For executive producer of Breakfast Carol Hirschfeld, the kitchen is a place of comfort, creativity and sweet memories. She talks to Emily Simpson.
I had to start cooking as a kid because Mum died when I was 10 so we would be tasked with doing dinner, my sister and I, from the age of 11 or 12.
There were some incredible disasters. It was still that era when parents would make you eat things like offal, and I remember grilling liver – I really didn’t know what a grill was – and the liver was like the sole of a shoe when I’d finished with it. Miserable!
Dad was a really good cook. He’d do the basics well. It’s interesting seeing people with all these fancy fryers these days – air fryers or whatever – because Dad made chips in a saucepan with perfectly ordinary vegetable oil and they were fantastic. I can still see them now, the biggest, fattest most golden chips.
Because he was a busy solo father with three kids he’d go to 3 Guys and shop in bulk. Suddenly we’d have chicken for seven nights straight. He’d say, “Chicken! You’d be pretty pleased with that!” And we were but not after seven nights.
I don’t know if this was an Australian thing (he was Australian) but he’d just whip up a dessert, peaches on the bottom and a sponge top. He’d bake rock buns and I remember him making us Turkish delight to take to school. It was quite unusual at that time for a dad to cook so well. He cooked when Mum was alive as well – I think he might have done the bulk of the cooking even then.
But Mum made the most divine chocolate pudding. We had one of those steaming pudding bowls with a tin foil top. There was no Farro around, it was just made with cocoa and not Dutch cocoa, but in my mind it was the most chocolatey self-saucing pudding you could ever dream of.
I think that’s the thing isn’t it? Food is memory, it’s company, it’s comfort, it’s everything.
Mum had a slightly fancy cookbook that I was obsessed with. It must have been American because it had things like Bombe Alaska. And it had salads where everything was laid out on a platter with a million separate components, nothing like the iceberg lettuce salads I’d seen before. And I thought right, that’s what I’m going to do with my salad at manual. And I won the manual prize for cooking in Form One with that salad. I was crap at the sewing.
That was the start of me loving cookbooks. Both my sister and I still have way too many, and to me they represent a dream, an aspiration. I will have that dinner party and it will be glorious and all my friends will love me because I will feed them so well!
It’s always been my favourite way to socialise.
A memory I have of university is going to my older brother Charl’s place and he would feed me. That really made me understand how you can go to the next level with food. We were at university together but before that Charl had (almost fully) trained as a chef. I was envious that he could just look in the fridge and make a beautiful meal. He wouldn’t think twice about whipping up a béarnaise sauce and it fascinated me how that could lift the most ordinary of dishes. That’s when I realised, cooking is science, and it’s practise.
My sister Linda is a wonderful cook too, she’s the baker of the family. There was always a lot of discussion between the three of us about cooking. My sister turned to me once and she said “What? Are you not making your own vinaigrette?” There’s nothing like homemade and I never looked back.
I still love to cook with my sister. We go to her bach and that’s where we cook together. I laugh when I look at her larder, it’s ridiculous, she has everything. I know there will be preserved lemons and sumac. I don’t have to worry.
I had a boyfriend in my early 20s, Michael, who made me appreciate the simple but glorious things in life. He loved oysters with Vogel’s bread, a perfect combination that we would enjoy on Saturday mornings and I remember thinking, “Wow! This is delicious.”
I started to play around with throwing dinner parties when my husband Finlay and I were first together in my mid-20s. I had some terrible disasters. My family will vouch that I’m not a great timer. I tend to over-reach. With some of my early dinner parties I’d get the timing so completely and utterly wrong.
By the time I was 30 I decided I was going to specialise in some things. I bought a Marcella Hazan book on risottos. I just thought risotto was the most comforting dish and I was going to keep to keep cooking them until I got them right. I made them with asparagus, with mushrooms. That’s part of the business of cooking you have to try, try and try again. This is where my sister is great, she has conquered pastry, she did batch after batch until she got it right. I don’t quite have her patience.
My perfect scenario: It’s summer, not too hot, it’s about four o’clock in the afternoon, there’s music on definitely – something like H.E.R. playing a Tiny Desk concert on NPR – and I’m in my kitchen working my way through my different dishes for a dinner party. Knowing I’ve got time. Ideally I’ve already knocked off the dessert.
Lately I’ve had a real phase with pavlovas. It started with the Meringue Wreath from Dish magazine – I love to play with those, I love the prettiness. Also Nadia Lim’s Brown Sugar Pavlova which is quite complex although, not really. That’s the thing with cooking, it’s just a series of steps. And you feel such satisfaction at the end.
Cooking makes me happy. After a day when my mind has been so intensely busy, the monotony of chopping is a relief. I get lost in those repetitive actions and then... enjoying the smells. Some people talk about how disappointing it is that it’s all eaten so quickly, but I don’t care. Finlay eats really quickly and he says it’s a sign of his great satisfaction with the food.
When my kids Will and Rosa were little, Finlay was the primary food giver because I was reading the news so I missed their dinner time. We called it ‘Dad’s Diner’ and they preferred his food for years. I loved the way he fed them. I would have over-reached. I would have put anchovies in the cheese mac but he kept it simple. He’d chop up raw carrots and cucumbers and that was the salad. My kids were very unadventurous with food until a certain age; I worried about it, but it didn’t matter in the end. They embraced food with gusto when they found their palates.
Food’s a big conversation in our household. We all like to watch cooking shows together – it’s a neutral space! It was really important to me that both the kids learned to cook and they have. Rosa is mainly vegetarian and Will is mainly vegan, and we’ve followed their lead by becoming pescetarian. I don’t miss meat at all.
Finlay and I share the cooking. He often cooks during the week because I might have a meeting at 5pm or something. The other night Finlay made a roasted tomato and white bean stew. He’s precise in his cooking. No fuss.
I provide all the fuss.
'This Makes Me Happy' is a series about the things in life that bring us joy.
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