5 minute read
There’s more than one way to wet your whistle by Max Allen
MARIEKE BRUGMAN’S art of food
For 25 years, Marieke was chef and cookery teacher at Howqua Dale Gourmet Retreat and cooking school that she co-founded near Mansfield. Marieke taught countless students the pleasures of seasonal eating with much produce and recipe inspiration taken from Howqua Dale’s kitchen garden. “I’ve always grown food wherever I’ve lived,” she says.
After hanging up her apron at Howqua Dale, the inveterate traveller set off hosting gourmet cycling tours of Australia’s wine regions. Next stop, Marieke became a yoga teacher and travel concierge, hosting luxury tours and retreats in Africa, Turkey, Paris, India, Sri Lanka, and Mexico to name a few.
Marieke has also been a major contributor to The Symposium of Australian Gastronomy series, the Australian Food and Wine Network, and to many anthologies celebrating Australian cuisine. Her contagious passion for food and cooking is based on strong food principles imparted by her mother.
Marieke describes her Dutch parents as “very European”. “Mum was the cook; she had certain principles. The table was the central altar, set with white damask every night of the week. There were no excuses – everyone was expected to show up to dinner and there was always space for a stranger. Every family celebration was food-focused.”
Her mother never went to a butcher’s shop. Instead, an Austrian friend who was a butcher came to the house every Friday with meat for the week. “It was inspected, and Mum selected what she wanted. Chicken was a luxury in those days. When we did have it, it usually arrived live in the back garden and Dad had to chop the head off, and we learnt that a chook can still run around decapitated.” In her mother’s kitchen, meat was cooked in a heavy pan on the stove with a splash of cognac or red wine and served medium rare with the pan juices – not roasted in the oven as it was in the homes of Marieke’s Australian school friends – and never under any circumstances did gravy come out of a box.
It was through her childhood sewing teacher Nancy Grant, a friend of Marieke’s mother and the grandmother of fashion designer Martin Grant, who really inspired Marieke to cook. “I’ve never met anyone who made a better sponge, made better shortbread. Nancy was one of the first people into avocado when avocado was exotic, and everything was made by hand – hold the mixing bowl between your knees and, with a wooden spoon, cream the butter and sugar for half an hour. In between her telling me what I had to pick apart and resew, she would always be cooking. I would ring my mother from Nancy’s house and say I need these ingredients.” Weekends were spent sewing and cooking. “I loved it; it was a space to be creative. By the time I was 12, I was the neighbourhood pav queen. I’d make them and people would buy them.” Marieke has called the Mornington Peninsula home since 2007, and true to her word grows food in her backyard. She has wonderful memories of summer family holidays in Blairgowrie or Sorrento. “My mother loved the beach. We stayed for three or four weeks. The houses were so fabulous; a timber or stone cottage with a veranda, often with sleepouts which meant a whole bunch of kids could stay the night. There’d be piles of old American magazines, Vogue and McCall’s. We’d be barefoot. Just the simplicity of it.” On these holidays, Marieke’s mother broke her food rules and allowed fish and chips for dinner and tinned potato salad at picnics. “We loved it.” Summer on the Peninsula for Marieke now means teaching yoga at Portsea. During lockdown she developed a podcast that will launch next year, and drafted the outline for a book.
Autumn is Marieke’s favourite season on the Peninsula. “The weather is settled, the water is still warm, the crowds have thinned out and in a good season you can go foraging for mushrooms.” When it comes to her favourite local food haunts, she says: “You have to go a long distance for specialty things. Torello Farm does a great job, as do Hawkes Farm. I sometimes call in on the Cypriot guy George at his farm in Rosebud for his eggs or honey, and I buy really beautiful seeds to plant from Transition Farm.” Buying seafood, though, is more of a challenge. “I want to go to the fish shop and say, ‘Where’s the leatherjacket? Where are the more marginal fish? Why are you just selling outrageously expensive King George whiting and Tasmanian salmon?’ If they’d read Richard Flanagan’s book they’d never buy salmon again.”
On the way food values have changed, Marieke says: “I think we’ve created a multitude of issues. Too much waste, too much packaging, too much convenience and cost-cutting. I think there’s such a price for convenience. People have lost the skill to respect the whole thing. In the old days at my cooking school, for example, we’d do a whole weekend on ‘take a duck’, learning to utilise every part of the duck to make duck neck sausages, confit legs, luxurious duck breast, and the bones for stock; or how to optimise lesser cuts, how to cook ‘on the bone’ and fillet a fish. The irony is there’s huge popularity in cooking programs but is it really skilling people up to love taking time each day to cook? It’s such a rewarding experience to cook.
“For me, the social, communal function of food trumps everything. The ideas of hospitality, conviviality, generosity, conversation and sharing table have always underpinned the pleasure to cook for others. The table can be a hay bale in a paddock or a rug on a horse ride. It’s about coming together. Life is too short to eat a bad meal.”
