OUTLOOK OF AUSTRALIAN CUISINE

It is something of a paradox that the world’s geologically oldest continent should be developing one of the world’s newest cuisines.  Australia is a large island of some 7.7 million square km (2.9 million square miles) (including the smaller island of Tasmania, to the south), surrounded by nearly 37,000 km (23,000 miles) of coastline. While nearly two-thirds of the continent is classified as having a temperate climate, there are many different climatic zones, including palm-fringed coasts and tropical rainforests as well as arid deserts. Much of southern Australia experiences a typical Mediterranean climate with hot dry summers and predominantly winter rainfall.

Australia was physically isolated from the rest of the world for over 40 million years and has enormous biological diversity. It is rich in flora species (for example, its 25,000 plant species are more than Europe has) but relatively poor in fauna with just over 2% of world’s freshwater fish species.

When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, at least 60,000 years ago, primitive humans all lived as hunter-gatherers; the beginnings of agriculture in the northern hemisphere were not yet apparent. In Australia they remained hunter-gatherers, in some areas developing a rudimentary agriculture but typically practising ‘firestick farming’ (deliberate burning of small patches of land to encourage plant growth and make hunting easier) as a way of curating resources and ensuring continuity of food supply, particularly of medium-size mammals. While they tended to live in harmony with the environment, they also had an impact on it; it has been argued that Aboriginal hunting was responsible for extinction of some of the giant marsupials which existed some 30,000 years ago.

As in all hunter-gatherer societies, the Aborigines ate a very wide variety of plants (fruits, roots, tubers, leaves, flowers), insects (WITCHETTY GRUBS, Bogong moths), small reptiles (SNAKES, lizards, goannas), and larger game (KANGAROO, EMU, wallaby). They developed techniques of dealing with potentially harmful foods such as CYCAD seeds (Macrozamia spp) which, when eaten untreated by some of the early explorers and settlers, caused violent vomiting and diarrhoea. Their harvesting was not indiscriminate; they knew the right time of the year for maximum flavour and nutritional value, how to identify ideal conditions of ripeness and palatability, how to dig roots so as not to disadvantage the harvest in following seasons. They also developed a kind of gastronomic code such that certain animals or certain parts of animals had greater prestige—for example, the liver of BARRAMUNDI.

Much of this local knowledge was ignored by the first white settlers who arrived (the majority as convicts) in 1788, and who sustained themselves with predominantly imported rations until about the turn of the century. From the 1830s, however, there were many who emigrated voluntarily, attracted by the potential of a new land. These colonists were more enthusiastic about the local resources and were happy enough to accept and incorporate indigenous foods, especially those having some resemblance to familiar ones, as this account by Mundy (1862) of a dinner in Sydney in 1851 demonstrates:

"The family likeness between an Australian and an Old Country dinner-party became, however, less striking when I found myself sipping doubtfully, but soon swallowing with relish, a plate of wallabi-tail soup, followed by a slice of boiled schnapper, with oyster sauce. A haunch of kangaroo venison helped to convince me that I was not in Belgravia. A delicate wing of the wonga-wonga pigeon and bread sauce, with a dessert of plantains and loquots, guavas and mandarine oranges, pomegranates and cherimoyas, landed my imagination at length fairly at the Antipodes."

Virtually all species of wildlife were considered edible game—emu, possum, bandicoot, wombat, flying fox, echidna (described as excellent eating, with a flesh resembling pork). Kangaroo, in particular, was much esteemed, and was even sold on a commercial basis in the main towns. The tail was made into soup, and the meat generally roasted, stewed, or ‘steamed’. The kangaroo steamer, nominated as the national dish of Tasmania during the 19th century, was made of finely chopped or minced kangaroo plus salt pork or bacon, similarly prepared, a little seasoning and a very small amount of liquid, cooked slowly in a tightly closed pot beside the fire.

