Recovering a forgotten Australian cookery teacher and food writer : Wivine de Stoop

This paper outlines the career of an important, but largely forgotten, Australian food writer, Wivine de Stoop. A well-known advocate of Continental and especially French cookery in Melbourne, Belgian-born de Stoop ran influential cookery classes from 1960 until to at least the 1980s and wrote a popular cookery book. Active in Australia when postwar European migrants are acknowledged to have brought their foodways to Australia, de Stoop’s work and its reception casts light on how our now everyday Australian food habits were popularised through both the popular media of cookery books and hands-on-training in suburban kitchens offered by these migrants, as well as via the more popularly accepted ways of restaurant and café menus.