A cook's companion

Stephanie Alexander is a cook, restaurateur, food writer and champion of the quality and diversity of Australian food.

My public reputation was established in the restaurant field, so there were 30 years of my life when I was basically chopping and stirring, and not using any library. I think back on those years with mixed feelings. My restaurant was very significant; it was a time of great change in Melbourne. Food has continued to be a major focus in my life. I have written 14 books and most recently a memoir. My most well-known book is The cook’s companion which reflects my background as a librarian and my passionate interest in food. My current preoccupation is food education as founder and board member of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.

My first visit to the Library was around 1959. More recently I’ve come here because my family has a collection of papers in this library. When I was writing my memoir I wanted permission to use a family photograph which I knew was in the collection. So I came to the manuscripts room; that was quite exciting, with white gloves and so on.

My father deposited many personal papers to do with history or family or his famous brother, the journalist Wilfred Burchett, in this library. The Burchett collection includes many records of early Melbourne as well as my father’s own research into the buildings in East Melbourne. He was an amateur historian and passionately interested in Victoria’s history.

The institution of libraries is incredibly important. I trained as a librarian and the first ten years of my working life were spent in libraries.

My memories of the State Library of Victoria are of a time long before the beautification of the dome. It was a dark place, like the British Museum, where you felt almost overwhelmed with the solemnity of the moment when you sat down at a desk to work. Those green lamps, the deadly silence – it was forbidding. You had to feel pretty confident to come into the Library when I was an undergraduate! Now it’s a very different situation and you see kids sitting on the floor with headphones in their ears. Times have changed – for the better.

Anyone who’s interested in history would know that the Library is the repository of so much information. It’s not just an incredibly important institution, but also a beautiful building and gathering place. Sometime when I have a couple of days free, I shall come and investigate the Burchett collection; I know there’s a lot of information there. Very recently an elderly cousin of mine (aged 91) deposited an additional 12 diaries handwritten by my great-grandfather with the first one being from 1898. So the contributions continue. And of course I donated my own notebooks to the Library, so they now have something like 130 of my hand-written notebooks.