Mothers add a dash of love

Kylie Kwong

Restaurateur, chef, author, presenter
Mother: Pauline Kwong

I had to be a restaurateur, because cooking is in my blood, travelling back generations to my Chinese ancestors. Growing up in Sydney's North Epping, my family was poor but there was so much love, and mum's love manifested itself in her cooking. Our lives revolved around family and food. While eating one meal, we'd be talking about the next. My mother, Pauline, who's 71 now, invested her senses and her heart into what she put onto our table. Her great joy was serving food and watching our faces light up. Eating at the Kwongs' was nothing fancy, just a plastic tablecloth and chopsticks, but it was the highlight of our day and feeding dad, my two brothers and me was like throwing meat to the sharks. Through mum, I came to understand that food makes you happy. Like her, I express my love through my cooking. When anyone comes to my home, I don't ask them how they are, I say, ''Are you hungry?'' Like mum always does.

My parents hosted Saturday night banquets for 15, and I learnt to cook watching mum from my perch on the kitchen bench and being her helper as she created these feasts. I went with her to the fish, meat and veg markets at Haymarket, where she was uncompromising about buying the best seasonal produce, but always said, ''Please''.

I got to know Michael the fish man, who smelt like the sea; Peter the butcher; the Italian greengrocers. In our kitchen as she prepared the banquet, she taught me to chop and blanch and score, to remove the sac from calamari, to tell if something was cooked by how it smelt, and to deep-fry, knowing the oil was hot enough when it had a certain look on its surface. I learnt to cook with my senses, as mum did, and the love came naturally.

When I grew up and became Neil Perry's head chef at Wockpool, mum's lessons came rushing back. Neil then pointed me towards the great technical cooking books, the Elizabeth Davids, for technique, and that complemented the beautiful touchy-feely stuff mum had taught me.

At Billy Kwong, we have around 25 dishes, and 10 of those come from mum's recipe book: the steamed fish with ginger and shallots, the white cooked chicken, the sweetcorn and chicken soup, the prawn wontons … The thumbs up from Pauline Kwong means we've done well.

Andrew McConnell

Restaurateur, chef
Mother: Margaret McConnell

I grew up in Melbourne's Balwyn, and my mother, Margaret, cooked every night for my father and five siblings. Money and time were tight, yet still she was inventive with her food. Somehow she served up such treats as Irish stew, steak and onions, roast chicken. She made liver pate, and for dessert golden syrup dumplings and scrumptious Anzac biscuits.

We kids helped out in the kitchen and washed up after we'd eaten. Definitely, hanging around her apron strings is what sparked my interest in good food. Also, I was exposed to other countries' food because mum and dad ate out - I remember local Chinese and Lebanese restaurants - not every week, but often enough.

I learnt about food because mum exposed us to it, but more than what we actually put in our mouths was the social aspect of eating. At our place, there was always someone dropping in for dinner. The ritual of family and friends sitting together, talking and laughing as we ate, was one I enjoyed, and although they are all very different establishments, this atmosphere of conviviality and a shared table is what I have always tried for in my restaurants, including today at Cumulus Inc, Golden Fields, Cutler & Co and Builders Arms.

After school, I wanted to do a fine-arts course. To make some money I took a job washing dishes in a restaurant. I enjoyed working with food and the pressure and creativity of the kitchen, and so I became a chef.

What happened at my mother's table now happens in my own home. Family and friends gather to eat and enjoy each other's company, without games or screens or TV. I encourage everyone to get involved in the cooking and cleaning up after the meal, as I did with mum. Cooking for others should never be a chore.

My mother is a loving, nurturing woman. To this day, I make her chicken liver pate and golden syrup dumplings. I've manipulated her Anzac biscuit recipe into my apple confit with burnt-butter ice-cream and oat biscuit. The crunchy oat biscuit wafer is made just as mum did, with ground oats, breadcrumbs, brown sugar, baking powder, diced butter, nutmeg, cinnamon and egg whites. I've never told her, until now.

Rick Stein

Restaurateur, chef, TV presenter, author
Mother: Dorothy Stein

I was doubly blessed. I had a mother who enjoyed cooking for her family, and I grew up in places where local produce was high quality. My mother, Dorothy, died 12 years ago, but the food she cooked and the lessons she imparted to me helped make me the chef I am. She was a very good cook, albeit of plain English cookery. Garlic was unknown in Cornwall then, and olive oil was something for medicinal purposes.

As a boy in Padstow on the Cornish coast, fresh fish was always available. I have a 1950s memory of my father fishing from a rock and hauling in plenty, and that night we had bouillabaisse. Dad had a share in a lobster boat so mum cooked lobsters and crabs straight from the sea. Her fish cakes were fabulous. Mackerel was in abundance in Padstow, so much so I used to grumble that we were always having it, grilled with a piece of fennel on top.

