Two recent books, one by Calabrian-Australians in Melbourne, the other by a Lebanese-Australian in Sydney, bring to life the transplanting of these cuisines from the Mediterranean to suburban Australia. They are informative as much for the traditional family and regional recipes as for the anecdotes, which are plainly and affectionately told, and which often centre on the authors’ kitchens, meals, vegetable gardens, produce, and families.

Mangia! Mangia! (Lantern, $39.95 hb, 254 pp, 9781921382468) grew from a desire by the authors, Teresa Oates and Angela Villella – friends since high school, whose families valued cooking – to preserve the old Calabrian culinary ways that they had experienced growing up in suburban Melbourne. A testament to their families and to their passion for food, fine ingredients, and la dolce vita, this is an endearing volume. The charming design complements the aim of this book: home cooking at its best, using good seasonal ingredients, simply but skilfully prepared. For once, the photography in a cookery book captures domestic dishes and their preparation in a suitably homely style – so much so that when I first opened Mangia! Mangia! I assumed that the photographs had been taken by the authors. Then I realised they were the work of a practised and sensitive professional, Simon Griffiths. No slick art direction or stylised images here, with idealised and unrealistic presentation to intimidate the home cook. These are ‘reality photographs’ that capture the frantic moment: one dish is even photographed with a sauce spot on the rim! Multiple photographs on some pages usefully show the different processes involved in specific recipes: making pasta or a sauce, or coping with a whole pig.

You have to be impressed by a book that opens with a recipe for a tomato sauce calling for eighty kilos of tomatoes. (I live in a flat with what could only be described as an efficiency kitchen, and do not have an extended family to draw upon for some of the more tedious tasks of preparation, peeling, chopping, and stirring.) The sausage-making section is fascinating. Making sausages is quite fun, well worth the effort, and you might also like to go back to Jane Grigson’s Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery (first published in 1967) for comparisons, and to extend the European repertoire further north. Although I am not inclined to bring the 120-kilo, desexed, acorn-fed female pig into the kitchen to prepare the salumi, and although I don’t have a cellar to cure them, this section makes compelling reading. Knowing the process, I am now better informed about what to look for in salami when purchasing it.

Mangia! Mangia! attests to the successful infiltration of Calabrian food into Australian eating habits. There is hardly a dish in the book that will not be familiar to most cooks in some version or other. The authors often present two versions of the same dish, illustrating the different preferences of their families. In the salami stakes, for instance, the Barilaros prefer paprika – the Villellas not. There is a preponderance of pomodoro in these Calabrian recipes, so much so that one wonders what the Calabrians ate before the tomato invasion. Having decided not to make any of the delicious-sounding sauces or preserves, and having been defeated by the thought of tackling an entire pig, I headed for the nougat, only to read that it needed stirring for ninety minutes; I think I’ll stick to my own less time-consuming version. (Can one borrow an extended Italian family to share the manual side of food preparation?) The more practical Pappardelle with Quail Sauce, very simply prepared, in a quantity for six, is delicious. I even followed the instruction to thicken the sauce with cornflour, which I haven’t done since the 1970s. I purchased the fresh pappardelle ready-made, but this book gives sound, illustrated advice about making pasta for the proper home version. Similarly, the Pasta with Broccoli, with an addition of fried potato cubes, is simple to prepare and an attractive variation of this standard dish.

Nouha Taouk’s Maronite Lebanese family settled in Sydney in stages, from the late 1960s. Through their food and home-grown produce, they replicated the culinary side of the life they left in Becharee, a rural village in the mountains of Lebanon. Cooking here is also very much a family affair, and ruled by the women. Again, the large number of Lebanese in Australia and the deserved popularity of Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, which first appeared in 1968, along with the suitability of such a cuisine for our climate, means that many of the dishes will be familiar. There are recipes for tabouleh, baba ganoush, and kibbeh. It is a relief to be encouraged to use intuition, not the scales and measuring cups, and reassuring to have the recipes tested under Australian conditions with Australian ingredients.

The design of Whispers from a Lebanese Kitchen: A Family’s Treasured Recipes (Murdoch Books, $59.99 hb, 255 pp, 97817419682240), though following a predictable formula favoured by this publisher, is appropriately rich. Each page has a photograph or patterned surface: the photographs of food and family are engaging and relaxed. The recipes are interspersed with descriptions of the family’s background, the way they live and entertain, all forming an interesting narrative and a valuable record for the future. Food and its preparation unite the family; frequent, large-scale home entertaining is central to the festivities. This is a family of good cooks; having entertained three hundred guests for a family wedding, a recent engagement for seventy ‘was a breeze’.

While neither of these books offers the broader context of their respective cuisines – there are no discursive essays on the histories of Calabrian or Lebanese food, no bibliographies or references – seen as the attractive family culinary memoirs they are, they warrant serious consideration for a space on the shelf.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011