Analiese Gregory: Wallaby is surprisingly delicious – once you get over the mental block
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Chef Analiese Gregory talks to Ella Walker about diving, cooking and beekeeping in the wilds of Tasmania
It’s 7pm in Tasmania, where chef Analiese Gregory is. There’s a huge bowl of in-season cherries beside her, a glass of wine in her hand, and a day behind her spent cooking, foraging and being awed by her new hive of bees.
“They like it when it’s sunny, and they’re not so into thunderstorms or rainy weather,” she explains. “I’ve discovered this, just so you’re aware, it makes them grumpy.”
Having worked in top restaurants in London, France, Spain, Australia, Morocco and more, Gregory landed in Tasmania four years ago – and her new book, How Wild Things Are, captures how she lives and eats.
It’s divided into two sections: recipes – the kind of food she’d throw together for a friend; and a sketch of her (deeply enviable) life on the Aussie island state, where she’s learned new skills, like cooking possum and wallaby.
The latter is a sustainable meat in Tasmania, and is lean, a bit like veal crossed with venison, says Gregory. “It’s surprisingly delicious – once you get over the mental block.”
Born in New Zealand, Gregory was raised on lots of Chinese food (her mother is Chinese-Dutch) and “grew up in one of those houses where we didn’t really go to McDonald’s or buy cakes at the supermarket”.
“If you made something, then you could eat as much of it as you wanted,” she remembers fondly, like the banana cake she made and scoffed aged five.
Gregory tends two acres in the Huon Valley in southern ‘Tassie’, “on a dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere”. She has chickens for eggs, pigs destined for salami and charcuterie, those sometimes grumpy bees and is building a vegetable garden.
When she’s not tending her menagerie, Gregory can often be found hanging up rubbery strands of seaweed to dry, or chucking her diving kit on. Prior to moving to Tasmania she’d only been diving a couple of times, but the lure of ridiculously fresh, hand-plucked seafood, hauled in and cooked direct on the beach, coaxed her into the cold water.
Besides collecting abalone (scallops, she says, make for a reasonable ingredients swap), her dives are also spent on the lookout for seahorses – “There’s some really crazy ones in Tasmania” – and watching manta rays and gummy sharks scoot past while she attempts to catch crayfish.
Even if we weren’t in lockdown and starved of travel, Gregory’s life would likely make you want to pack a bag, buy a beekeeping veil and rescue a couple of goats.
“There are very good moments, where I go and dive and then cook abalone on the beach – life is great. Life is amazing,” she says. “But then I also live in a 1910 unrenovated house with no heating. And my goats escape and terrorise the neighbours. And one of my pigs keeps biting me and now I have to get a tetanus shot.”
- How Wild Things Are: Cooking by Analiese Gregory, photography by Adam Gibson, is published by Hardie Grant on March 4, priced £22.