My mother's influence is everywhere on the menu at Rick Stein at Bannister's, my restaurant at Mollymook on NSW's south coast, and my restaurants in Cornwall. The pastry is hers, and the salad dressing. The cooking is simple and hearty with few garnishes or intellectual amusements, and that's all her. If you've great prawns and snapper, why mess around with them?

We had a farm in the Cotswolds and grew organic vegetables, free-range chickens, grass-fed beef and pork, which mum roasted memorably. Mum used fruit in season to make apple charlotte and crumble, and blackcurrant raspberry tart. None of this was revolutionary, but it was always interesting because the ingredients were the best and everything was made with love.

Mum dined regularly at my restaurants, and this strong, tough, intellectual woman became terribly nervous, fearing that something would go wrong. She wanted the best for me and for nothing to go wrong. Happily, nothing ever did. It was a privilege to cook for her, after she'd done the same for me for so long.

Martin Teplitzky

Teacher, restaurateur, chef
Mother: Gretta Anna Teplitzky

It's fitting that I'm hosting my cooking academy in the same home in Sydney's Wahroonga where I grew up in the '60s, and where my late mother, Gretta Anna, held her cookery school and wrote her classic recipe books. How lucky were dad and I? Mum cooked all our meals. Usually mum's family dinners were simple - roast chicken, roast beef - invariably beautifully cooked with quality ingredients. But there was the occasional three-course gastronomic extravaganza when she was testing recipes for a book or preparing classes.

Her oxtail with orange peel, a revolutionary dish in her day, stays in my memory, and oxtail is one of my favourite ingredients to this day. Mum made cakes, tarts, roulades, souffles, and Hungarian pancakes, in which she half-cooked a stack of pancakes, made with yeast so they were fluffy, then flopped them into a baking dish and spread chocolate and cream between each pancake, then poured more chocolate and cream over the top and baked it. To serve, she sliced it like a cake.

Her great joy was sharing her knowledge of food and her talent for cooking with her family, her readers and students, just as the great chefs of Europe - Alain Chapel, Fredy Girardet, Roger Verge, the Roux brothers - shared their passion with her when she bravely knocked on their door and asked if she could observe them in their kitchens.

My mother believed that cooking and eating should be enjoyable. She was never preachy or bossy and her classes were happy places. When at age 16 I realised I hated school and left, mum arranged for me to work in the kitchen at the famous Le Trianon in Potts Point for two weeks to see if I was cut out to cook, and when it was clear that I was, her friends Gay and Tony Bilson apprenticed me at Berowra Waters Inn. After becoming head chef there, I opened Bon Cafard, and mum and dad came and enjoyed the raucous rock'n'roll atmosphere and the food. Her second cookbook was influenced by what I was doing.

When I returned last year from 12 years' cheffing and teaching in Europe, I discovered a box of her handwritten, unpublished recipes and I'll be putting them in a book with some of my own. I've also opened the Take 2 Eggs cooking academy at our home, where dad still lives, and one of the classes, Gretta Anna Revisited, is based on mum's methods.

Christine Manfield

Restaurateur, chef, author, presenter, food manufacturer
Mother: Fay Manfield

I grew up in Brisbane in the '50s, so mum cooked meat and two veg, comfort food based on good nutritional principles, on a budget. When my father left us, mum went out to work as well as caring and cooking for me and my three younger brothers. I was probably a total bitch to her, but now I know she did her very best. She'd serve me liver and I'd sit there with my mouth jammed closed and she'd threaten, ''You won't get dessert,'' and I'd say, ''I don't care!'' Mum never used spices because in her world they didn't exist. Those, and wonderful discoveries like oysters and prawns, were part of my adult journey.

That said, mum did a wonderful roast chicken and apple crumble dessert, and Heavenly Pie was her version of coconut ice, with layers of milk and pink jelly. It was heavenly but I've never made it. I don't cook what she cooked. Mum cooks her way and I cook mine.

What I did learn from mum was to buy food carefully and not be wasteful, and I apply those principles in my own cooking and in the restaurants I've run, Sydney's Paragon, Phoenix, Paramount and Universal, and East@West in London. I'm conscious of recycling, and I teach my employees to be creative. Staff lunches are made from leftover scraps of meat, fish and vegetables. The genesis of all that was mum.

I became the chef that I am by seeking out everything that was different to what I'd known growing up. I left home at 15 and that made me independent and resilient. I met people from other lands and ate their food, but travelling to Asia, India and Europe has made the biggest impact on my knowledge and appreciation of food. I sought out interesting and best-quality ingredients. The biggest enemy in life and cooking is mediocrity. Food is my third career and I figured, ''I don't have time to do anything that's ordinary.''

Now, after a good time but not a long time, I'm about to leave Universal, my fifth restaurant and my finale. Perhaps I'll do some travel writing, some teaching, and not-for-profit work, but mostly my partner, Margie, and I plan to live the life of international gypsies.