THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS
Barbara O’Neal
Published by Harper Collins Publisher Australia, P/B $32.99

This is shameless ’chick lit’ and it’s pretty unlikely that any male chef (or for that matter male) is going to get into it unless they are a bit pissed (or stoned) and sentimental and/or have been recently dumped by a tough female chef in love with nothing but her food. Girls will get it, especially kick arse female chefs who make it to the top and stay there because they have earned and gained the respect of their male colleagues by being their better, tougher, stronger and more talented. The Lost Recipe for Happiness does make the connection between the kitchen that really works, the one that understands it takes a team and the better the team, regardless of how competitive it is, the better it works. Punters will probably not get half of this book, the sickening opening night that goes completely wrong, a kitchen half staffed with illegal immigrants, drunks and addicts, the jealousies the love, the family that is the mystical group of cripples who share a peculiar love for each other and run the best kitchens; basically the full catastrophe.
O’Neal even gets most of the kitchen bits right apart from the notion of dying the tamale husks with food colouring ddd…! It just wouldn’t happen in a good kitchen. There is a lot in this book for Anthony Bourdain’s ’kitchen bitches’ to relate to, right to the crippling agonising pain of a broken back, the exhausted limping which was a bit too close to home.
This could have been yet another dreary hash of sickeningly sweet books like Mostly Martha, but somehow manages to scrape in with just enough toughness to have some sense of truth. At least there is a lot of hot and steamy sex, just like every normal kitchen, that ends up condoning complicated incestuous trysts because no has the time or energy to go looking for a relationship after a 16 hour a day. These cynical personalities are mainly driven by their love of food and cooking, but deep down most long for someone to love who will love them back without asking them to give up their passions.
If you’re into kitchen reality you should probably tear out the last 20 pages before you start reading and throw them in the bin, but if you feel like a lot of unbelievable happiness and in need of a good weep the end will kill you. After all the title says it all! If they make this book into a movie, which is more than likely, there are bound to be girls in cloggs attending the mid afternoon sessions, weeping noisily and wishing their love affairs had half such happy endings. It’s a soft, mushie, tragic, sad, a story of ghosts and kitchens, love and redemption and for some inexplicable reason impossible to put down.

Sometimes someone who knows you presses a book into your hands, and insists against all protests about being time poor, too much work connected reading to read novels, and says “You must read this book, it is unbelievably beautiful. It is about things that you love! ”
Picked up late at night looking for reading sedative, six hours later it was daylight and the book had not been put down. It was only reluctantly put down to start the work of the day. Without looking up Mone’s biography, it was clear that she had a knowledge of Chinese cuisine that can never be book learned. It is the knowledge of someone who has either been born into the culture or been steeped in it for a very long time, wrongly concluding Mones was probably Chinese, with generations of fabulous cooks and culinary history in her family. Her perfectly crafted words are written with an understanding of the cuisine that is only learned by cooking with Chinese from home cooks to master chefs, eating the food understanding the philosophy and history behind each nuance of a dish.
Some of the descriptions are the voice of Cheong Liew, some my friends in China, some my friends in Australia who talk about their culture’s food with a longing that I never grasped until my first visit to China. Some are the voices of the amazing master chefs of the Changfu Group in Chengdu, who would discuss a dish in exactly the same tone as Mones, analysing every nuance and often cruelly castigating anyone who had made a mistake. Further Mones writes with the correct understanding that Western Cuisine in comparison to Chinese cuisine has not developed past infancy.
The Last Chinese Chef is the most stupendous insight into the passions, rules, history and complexities that go behind Chinese cooking whether it is court cuisine or the single ingredient of the poor that turns a bowl of rice into a miracle. This is a book about the pull of cultural heritage, facing the hard curve balls of life, and although neatly woven into a beautiful tender story it is subliminal to the superbly crafted passages describing food.

visit Nicole Mones web site click here