Join Kate Legge, author of Delicious, for afternoon tea and a conversation with award-winning journalist Belinda Hawkins.
Who is Kate Legge
Kate started her career at Melbourne University as co-editor of the student newspaper Farrago in 1980. She then joined The Age as a cadet and quickly started accumulating awards for her coverage of people, politics and social affairs in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Washington DC.
Just released, her fifth book is Delicious: Stories of Cooking, Love and Friendship. Chapter by chapter it explores some of the friends she has made in different parts of her life and the way in which food brought them together. At the end of each chapter is the recipe that someone close to her made for her or that she made.
Kate is remarkably candid about her herself, her family and her friends. Kate reveals and analyses the bonds that break and sustain relationships. Here the emphasis is on what sustains them. At the heart of that is the joy of cooking for those you love and then sitting around a table with them. It traverses topics we can all relate to such as the freedom of university years, the isolation of stay-at-home mothers and the gnawing self- recrimination of working mothers, marriage and separation, the hidden histories of many migrants, ageing parents and new love.
“The idea for Delicious came upon me while reading a recipe for an Aunt Maggie’s tea cake in a dentist’s waiting room,” Kate says.
“I wondered who was this woman? The matriarch of a large clan? A cook on a farm who fed a shed full of shearers? A maiden aunt famous for her afternoon spread?”
“I thought of all the recipes that have been handed down to me by friends and family and how these scraps of grease-stained paper are biographical snippets of my days on earth and the people who’ve fed and nourished me. I love the magic and mystery of all that unfolds in the heart and the kitchen. Food and friendship salve our hunger and soothe our troubles. The idea of exploring these two themes lit an urge to write about them.”
Following the talk we will be celebrating this wonderful memoir with an inspired-by-Delicious afternoon tea inspired by the recipes in the book.
Sunday 30 August 2pm-4pm
Shoreham Community Hall
67 Byrnes Rd Shoreham
