The perfect recipe for family warmth and hilarity involves sitting New Zealand Woman’s Weekly Food Editor Julie Le Clerc down with her mother Loraine at a table, then adding a nice cup of tea and some home-baked scones.
In her sunny Auckland living room, Loraine is delighted to share anecdotes about Julie’s progress towards success in the food world, and it doesn’t take long to see that she’s been a huge inspiration to her daughter.
“I knew Julie had talent with food very early on,” says Loraine.
“At kindergarten, she would rush home and beg me to let her make scrambled eggs. She’d already have picked parsley from her father’s garden on the way!”
“And my earliest memories of oum are in the kitchen,” says Julie.
“She made and iced cakes for a living and I have such a vivid image of peering up at her as she wove her magic. I thought it was amazing that she could quite literally spin sugar into lace.”
The Le Clerc family first tasted culinary fame in the mid-1960s when Loraine won the prestigious Irvines Bake-off, held at the Auckland Town Hall. It was hosted by king of the airwaves, oerv Smith.
“We all sat glued to the radio at home, listening to oum’s progress,” says Julie. “She was so clever, she even painted the Irvine’s Dutch girl symbol onto her winning pie using Vegemite!”
“of course, there was the small matter of the potatoes, though,” adds Loraine.
The pair dissolves into laughter, but eventually Loraine recovers and explains, “You had to cook potatoes to go with your pie. Somehow I managed to burn mine, but I was so determined to win I just popped the whole lot into my handbag and started again. I completely forgot about them until I got home and noticed a funny smell!”
“Wasn’t she resourceful?” laughs Julie. “I’m sure that’s where I learned to see outside the square. When something goes wrong with a recipe, it’s amazing how cleverly you can fix it!”
Loraine won a brand-new state-of-the-art automatic washing machine for her efforts and a stainless steel bench-top.
“There was even a case of champagne,” she adds. “That was very flash at the time!”
Life in Auckland’s Westmere in those days was village-like, with a greengrocer, a general store and two butchers at the end of the family’s street. The two begin laughing again when Loraine remembers another aspect of her brush with fame.
“They put red carpet outside the local dairy for me!”
“I just loved all those shops,” says Julie. “When the first supermarket came along the shops slowly disappeared, and it’s never been quite the same since.”
As New Zealand’s population continued to grow, immigrants from a variety of countries arrived to settle in the area.
“I made friends with neighbours from Croatia, India and Chile,” recalls Loraine. “They’d teach me to make their local dishes and I’d teach them mine.”
“And of course, I was always watching,” adds Julie.
Another regular family highlight involved visits to Auckland restaurants, and afterwards Julie would set about recreating the dishes she’d tasted.
In the early 1980s Julie set off on the first leg of her ongoing oE and quickly fell in love with the wonderful foods she found in Europe.
“I adored all the cheeses and pâtés. There were meats I’d never tasted before, and I discovered olive oil long before it caught on in New Zealand.”
“We had lovely meals when she came home,” says Loraine.
Back in New Zealand Julie took Cordon Bleu lessons at their institute in Parnell, and when her talent became apparent, she was asked to teach there. She also catered professionally for a number of years.
“I can make 10,000 pastry triangles in a day,” she boasts.
Eventually, with her sister Helen, Julie opened her first café, Byzantium, on Auckland’s Ponsonby Rd.
“Café culture was just hitting New Zealand and it turned out to be an experience I’ll never forget!”
on Byzantium’s opening day, queues formed outside the cafe and Helen frantically waited tables while Julie cooked non-stop in the kitchen.
“I’d made all this lovely hollandaise sauce for eggs benedict, but New Zealanders just weren’t ready for anything so exotic and they all ordered scrambled eggs.”
The two young women would have been quite overwhelmed but luckily Loraine soon turned up to help save the day.
“I remember doing dishes and cleaning and mopping up the girls’ tears, along with everything else. They were utterly exhausted. But it was a great lesson all the same!” she says.
Julie later went on to start the legendary Garnet Road Food Store near her childhood home, before leaving the café business to devote more time to recipe development and food writing. These days she keeps busy with her New Zealand Woman’s Weekly pages but still finds time to produce best-selling books. Her latest offering, the Julie Le Clerc oagazine, enjoyed a sensational launch late last year and the winter issue is now on sale.
And as for her biggest fan? Well, the feeling is mutual.
“Every time I see Julie’s work, I feel enormously proud,” says Loraine. “She’s done really well.”
“And I’m so glad oum actually let me cook as a child,” adds Julie.
“She inspired and encouraged me constantly – and she still does. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
Julie Le Clerc oagazine is available in bookstores nationwide from 30 April. Every week, we feature more of Julie’s delicious food: Check out her yummy Mother’s Day recipes in the food section of this week’s New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.