‘A time capsule’: Readers share tales of battered Stephanie Alexander cookbooks
On the 30th anniversary of Stephanie Alexander's The Cook’s Companion, readers shared photos and stories of their well-worn copies, highlighting the cookbook's role in their culinary lives. The battered books, often stained and falling apart, reflect decades of use and personal memories. What began as a practical kitchen guide has become a sentimental keepsake for many Australian families.
- ▪The Cook’s Companion was first published in 1996 and has sold over 550,000 copies in Australia.
- ▪Readers submitted photos of their damaged copies, showing torn pages, handwritten notes, and food stains from years of use.
- ▪The cookbook has been passed down through generations and used for milestone events such as weddings and birthdays.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | SMH Good Food |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/goodfood/recipes/a-time-capsule-readers-share-tales-of-battered-stephanie-alexander-cookbooks-20260508-p5zv4l.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 05:00:00 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T19:05:18.985Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T19:05:18.985Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 5GAhpXFdtOX3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","dateModified":"2026-05-16T19:00:00Z","datePublished":"2026-05-16T19:00:00Z","description":"On the 30th anniversary of The Cook’s Companion, Good Food put out a call for photos of battle-scarred books. They might be falling apart, but they tell beautiful stories of growing up and a life of cooking.","headline":"‘A time capsule’: Readers share tales of battered Stephanie Alexander cookbooks","keywords":"Aussie icons, For subscribers, Stephanie Alexander, Best of","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sarah Norris","jobTitle":"Head of Good…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at SMH Good Food.