Julie Biuso: from plate to page

Julie Biuso offers me sweet, homemade walnut treats when I meet her at her Waiheke Island home. Outside, her planter boxes are heaving with celery, broccolini, chillies and chard. But given Julie is one of the country’s best-known television and radio food celebrities and the author of 16 cookbooks (and one memoir), the greeting isn’t entirely surprising.

The seeds of her vibrant career were sown growing up as the youngest in a large, rowdy but well-organised suburban family – and with a lot of grit.

“My mother was a terrific baker,” she says. “Tins were always full of gorgeous treats when we came home from school. And my father had a huge vegetable garden.”

She first experienced the dopamine kick that would cement a lifetime of sharing food and food writing when her siblings yelped with delight as they bit into the “big fancy toasted sandwiches” Julie made for Sunday night dinners. Her confidence bolstered, she was soon creating designer cookbooks from “ridiculously ambitious recipes cut from magazines”. She was 11.

But travel was the real goal. From her first year in high school, Julie worked in restaurants and saved her pay. By the end of her third year, she’d set up a wily plan for her father to sign her passport forms, then headed to Europe.

Making delicious food was not Julie’s only talent, though. In primary school, her writing caught public attention when she came first in an ASB short story competition and received the grand prize of a ten-shilling Whitcomb & Tombs book voucher. She credits her writing skill generally, and particularly a letter that she wrote presenting a compelling argument to allow a girl from New Zealand to enrol without an in-person interview, for helping her secure entry to London’s elite Cordon Bleu cooking school.

Then, at 22 years old, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef was catering for the well-to-do set in Italy. By 28, she had established and was head teacher at its first cooking school in New Zealand

Fast forward to present day, and Julie’s home not only houses delicious treats, but also volumes of poetry – another writing venture that she started in her childhood bedroom, scribbling “miserable angsty stuff”. During the interview, she opens a book on her knee and reads fine cursive handwritten stanzas.

‘Emergency Knickers’, one of her originals, is wildly entertaining and unexpected.
Up until 2023, Julie also co-ran and performed at the ‘Song and Poetry Thing’ event on Waiheke Island. She considered studying poetry for a Master of Creative Writing (MCW) at the University of Auckland under Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh. Instead, she opted to study fiction, working on her first novel – a piece of work crafted under the supervision of Associate Professor Paula Morris, director of the MCW. Julie’s masters year was limited to an intimate cohort of eight, all novelists.

“A novel has been a dream for decades,” she says. When Bill Manhire established the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington in 2001, “I knew straight away that was what I wanted to do, so badly. I couldn’t, I had young children and was working like a maniac – recipes, radio, television.”

Starting the Auckland course, Julie had a nest egg of ideas. The degree taught her “structure, dialogue, point of view, all the tools to maintain tension”.

“I’m so grateful that I did it, but [it was] brutal! The first time you’re having your work critiqued by your peers, you feel ill. That toughens you up as a writer, and you press on,” she says.

At the time of writing, her novel was up to 90,000 words and in its second-draft stage. The plan is to get it published.

All the while, Julie is still cooking, managing Shared Kitchen, a food website she created with her daughter Ilaria, and presenting a monthly session with Jesse Mulligan on RNZ Afternoons, 40 years after she started with radio. She’s also contemplating whether her granddaughter, two-and-a-half years old, might be ready to make pikelets in an electric fry-pan on the deck, “perhaps in another six months”.