Tess Mallos has had a far-reaching influence on bringing Greek and Middle Eastern cooking not only to a new Australian audience, but to the “converted†– few Greek homes are without a copy of her Greek Cookbook or The Complete Middle East Cookbook.
She said when the Complete book was published that she hoped it would help keep alive food traditions of their roots of people living in a different culture - people like herself, born in Australia of Greek parents.
Natalia was pleased to receive a copy of The Complete Middle East Cookbook as a present when she and Nick married, and Anastasia, no mean Greek cook herself, is looking forward to learning from Tess.
Tess jumped into a career in food with no training and little warning. A young mother of two, she and her husband John, had just returned to Sydney from running a café in country NSW, when her sister Ellen “needed help badly†in designing and cooking a lunch. It was to have rice in every course because Ellen was trying to gain the Rice Board account for the advertising agency she worked for.
At only two week’s notice, preparation began with building and equipping the kitchen! Tess cooked the meal (and met Margaret Fulton, who was a guest at the lunch), Ellen gained the account, and offers began coming in for Tess to prepare food for advertising photography. Eventually she did a weekly cooking segment in Good Morning Australia and soon began publishing books.
The recipes in Tess Mallos’s latest book Middle Eastern Home Cooking (Lansdowne 2002) all appeared in her encyclopedic Complete Middle East Cookbook, first published in 1979 and still in print. The difference in the new book is every recipe is illustrated and there are step-by-step illustrations for handling grapevine leaves, filo and such.
Tess and John travelled extensively in the Middle East in 1978 as she researched the book, visiting many good home cooks in Yemen, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the Gulf States and Israel. Early editions of the book had a separate Middle Eastern version that did not include Israel (maps printed in Middle Eastern countries at the time did not show Israel – it was there but blank, Tess said), but in later editions, Israel does not appear at all.
Middle Eastern Home Cooking has been selling for 23 years, an impressively long life for a cookbook. Tess and her publishers thought the events of September 11, 2001 would put paid to sales in the US, but in fact they revived interest in the Middle East and sales of the book there took off.
Here Middle Eastern food is sitting well with health-conscious trends, it being rich in pulses and legumes, and high-antioxidant foods such as bitter greens and olive oil, and lemon juice, which helps the body use iron.
And Middle Eastern food is not nearly as exotically “foreign†as it once was. “You know a food has been accepted when you can find hummus, pide bread, baba ghanoush and tahini everywhere,†said Tess.
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