Portrait of a recipe
Given Debra Oswald's novel
The Whole Bright Year is set on a peach farm in Australia, and given Dame Nellie Melba was such an Australian icon, we settled on a Peach Melba Eton mess as our dessert. After all, what could be more peachy, or Australian, than a Peach Melba, right? As it turns out, the Peach Melba was actually invented by a French chef in the 1890s named Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, in honour of Australia's great soprano; and Eton mess, is a traditional English dessert - but there was a method to our madness!