The Cook and the Academic

By John Clarke

Cooking and Academia seem worlds apart, but in the life of Christine Feinle-Bisset they have been entwined.

At the August meeting of Kaffee und Kuchen Professor Christine Feinle-Bisset, Research Fellow at the Adelaide University Medical School, President of the Australasian Neurogastroenterology and Motility Association and a member of the Rome V
Committee on Disorders of Gut-Brain Interaction, was the guest speaker.

She likes baking cakes. Christine grew up in the village of Bühlenhausen in southern Germany. She was the oldest of five girls, and hers was a baking family. At every family gathering an abundance of Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) was on offer. Southern Germany is, after all, the home of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cake) and Zwetschgenkuchen (plum cake).

Her academic interests began at high school at the nearby town of Laichingen, and her love of food drove her tertiary studies at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, where she graduated with a degree in nutritional sciences. She continued her studies in Human
Nutrition at the University of Sheffield in England, completing her Doctor of Philosophy in 1995. Postdoctorate studies followed at Zurich University in Switzerland. In 2000 she joined the staff at the University of Adelaide.

The career of an academic is demanding, but Christine still found time for baking. In 2002 she and her husband Tom bought a property at Uraidla in the Adelaide Hills, and soon their property was producing fruit and nuts – Christine is also a keen gardener –
which demanded to be baked into cakes. but even with a young daughter there is a limit to how many cakes a family can consume. Christine and Tom discovered the Uraidla and Stirling markets, and it was not long before the Hills residents discovered their market stall.

By 2015 Christine’s Cakes had become a family business with Tom baking rustic sourdough bread and ten year old Emily specialty cookies. As The Little Uraidla Bakehouse they began working from home, taking orders and delivering to their
customers’ homes. (On Saturday mornings as during the week Christine was continuing her academic career.)

The love of baking must be shared as she had learned many years before at Bühlenhausen with her sisters, and so today as well as cooking herself she is running baking classes for small groups in her family kitchen. The offer was made: Come and join me at one of my Adelaide Hills Baking Classes.