Made With Love

Julia Busuttil Nishimura has gathered a legion of fans with her easy-tofollow recipes. Her new cookbook takes comfort food to the next level

- Rachel Sharp

Devoted foodie julia busuttil nishimura is poetic licence personified when it comes to her signature recipes.

Despite being born in Melbourne to Maltese parents and marrying her soulmate from rural Japan, the author and Instagram star’s name is so synonymous with delicious Italian fare, you’d think she hailed from the Tuscan countryside.

Her hit debut cookbook, Ostro, released 2017, and newest tome, A Year of Simple Family Food, out late August, are both based on a firsthand knowledge of Italian cuisine’s ethos, fuelled by a lifelong food fascination. “At the Maltese Club as a kid, I’d always find myself in the kitchen watching the chef,” says the now 32-year-old mother of sons Haruki, 4, and Yukito, five months. “I cooked our Christmas lunches from 12 years old, and spent my teens reading cookbooks every weekend. Back then, the only people writing them were Stephanie Alexander and Jamie Oliver, so it didn’t enter my mind it was something I could do.”

After studying politics and Italian at university, she moved to Southern Tuscany to work as an au pair. “The entire culture—the food, the people, the friendliness—just felt like home to me,” she recalls. “The family I worked for lived next door to the nona [who loved cooking], in a beautiful villa with an olive grove. There was so much care in shopping for ingredients. We’d drive to different farms to buy pasta and pecorino and ricotta.”

Haruki loves to help out with the baking.