Brae: Recipes and Stories From the Restaurant

Hunter is chef and owner at Brae (a Scottish word for hillside), a restaurant in a bucolic setting outside Melbourne that’s intended to be Australia’s answer to Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York. It boasts working gardens and reverence for local products—including wallaby, served raw. In a lengthy opener, Hunter describes his peripatetic culinary path and the Brae concept. His offbeat recipes challenge home cooks and kitchens with multiple components. Relatively simple pretzel breadsticks are brushed with treacle, then rolled in rendered, frozen, and ground pork skin. Elegiac essays accompany recipes for signature dishes, such as Pekin breed duck (“raised ethically and sustainably”) aged on the bone for weeks, stuffed with rye grass, and roasted in a brick oven. That duck is served with nasturtium flowers soaked in mead (made by fermenting honey and rainwater) and a powder of chicken livers, cocoa nibs, and lime zest. This is an aspirational book, and the text is aimed squarely at professionals: a diary conveys the immense amount of work that goes on behind the scenes at this high-end idyll, and instructions for how to behave in a kitchen include a reminder not to arrive “looking shipwrecked.” (Apr.)