Australia already has cooking shows for technical perfection, restaurant dreams and people who can plate a pea without looking frightened. ABC’s Recipe of the Year wants the dish scribbled on an old card, carried across an ocean or cooked every Tuesday because everybody at home would complain if it disappeared.
The seven-part competition, hosted by Adam Liaw and Pia Miranda, premieres on Sunday 11 October at 7.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview. Home cooks will bring recipes shaped by family, culture and necessity to a country farm, where Country Women’s Association judges will test them against the most dangerous force in Australian food television: someone who knows exactly how a scone should behave.
Recipe of the Year is making memory part of the judging
The ABC’s official announcement describes a 19-year-old cannoli entrepreneur, a Sydney builder whose mother’s food brought comfort during wartime, a teacher reconnecting with her late mum through treasured recipes and a Malaysian-born cook feeding international students. That is a smart cast before anybody turns on an oven.
Food competitions often insist a plate can be judged on its own. Home cooking knows better. The lasagne is also the person who made it after a night shift. The jam is the summer when the fruit tree produced too much. A noodle dish can be a map back to a place someone no longer lives. Recipe of the Year is treating those associations as part of the recipe, not sentimental garnish added between eliminations.
Liaw is an ideal host because he can explain technique without making ordinary cooks feel as though dinner is a failed audition. Miranda brings her own useful history: she is an actor, a food lover and a former Australian Survivor winner. If a contestant can survive CWA scrutiny with a jam roll intact, she will recognise the achievement.
The CWA gives the format rules without giving it cruelty
Each week, contestants will tackle classic CWA recipes including scones and jam rolls in pursuit of a ribbon. That could have become a cosy branding exercise, but the Country Women’s Association gives the show something most warm formats still need: standards. Generosity means more when the judges are perfectly capable of identifying a bad bake.
The difference is that expertise appears to be used as guidance rather than theatre. The cooks, hosts and CWA members gather at the table, and everybody has a say in which recipe wins. The show’s ABC iview preview listing places it among the broadcaster’s coming-soon highlights, beside dramas and documentaries rather than inside a separate reality-TV penalty box.
Production began earlier this year as an i8 Studio and ABC co-production. In the initial series announcement, Liaw argued that recipes reveal something about the people who write and cook them. ABC entertainment boss Rachel Millar called the concept a warm hug of a show. The completed format now looks precise enough to earn that description rather than merely print it on a press release.
Australian television could use a competition about sharing
The pleasure of a good cooking show is rarely the ranking. It is the sudden desire to cook something, call somebody or ask an older relative to write down the dish they currently make from memory. Recipe of the Year seems designed to produce that feeling before the credits, then send viewers towards the kitchen instead of an online argument about elimination strategy.
It also joins a welcome run of Australian programs finding entertainment in ordinary competence and community. Mary and Golden’s Filipino hospitality on MKR makes food a story about the home they built here. Hamish Blake’s Unskilled Adult turns public beginner panic into a job, while Stuck Up & Stupid relocates literary romance to an Australian beach.
None of those ideas needs humiliation to create stakes. In Recipe of the Year, the pressure comes from offering a personal dish to people qualified to understand it. Winning matters, but sharing the recipe is the act that gives the competition a reason to exist.
The title promises one national winner. The more interesting result may be hundreds of viewers deciding the recipe that matters most is already in their own family, currently held together by a stained notebook and one instruction that simply says “cook until ready”.
About the author
The conversation
Be the first to join the conversation.