Stephanie Alexander on 30 years of The Cook’s Companion - News + Articles

May 20, 2026

The author of Australia’s favourite cookbook shares why she has no time for food fads, how The Cook’s Companion almost never made it to print, and why it’s her enduring mission to inspire a lifelong love of good food.

How many Australians first fell in love with cooking while leafing through Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion? This definitive guide to mastering everything from apples and brains to yabbies and zucchini has taught generations of curious cooks how to become confident ones, and confident ones how to become truly inspired.

So trusted is this beloved book, it has even managed to thrive in the digital age. More than half a million copies have been sold since it was first printed in 1996. But it almost didn’t get published at all.

“It just grew and grew”: creating The Cook’s Companion

The original idea was a simple A-Z ingredient guide. Alexander had previously worked as a librarian, so A-Z was a very familiar way for her to organise anything. But as she worked, the project grew into something far, far more ambitious.

“I hadn’t even reached the end of the letter A,” Alexander admits. “It became obvious that it wasn’t just a description of ‘A for apple’; you needed to give information about the different sorts of apples, how some were better for baking, were they best stored in the refrigerator; all those things.

“The pages started to pile up, and it just grew and grew.”

Alexander’s publisher, Julie Gibbs, had to break the news to Penguin that the modest paperback they had first envisaged was now going to be something much larger.

“She was initially advised by a senior Penguin person to tell me to cut it,” Alexander says. “She just said, ‘I can’t do that; it’s too good.’ So I am forever grateful to Julie for that.”

The first edition ended up taking four years to complete, and was 824 pages long, weighing in at 2.2 kilograms. But Gibbs had been right: the first print run was a sell-out success.

“It clearly hit a spot, Alexander says. “I was correct in what I thought; that a lot of people were looking for basic information so they could get started on cooking. Too much that was available was either too aspirational, or full of prohibitions like no salt, no fat, no sugar, don’t do this, don’t do that. You immediately shut the book if you come across that.”

Stephanie Alexander — “I don’t think food should be ‘trendy’,” Alexander says.

A lasting legacy

This March, a new, fully updated 30th anniversary edition was released – a mighty 2.8kg tome that houses 1,352 pages of joyful culinary exploration (the previous update, published in 2004, was 2.55kg and 1192 pages). But while it has been reworked to reflect our changing food landscape, it does not bow to popular online trends. After all, TikTok is fleeting; The Cook’s Companion is forever.

A lover of good produce and simple, time-honoured recipes, Alexander simply has no patience for today’s ‘wellness’ warriors and those who promote restrictive eating.

“Obviously I have no problem with anyone trying to eat better or eat more fruit and vegetables or whatever thing they’re on about,” she says. “But I don’t think food should be ‘trendy’, and I am deeply suspicious of people who cut whole categories of food out of their diet because of something somebody has told them.”

As for viral recipes like the Japanese Biscoff ‘cheesecake’?

“Well, make it if you want to,” she says dismissively. “But, you know, would you want to make it again?”

“You can do this”: sharing the joys of cooking

Such a recipe would certainly not warrant an inclusion in The Cook’s Companion, with its strong focus on classic, European-style cookery, but not every recipe can make the cut.

Some omissions were unintentional; Anzac biscuits remain a glaring one – “Oh, that was a terrible mistake,” Alexander says ruefully. “About a week after the book was printed, I rang Caroline [her longtime editor] and said, ‘Guess what we left out?’ Oh, she was horrified. We both had a little sob.”

Biscuit tragedies aside, this new edition (likely her last, the author says) remains a rallying call for people to embrace the joys of food and cooking. It’s what inspired her to write The Cook’s Companion in the first place.

“I’d had 20-odd years of working with a whole lot of young people who were supposedly very interested in food,” she says. “And they were, but I found that a lot of them really had no personal experience of growing food or understanding seasonal differences. There seemed to be a need for very clear, friendly information that didn’t increase anxiety; to give the message that you can do this.”

Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation — Lunchtime at Blair Athol North Primary School, SA.

Inspiring the next generation

This message continues in Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, which inspires children to build a healthier relationship with food by learning how to grow it, cook it and then sit down together at a table and share a meal.

“I love watching the kids in the garden,” she says. “But when you see the enthusiasm with which they set up a table to have their lunch, you realise that so many children really have very little experience of eating around a table. That’s scary, and a bit sad.”

The Kitchen Garden program has now reached more than a million children in more than 1,000 Australian educational facilities. Later this year, a rooftop garden and education centre will open in partnership with Powerhouse Parramatta, which will provide up to 10,000 regional NSW and Western Sydney primary school students with hands-on learning across agricultural science, cooking, sustainability and wellbeing. A second food education hub is also underway at Burradoo Park Farm in the NSW Southern Highlands.

As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Alexander the one thing that every diehard Aussie foodie wants to know: what’s happening with the film about her and Maggie Beer and their cooking school in Tuscany? It seems it’s still in the works, but there’s no set date for production as yet.

“Maggie and I have both said that if it does come to pass, we’ll go to Tuscany just for fun, to watch them making a bit of it,” Alexander says. “Maybe get one of those walk-on parts, you know – two aged ladies, having a glass of wine, nobody knows who they are. That’d be quite fun.”

Yes. Yes it would.