Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery: May 9

This week Maggie Beer is the guest on Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery.

And whilst she may be identified with South Australia’s Barossa Valley, she is originally from Sydney’s Lakemba.

Julia meets up with Maggie in Punchbowl, and they set off in a chauffeur-driven Corolla for a tour around her old neighbourhood. As they travel along the main drag, Maggie reminisces about the days when there were only a few shops and a picture theatre. When they visit the former home of Maggie’s ‘spinster’ aunts, she’s quite overcome with emotion. Maggie tells Julia that, like her mother, she’s a person who’s always been able to find the joy in the everyday, and talks about her parents’ love of music and cooking, and the catering business they started when she was a teenager.

At Wiley Park Girls High, Maggie reflects on having left school at 14 to work as a receptionist, and thinks this gave her the grit to make a go of the pheasant farm restaurant she and her husband started years later.

Maggie then takes Julia to her farm in her beloved Barossa Valley. This has been Maggie’s home since she and Colin moved there with a plan to breed game birds. What began as a simple farm shop catering to picnickers grew into a culinary sensation. Maggie describes the evolutions of the business and how their lives changed when they won a coveted Remy Martin/Gourmet Traveller Best Australian Restaurant Award.

8pm Wednesday on ABC.