A Melbourne lockdown project that became a meditation on Chinese-Australian identities and comfort food has been named as a finalist in the James Beard Media Awards 2023, alongside a colourful new way to look at veg-forward cooking.
Chinese-ish: Home Cooking, Not Quite Authentic, 100% Delicious, the cookbook collaboration from Etta head chef Rosheen Kaul and illustrator Joanna Hu, gained a nod for Hu and photographer Armelle Habib in the Visual category, which honours food books with exceptional graphic design, art and photography. It joins one other Australian nominee on the shortlist: Alice Zaslavsky’s In Praise of Veg: The Ultimate Cookbook for Vegetable Lovers, which gains a nod for Vegetable-Focused Cooking.
The James Beard Awards scheme – based in the USA – is a heavy hitter in global food culture, pushing new standards in culinary storytelling and the restaurant industry. “The James Beard Awards are like the Oscars of food media,” Zaslavsky tells Broadsheet. “Even just to be nominated out of the thousands of cookbooks that come out every year is just wild.”
The nomination is “truly beyond our wildest imaginations”, Hu says. “To think that the first little project Rosheen and I worked on together in lockdown, whilst we were both waiting on Centrelink, has become something internationally recognised is still hard to compute.
“It’s also incredibly affirming in this way, because it will always feel like something we did out of a very intrinsic motivation – something purely for the love of it – and now it’s been received so positively.”
Kaul, the other half of the original Chinese-ish creative duo, is also still a little shocked at making the shortlist. “Our little book, out in the world? Us?” she laughs. “If you’re a chef and you win a James Beard Award, it’s one of the highest accolades you can get in the culinary world.”
Hu and Kaul are quick to praise collaborators Armelle Habib and Lee Blaylock, the photographer and stylist tasked with helping them turn their zine-like Isol(Asian) Cookbook into a 223-page hardback for publishers Murdoch Books.
“Within our first hour or so, we all just ‘got’ each other so clearly,” Hu remembers. “There’s no way we would have produced the stunning photographs in the book without them. They were the geniuses behind the idea for our author portraits in the grocer!”
Zaslavsky – another Murdoch Books author, who shares the same art director as Hu and Kaul – also applauds the creative team that helped pull her book together. “The uniqueness of the way it’s organised is a big sell,” she says. “Making it colour-coded isn’t just a gimmick, it’s actually really useful for a home cook.”
In Chinese-ish, the book design itself is unconventional: beautiful yet scrappy. Hu’s oil and watercolour renditions of congee bowls, dumplings and ginger sit next to hand-built fonts and stylishly un-styled food photography, featuring Hu and Kaul’s favourite recipes as well as cheeky glam shots in an Asian grocer (and at least one wielding a reckless amount of condensed milk).
Kaul is full of praise for the small and authentic nods to Chinese-Australian culture in the images – something “beyond just chopsticks”. The whole design has a very “If you know, you know” vibe. Illustrations reference Chinoiserie paint styles mixed with Australian flora and fauna; photographs of cookware radiate wok hei.
“The visuals for the book were very much drawn from the visuals of the first two Isol(Asian) books,” Hu says. “We knew we wanted to keep the loose, hand-drawn illustrations that were kind of sprawled across the page, acting like borders or repeated in decorative patterns, and we knew we wanted to keep the handwritten recipe titles.”
“This is all on Jo – this is her award,” Kaul says. “It definitely has a handmade feel. With Jo’s watercolours, she paints outside the lines. And I do as well, I suppose.”
As much as Hu and Kaul (and team) are excited by the recognition from the James Beard Media Awards, the book project holds a much deeper meaning, Hu says. “I’ve definitely heard from some people about how they can recognise their own immigrant stories in the writing, which is incredibly meaningful to me.”
For Zaslavsky, the award nomination comes as In Praise of Veg racks up 100,000 copies in print worldwide. It’s about to be published in French, and the Masterchef alum is casting her eyes over a preview cover for the Korean edition. “I think the reason why this book has had an impact is because it is very much capturing the zeitgeist of the way we cook and eat now, which is much more focused on putting vegetables first.”
Media award winners were announced at a ceremony in Chicago on June 3. Hu and Habib took home the James Beard Book Award for Visuals.
