By Andrea Louise Thomas
Fiona Hammond knows food. In her career, spanning over 25 years, she has worked as a recipe developer and tester, a food stylist and food photographer. She was a food columnist for The Age’s Sunday Life magazine, and she contributed articles to Gourmet Traveller magazine for ten years. Fiona collaborated with Maggie Beer on her cookbooks, Verjuice and Maggie’s Christmas, as a recipe tester.
Fiona has developed and tested recipes and styled food for over 40 cookbooks with some of Australia’s biggest publishers. In 2020 she authored her own beautifully presented cookbook, Gather, with long-time collaborator and food photographer, Adrian Lander. It features recipes that celebrate the abundance of fresh seasonal produce across all of the seasons on the Mornington Peninsula.
At her peninsula home that passion for fresh seasonal produce is immediately evident. An enormous fig tree bursts with ripe fruit as do the neighbouring passion fruit vines, quince, and apple trees. Her self-wicking beds host silver beet, spinach, zucchini, chicory, basil, and heirloom tomatoes. Vines of pumpkin trail generously along the beds. The garden is brimming with fruits, vegetables, flowering trees, and shrubs, growing and giving season after season.
“Cooking is my expression of love – sharing food, knowing where and how the fresh produce is grown and gathered and creating uncomplicated recipes using seasonal produce is my drum beat. It nurtures my being,” she says. Her cooking ingredients come from her garden, or from Torello Farm in Dromana where they stock peninsula grown, grazed and gathered food through all seasons. Fiona provides Torello with tantalising recipes and photographs for their website and Instagram feed.
Growing up on a farm in regional Victoria, it’s not surprising that Fiona values cooking with fresh seasonal ingredients. From an early age, she and her sister were responsible for animal husbandry, driving the tractor and gathering ingredients for meals. Fiona learned to cook ‘by osmosis’ standing side by side with her mother and grandmother. The family lived a genuine paddock to plate lifestyle.
Fiona feels fortunate to have grown up as a free-range child on a farm in the 1970s, an era when dinner parties were big. She was frequently tasked with designing the menu for the family dinner parties. She learned many skills critical to her future career from raising animals, collecting eggs, chopping wood and fishing for eels with her father to negotiating cooking on a combustion stove.
After high school, Fiona applied to RMIT intending to study Food Technology. She pivoted to photography instead. After completing a Bachelor of Photography in Applied Sciences, Fiona went backpacking for three years. She used London as her base. She worked, saved and travelled on repeat, tasting her way through Europe, Scandinavia, Morocco, Egypt and Israel.
Returning to Australia, Fiona knew she wanted to work with food, but didn’t want to be a chef. Instead, she worked for a major Melbourne catering company in management for a while but longed to be in the kitchen. So, Fiona worked at The French Kitchen cooking school in Armadale where she honed her cooking techniques. She worked there as an assistant for two years, but she really wanted to be a food stylist.
With this goal in mind, Fiona created a portfolio of food photos and contacted Gourmet Traveller. When they asked if she could write recipes, she gave a resounding, ‘Yes.’ Working to a given brief, she would create a recipe, visualise it, and work with their photographer to bring it to life on the page.
“I’m a visualiser. I think colour, texture and shapes when I’m creating a recipe,” she says. This is clear when you see her food photography. One thing is very clear; Fiona is passionate about conscious eating. “I eat simply, but provenance is really important to me. From an early age I developed a respect for where food comes from. Seasonal food tastes better. It’s cheaper and more nutritious,” she says.
“I’m a home cook. I find cooking meditative. It doesn’t matter what mood I’m in. It’s a joy,” she says. Curiosity and experimentation have driven Fiona whether it was wandering around local food markets overseas or tasting her way across the peninsula; she feels it’s important to give new things a try.
Originally published in Peninsula Essence Magazine
