For many years Ann Oliver conducted cooking classes that were enjoyed by a wide demographic of cooks. Whilst she had done limited teaching prior to closing Mistress Augustine’s in 1992, it was whilst giving cooking classes for the department store David Jones that she discovered her teaching skills. She started with a handful of people and at her last cooking class for the store there were more than one hundred people. 

Oliver’s enthusiasm for food is infectious, but, it is her ability to write recipes that work that was the secret of the success of her cooking school. Later a tight group of students, known as ‘teacher’s pets’ attended almost weekly classes for two years. Oliver remembers this time with great fondness pointing out that her teacher’s pets are all exceptional cooks and as much as she taught them they taught her.

When Oliver took on a  full time consultancy role with Chianti in 2015 after a few months of maintaining both, it was clear to her that she could no longer manage classes and her consultancy.

Many of the recipes in the later classes have never been available to the general public or published through her many commercial writing assignments. Ann plans to slowly build a large text book style recipe index on cuisine-extreme.com …which as you might imagine is a work in progress because she has encyclopaedic content and many interests.