Published: 27 May 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Media personality and cook, Alice Zaslavksy, tells Aviva Lowy about the pleasures and perils of ‘authentic’ cooking, ahead of a panel at Melbourne Jewish Book Week
IF THE STORY of Alice Zaslavsky, cookbook author and multimedia personality, teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t keep a good cook down.
And teaching is the whole point.
Zaslavsky, once a Melbourne high school teacher, claims that she just happened to be at the same place where they were doing the 2012 MasterChef try-outs when she thought she’d enter the competition to garner some cred with her students.
After making it onto the show, she outlasted many of the other contestants to survive into the final handful. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump into her own ABC radio show, TV segments, a weekly column in The Weekend Australian magazine, public speaking and social media.
Serendipity? Probably not.
It’s a fair bet that even if she hadn’t put up her hand for that initial TV competition, Zaslavsky, 36, would have found her way into the culinary cosmos.
“I had an extraordinary interest in food,” she says. “I was already doing the Chef at Home Course, giving up all my weekends to learn more about cooking - [and] a teacher’s weekends are very precious.”
Zaslavsky had even managed to work food into the school curriculum. “Food is such a universal language. Even if the students weren’t interested in history, geography or English, using the lens of food, or even literally bringing food into the classroom to hook them in, really made it much easier for them to be spongy and interested in the material.”
She also recognised that the kids didn’t have much food literacy, “so even though my remit was not to teach them that, because I have a personal interest, that’s kind of what made me choose to go that way.”
