Yes, the gritty culinary ambition is impressive, but perhaps the very best thing about Annabels cooking, if you happen to be a friend, neighbour or colleague, is that she doesnt so much cook to eat; she cooks to give. While she may lack a sweet tooth herself (sugar would only distract from her trinity of true loves the salty, the smoked and the citrusy), therell always be a zip-lock bag of biscuits, or a wrapped slab of cake thrust into your handbag if you happen to drop by after one of her baking relaxation sessions.

And here is the salient message, the thing that I have learnt from Annabel cooking is not just about servicing ones own love of tasty food (because thats why I got started in the kitchen). The fun part can be the thrill of giving, of helping, of sharing. And of connecting. In the various countries and cities and towns that I have called home, food has always been the link that has joined me up with people when I knew no-one. Everyone needs to eat, right? Then why not cook for them? Dont be nervous about your culinary skills, or perceived lack of them. Because, as my grandmother always used to say, food tastes best when someone else cooks it for you.