SALAD DAYS

REVIEW: FAMILY: NEW VEGETABLE CLASSICS TO COMFORT AND NOURISH

WORDS BY JESSICA MCLENNAN

Hetty McKinnon’s third book is the latest in her instalment of salad and whole food recipes from her home kitchen.

Hetty McKinnon calls herself a salad maker. From her small kitchen in Surry Hills, Sydney, she started delivering salads around the neighbourhood on the back of her bike. From such humble beginnings her business, Arthur Street Kitchen, has become an international phenomenon.

Hetty’s first book, Community, was strongly tied to those humble beginnings, and to the group of people with whom she first shared her joy of home cooking and creating healthy, hearty, vegetarian food. It was this community that helped launch her onto the national stage, and who shared their recipes with her for inclusion in that book. Her second book, Neighbourhood, branched out of Surry Hills—much like Hetty herself, who is now based in Brooklyn, New York—and found stories and recipes from neighbourhoods all over the world.

Her new book, Family: New Vegetable Classics to Comfort and Nourish, is all about the recipes that have come to her through family heirlooms, travels and conversations. Filled with anecdotes and snippets of tales from around the globe, it features inventive new dishes through to old classics re-envisioned for the twenty-first century, complete with healthier ingredients.

Released as a paperback and ebook, Family is certainly beautiful to look at but in the age of Instagram, amazing food photography is dime-a-dozen. Regardless, the photos that accompany the recipes throughout Family stand out, bursting off the page with colour and vibrancy. Featuring rustic plates and members of Hetty’s family sharing and enjoying dishes, Family encapsulates the homely, inviting feel that Hetty and her food inspires.

This spirit of invitation, threaded through all of Hetty’s books, is also at play in the curation of Family. Along with her own creations, the book is full of recipes shared with her from friends and family, and from readers and fans all around the world. A small introduction at the top of each recipe explain its origins, from a stranger she’s never met to her very own mother-in-law.

The core of the book is still salad. Hearty and substantial, Hetty’s salads are designed to stand as main meals, not simply side dishes. She is endlessly creative, finding new ways to combine favourite fruits and vegetables into wholesome dishes that can appeal to the whole family.

Hetty’s philosophy is that family food is comfort food, but that traditional comfort food is often unhealthy and high in salt and fats. Hetty, instead, has created new comfort foods that are filled with vegetables and whole grains that make them appropriate for everyday weeknight meals (and that the kids can still enjoy). Technically simple, her recipes are approachable for the most newbie cook and, equally, with her exciting approach to flavour a more experienced chef might find an unusual or unique combination—cauliflower dressed in minty yoghurt, or a lime pie with an Anzac biscuit crust.

‘Hearty and substantial, Hetty’s salads are designed to stand as main meals, not simply side dishes.’

Family very much focuses on multiculturalism, something that is second nature to most Australians. Coming from a Chinese background, Hetty was raised on traditional rice and noodle dishes. Nowadays, she understands that most people mix and match foods from cultures and regions, and that this can be reflected on the dinner table any given night of the week. Growing up, my family would eat Italian one night, stir-fry the next, and meat and three veg in between. Hetty has taken this idea one step further by putting foods from different countries together on one plate. Her gnocchi with edamame beans, in particular, are a curious mishmash of Italian with Japanese, a flavour and cultural combination that somehow works.

Before the launch of the book, Hetty launched the hashtag #familythecookbook, encouraging her fans to post photos of their family meals. She doesn’t simply want to write a cookbook—she is creating a movement to renew the idea of family and friends sharing a table and eating together.

Hetty cites research from Harvard University as a reason for encouraging us to eat with our families. According to the research, people who regularly eat with their families (particularly when growing up) have higher self-esteem levels and lower rates of obesity. This all makes sense. It’s the act of eating together and the conversations over the dinner table that help to form a person’s sense of belonging and teach them the cooking and eating habits that will sustain them through their lives.

Building community is central to everything that Hetty does—from her Brooklyn home she has launched a co- working space, a food magazine and she has a podcast in the works. All of this is centred around her love of food, and of sharing the stories that accompany what we eat. She is not interested in professional chefs; rather, home cooks like her mother take centre stage in her work.

All of Hetty McKinnon’s books have quickly become bestsellers. With such instantly shareable recipes, Family will very likely follow this path. Who knows, it could be the next staple cookbook in Australian kitchens.

Family: New Vegetable Classics to Comfort and Nourish

Hetty McKinnon

Published by Pan Macmillan

Available in all good bookstores