Stephanie Alexander AO (b. 1940), cook, restaurateur, food writer and philanthropist, has been a major influence on Australian food and culinary culture for 50 years. Growing up at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, where her father ran a caravan park, Alexander gained an interest in food and cooking from her mother, 'a wonderful cook who was not just interested in recipes, but in the culture that inspired the dish.' She has also recounted tending the family's vegie patch as a child, guided by her much-loved grandfather. After completing her school education, Alexander trained as a librarian, and at age 21 she set off on international travels that included a formative period in France. In 1966, with her then husband, she established The Jamaica House, a Lygon Street eatery specialising in curries and other West Indian dishes. It closed after a couple of years, at which point Alexander joined the team at Mietta's in North Fitzroy. In 1976 she established Stephanie's, also in Fitzroy, which within a few years had earned the reputation as Melbourne's home of exceptionally good, classic French food. 'Its $12 menu came at a time when no one had heard of goat's cheese and ginger came in a tin', one account of Stephanie's states, 'yet Alexander was surprising guests with violet petals in sorbet, lemon verbena-scented fish and dried marigold flavouring fish soup.' In 1980 she relocated the business to a Victorian-era mansion in Hawthorn. During the restaurant's seventeen years of operation there, Alexander published her first six books, among them Stephanie's Feasts & Stories (1988) and Recipes My Mother Gave Me (1997). In 2001, four years after Stephanie's closed, Alexander teamed up with a group called Cultivating Community to create a gardening and cooking course at a Collingwood primary school. With assistance from various bodies, including the Victorian Government, the project expanded, such that by 2010 there were kitchen garden programs operating in forty primary schools around the state. Alexander founded the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation in 2004 to coordinate the program, which is committed to introducing 'food education to children during their learning years, in order to form positive food habits for life.' Following an injection of funds from the Commonwealth Government, the program was taken up interstate, and as of 2018 it was reported that over 1200 primary schools and early learning centres around the country were participants. For her groundbreaking (no pun intended) work with the Kitchen Garden Foundation, Alexander was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2010. Meanwhile, the self-described 'accidental chef' had published another seven books including The Kitchen Garden Companion (2009) and The Tuscan Cookbook (2003), co-authored with travel companion and fellow cooking legend Maggie Beer. Alexander published the memoir A Cook's Life in 2010, and her 1996 tome The Cook's Companion ranks alongside The Margaret Fulton Cookery Book as the bible of any self-respecting Australian kitchen.
