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Maggie Beer has been inspiring cooks for more than two decades. Jo Bates meets the humble country cook who became a household name 102 taste
his year Maggie Beer was honoured in Australia’s most prestigious awards for a career spent inspiring Australians to connect with their quality local produce. The self-taught cook is typically humble about being recognised as Senior Australian of the Year: “It was a lovely, lovely moment in my life. I’m incredibly lucky. All because of a love of food. If you are doing what you love, all sorts of things happen.” In fact, awards and recognition have propelled Maggie’s 25-year career. In the name of food, she has taken steps that have been bold, brave and, of course, highly creative. It all started with a modest farm-gate shop, which she and her husband Colin opened in 1979 at their Barossa Valley property in South Australia. When Colin Beer was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study game-bird breeding in Europe, it set in motion the decision to open their farm-based business. Now known as the Farm Shop, Maggie says, “It’s where we started and it’s at the very heart of everything we do.” Soon afterwards they opened the Pheasant Farm Restaurant, a showcase for Colin’s game birds and Maggie’s cooking – back when she “had the audacity to open a restaurant with no training, no anything!” The country restaurant, in burgeoning wine country thrived, and their hard work and dedication was recognised with a number of awards, including the prestigious Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year in 1991. “As a little country restaurant it was the most mind-blowing thing [winning] against all the big boys,” recalls Maggie. As well as showing up high-end city restaurants, Maggie had also been experimenting with making verjuice and developing her Maggie Beer product range. “We’d been grape growers since 1973 and it was 1984 and we couldn’t sell our riesling grapes so a friend at Yalumba made verjuice. We didn’t have a benchmark, a recipe; we didn’t really know what to do but we made it every year. It wasn’t for another 10 years that we
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really got serious about it and in my naivety and stupidity I thought a cook will know what verjuice is – it turned out to be a long process of educating people.” Although verjuice has been the provenance of Mediterranean peasant cultures for centuries, Maggie was the first in the world to commercialise the product. Verjus, or green juice, is the pressings from unripe grapes and is used in cooking as an acidic flavouring and for deglazing. With the product range expanding and a family to care for, the success of the restaurant was proving too much to juggle so Maggie and Colin closed it in 1993, at the height of its renown. In a career that has never rested, an export kitchen opened in 1996 to produce her preservative-free gourmet products for retail. The Maggie Beer product range is now available in supermarkets across Australia and has expanded to include around nine refrigerated and more than 20 other products including preserves, spices, oils, vinegar and verjuice. Products are also exported to countries including the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and New Zealand. The staff of four has now grown to 70. The Farm Shop has also grown into a huge attraction for foodies from all over the world. “It’s in a beautiful spot on the side of a huge dam and it’s just a buzz every single day. It’s the only place you can go to in Australia to get every single product we make, so people flock there.” The daily demonstration on how to cook with verjuice continues to be a significant drawcard. There have been more than five cookbooks, including Tuscan Cookbook, co-authored with Stephanie Alexander, plus the incredibly successful TV show The Cook and the Chef, which Maggie hosted with Simon Bryant, executive chef of the Adelaide Hilton, and appearances on Australian MasterChef. “I’ll never retire because I love so much what I do,” says Maggie. While she intends to take more time for family and herself, she promises, “there will always be new ideas”. Her next book is due out in September.
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Carrots in verjuice with goat’s cheese & pine nuts Over the years I’ve learnt so much about verjuice, both from my own cooking and that of others – I appreciate the incredible generosity of friends (not to mention complete strangers) who share the numerous ways they’ve found to cook with this magical ingredient. Here I’ve used it with carrots – a vegetable I have to admit to not bothering to either grow or seek out, unless I spy a young bunch at our weekly Barossa produce markets. Par-cooking them, then rubbing off their skins and tossing them in nut-brown butter with verjuice gives them a totally different dimension, while still managing to retain their sweetness. Served just like this, this dish is a great accompaniment to any meal, but the addition of currants, pine nuts and goat’s cheese transforms it into a wonderful luncheon dish in its own right.
serves | 4 as a luncheon dish or an accompaniment ¼ cup dried currants 1/3
cup verjuice
1 bunch baby carrots, green tops trimmed (leave about 2cm), scrubbed ¼ cup pine nuts 100g unsalted butter, chopped ¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley ½ cup marinated chèvre or fresh goat’s curd
1 Place currants and verjuice in a small bowl and leave to plump. 2 Cook carrots in a saucepan of boiling salted water until almost cooked through. (The exact time depends on the freshness and size of the carrots, but I find that after about 5 minutes is a good time to check. To do this, remove a carrot from the pan, then rub with a clean Chux; if cooked, the skin will easily peel off.) Leave carrots to cool a little, then use a Chux to rub skins off while still warm. Set peeled carrots aside to cool, then halve lengthways. 3 Drain currants, reserving verjuice. 4 Toast pine nuts in a frying pan over low heat until light brown. Transfer to a bowl, then add butter to the pan and melt over medium heat until bubbling but not nut-brown. Add carrots to the pan and increase heat to high, then cook for 2-3 minutes or until butter turns nut-brown. Add reserved verjuice and cook until reduced and syrupy. Add currants, pine nuts and parsley, then transfer to a serving dish. Top with chèvre or spoon over goat’s curd and serve at once.
Recipe from Maggie’s Kitchen By Maggie Beer Lantern, distributed by Penguin, $65
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