Stephen Downes

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Paris on a plate (Murdoch Books 2006)

A ‘gastronomic’ diary of a dozen days in the French capital, Paris on a plate leans heavily on nostalgia for – and memories of – my early years living in Paris, where I worked, fell in love and got married. But underpinning these memories and observations of the street life of a great city is my meal-by-meal inventory of that fortnight. I eat at three great restaurants, several famous ones and a few that are downright ordinary. The book also outlines how the restaurant business has changed in France and the affect of big money on France’s alleged leadership in things culinary.

To Die For: 100 food experiences to have before you die (Pier 9 2005)

The sub-titles says it all. This book was such terrific fun to write. And so easy. I simply dredged my memory for the best things I’ve ever eaten. In a blitz of about three-quarters of an hour, I jotted down the first 70 or so. I break up the experiences into those that you must go to specific restaurants to enjoy, those that can be easily cooked at home, dishes that require a little more effort, and ‘Perfect 10s’ or ingredients – such as a home-grown tomato – that scream their transcendence. The book is packed with anecdotes about how I came to discover these essential gustatory experiences. There is even a story about the erotic potential of a ripe mango.

Adagio for a simple clarinet (Lothian Books 2005)

This is another book I very much enjoyed writing. It allowed me to experiment with a narrative style that comprised biography, autobiography, fiction, musicology, Nazi history, travelogue and time dislocations. At the story’s centre is my rediscovery of my father’s clarinet and my setting myself the goal of learning to play a short piece on it. The narrative explores what might motivate such a solipsistic challenge. Fundamentally, of course, it’s a story about a father-son relationship. But even now, if I reread Adagio I have moments when I believe I’m not the narrator. I’m fascinated by the ability of each of us to be several different people. At its extreme, of course, this human quality throws up a Hitler who loved children, an executioner who can go home and be kind to his dog, a bureaucrat or businessman who can make decisions that will make the disadvantaged yet more disadvantaged but mow his infirm neighbor’s front lawn. Before he weekends at his beach house.

Advanced Australian Fare (Allen & Unwin 2002)

This book is the only popular history of the development of Australian food, restaurants and commercial cooking in the crucial years between the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and its Sydney counterpart in 2000. It won awards locally and internationally – including the Australian Food Media’s Outstanding Food Book for 2003 – yet it sold poorly. I would have thought anyone who eats out in Australia, and especially any chef, would want a copy. That wasn’t the case. My thesis in Advanced Australian Fare is that Australia became a world restaurant leader and produced a unique culinary style not because of migrants, a common myth. Other more important factors – liquor-law revisions, a burgeoning wine industry in the 1970s, higher salaries and wages, increased travel, the lack of a food culture and Australian’s legendary willingness to ‘give things a go’ – were all much more important factors.

Blackie (Knopf 2003)

Though less than 200 pages long, Blackie is the hardest piece of extended writing I’d ever done. It’s about the life, illness and demise of one of our family cats.
Blackie had a brain tumour removed – unusual enough for a pet, I suppose – and I felt especially responsible for nursing him back to life. Unfortunately, he didn’t recover, which gave me the chance to write in more depth about the responsibilities of carers towards pets and what animals bring to our lives.
It was hard work, and the front of my t-shirt was often stained with tears. My friend Jeff Masson, one of the world’s best writers about animals and their psychology, called Blackie ‘deeply moving…honest and courageous’. Without a cheque in the mail.
Blackie has been translated into Italian, Dutch and Greek.

Heartening reactions to ‘Blackie’

Like everyone who reads them, I’m appalled at recent stories from southern China about the treatment of dogs for human consumption. Not content to cram animals into tiny wire cages, wholesalers slaughter their stock by bludgeoning them over an extended period; immense fear and intense pain in the minutes before their demise are supposed to make the dogs tastier and more tender.

Humans have odd relationships with other animals — from treating pets as quasi-humans to the kinds of behaviour dog-sellers in Chinese food markets perpetrate. In a small way I explore our responsibilities towards animals in ‘Blackie’ (Knopf), which is about one of our pet cats, who contracted a tumour and underwent pioneering brain surgery. It’s a distressing story, yet several people have recently mentioned to me how much they ‘enjoyed’ — if that’s the right word — the book; that they had found it uplifting.

Nursing Blackie through his illness was a highlight of my life. But I’m still someone who eats animals whose lives must have been dismal, whose treatment perhaps was less than humane. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to make my living reviewing restaurants in all their forms, didn’t enjoy eating so much. The contrition of vegetarians must be very good for the soul.