“My life has just been a little bit crazy lately,” Maggie Beer laughs softly as we get on the phone. That feels like something of an understatement. As well as her year-round duties helming a range of gourmet foods plus a shop and restaurant in the Barossa Valley, Australia’s most endearing celebrity cook is in a particularly busy period.
Beer is back in the judging seat for another season of reality competition The Great Australian Bake Off. She’s also gearing up for this year’s Tasting Australia festival, which returns to South Australia in April to showcase the state’s best food and drink. Among other duties, Beer will be headlining the festival’s Town Square Kitchen Legends Dinner on 29 April.
On a more personal note, Beer and her husband, Colin, have also launched the Saskia Beer Churchill Fellowship, an initiative that will provide a passionate food lover with the opportunity to pursue sustainable, community-focused approaches to food production through travel and study. The fellowship honours the memory of Beer’s daughter, Saskia, who died in early 2020.
Last year Beer hung a painting that reminds her of Saskia in the kitchen, the heart of their family home. She tells us why that painting reminds her of the happy times, as well as the story of some other important personal belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
We have a painting by Davida Allen of a farmer, a young girl and some chooks. It is so important as, to me, it tells such a story of Saskia working with Colin and the birds when she was seven or eight years old.
I’m the most sentimental so-and-so and I’m a hoarder of all sorts of emotional things. The painting is full of colour and exuberance and makes it feel like Saskia is there with us. And it’s hanging in my happiest place, the kitchen. Every family celebration we ever had was always there. Everything starts in the kitchen.
The memories this painting evokes makes me smile and is a reminder of our family times together – the chaos that always surrounded us, with my girls bossing me around and competing as to who could make the best mayonnaise or who should be doing what. It’s like having our Saskia in the kitchen always.
My most useful object
Now, this is hard. I have so many “useful” old-fashioned tools in my kitchen I could write about, yet on reflection I’ve decided that the most useful object has to be in the plural – archive boxes!
I have a large office at the bottom of the garden full of so many boxes. Inside these boxes are piles of spiral notebooks of every shape and size in which I have recorded all the great food experiences that I’ve had over 40 years, both here in Australia and abroad. They’re records of every great meal that we’ve ever had. This is my gold.
One day, if I ever take time to write a memoir, even if it’s just for the family, I’ll need these notebooks. They are my memories of dishes, of people, of restaurants, of different cultures. Just opening them up, either randomly or chronologically, I learn from them again and they continually inspire me to use an ingredient or an idea I’d forgotten about. Sometimes just glancing at the notes of a dish at a certain time and place brings back memories of far more than the food.
It’s a history that I really want to take the time to transcribe – and, just perhaps, eventually create a memoir with.
The item I most regret losing
I’m very haphazard and frenetic. I always have thousands and thousands of emails that I don’t put into folders because I just never have time. But at least in today’s world with computers and the wonderful cloud I can always retrieve things I’ve mislaid. However it wasn’t always so when I used to write columns, menus and stories on typewriters with carbon paper copies and put them away … somewhere. One of my great regrets is losing my file from 1995.
That year I was part of an amazing happening with the Barossa music festival, as their “official festival food designer”. I oversaw all the food served at each musical performance all over the Barossa. With the help of a great friend, Clare Bogan, we put so many hours into making each venue the perfect combination of music and local food. Now all that work – all of the excitement, the ideas that we put together and the record of that extraordinary time – is missing.
One night the festival was staging a baroque opera in the Octavia Cellar in Yalumba, so it required a menu of 17th-century food for 120 people. I had such fun researching and cooking the banquet, the star of which was my hare pies with lard pastry. But on the night, the pastry collapsed! I was mortified. Even though there was still plenty of great eating I felt I wanted to explain to the assembled throng what had happened. I told the story of the chef who suicided in France at the court of Louis XIV when the fish didn’t arrive, saying I felt pretty bad about it, but not as desperate as that.
The files that I’ve lost had the records of all the meals I’d planned over those 16 days. Of them all, I most regret losing the detail and photographs of this night as it was one of the most special nights of my food life. There’s so much about it I remember being amazing, I just need to fill in the gaps with my file, but it’s totally gone.