Ingredients from the plant world were also eaten or used in cooking but, being more peripheral to sustenance, were less often written about. The Tasmanian pepper leaf (Tasmannia spp) was used as a spice, and fruits such as lillypillies (Eugenia spp), rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa, see ROSELLE) and local ‘currants’ (Leptomeria spp) were made into jams and jellies; in a letter to Eliza ACTON in 1853 William Howitt describes using a preserve of native currants in fruit puddings. Such indigenous fruits seem, however, to have been an acquired taste, and neither as desirable nor as sweetly satisfying as fruit from imported species which had been cultivated and selected over many centuries and which thrived in the temperate climate. (A recipe for native currant jam calls for almost twice as much sugar as fruit.) Among other wild plants, PIGWEED (Portulaca oleracea) and FAT HEN (Chenopodium spp) were cooked as a kind of substitute for spinach; pigweed was also eaten raw in salads.

In the early days of the colony cooking was often a matter of improvisation. Pieces of meat were jammed on sticks and cooked over an open fire (the ‘sticker-up’). Damper cooked in the ashes became the ubiquitous substitute for oven-baked bread; because of the difficulty of obtaining yeast, carbonate of soda and tartaric acid were used as raising agents. The same dough, cooked as small flat cakes in a frying pan, produced ‘leather-jackets’; fried in fat, they were known as ‘fat-cakes’.

Damper and meat were inevitable partners in the monotonous bush diet, washed down by plenty of tea (up to three pints per day, according to one contemporary account)—a consequence in part of the cheapness and abundance of meat and of the primitive living conditions, but also a reflection of the basic rations decreed since convict days: flour, meat, tea, and sugar. Australian meat consumption in the 19th century was amongst the highest in the world, averaging around 125 kg (nearly 300 lb) per person. Meat was eaten three times a day, but little attempt was made to develop imaginatively complex dishes around this ingredient; rather, people continued what Muskett (1893) called ‘the conventional chain of joints, roasted or boiled, and the inevitable grill or fry’. Colonial goose and Carpet bag steak (a thick slab of rump, slit through the centre and filled with fresh oysters, then grilled over the coals and sauced with anchovy butter), which first appeared in cookery books at the end of the 19th century, may have been exceptions. (Colonial goose, also known as Barrier goose and Oxford duck, was simply a boned leg of mutton with a sage-and-onion stuffing.) Vegetable cookery was also unimaginative (protracted boiling in plenty of water), and the range of vegetables typically eaten was rather limited, though home gardens produced a great diversity, including a variety of salad greens. Tomatoes flourished, and were far more commonly eaten than in England, for example; correspondence in the Melbourne Argus in 1856 shows that they were eaten in salads, stewed, roast, fried, baked with breadcrumbs, made into sauces for immediate use or for keeping, pickled, and made into jam.

One reason for this was the lack of culinary skills amongst colonial cooks, amply testified by visitors to Australia; another was the stoic resistance to ‘dressed up’ dishes, a carryover of the English heritage. Further, at a time when physical labour demanded substantial meals for men, men’s tastes demanded plain, wholesome food and plenty of it. Thus there was little incentive to develop ‘dainty dishes’ for main courses, and even less when thrift and economy were considered more important than flavour. Stews were basically meat, water, salt and pepper, and a little flour. As in England, however, there were pretensions to a French-style cuisine amongst an educated minority; a menu from a Sydney restaurant, Paris House, in 1910 listed ‘Filets de Soles, Marguery’, ‘Artichaut vinaigrette’, ‘Bouchees Luculus’, and ‘Petit Poussin en Casserole et Salade’.

One area in which Australian women excelled, and where their creativity was indulged and expressed, was baking. Novelist Hal Porter (1963) fondly recalled his mother’s ritualistic weekend baking in the 1920s:

"Saturday afternoon is for baking. This is a labour of double nature: to provide a week’s supply of those more solid delicacies Australian mothers of those days regard as being as nutritionally necessary as meat twice daily, four vegetables at dinner, porridge and eggs and toast for breakfast, and constant cups of tea. … Mother, therefore, constructs a great fruit cake, and a score or more each of rock cakes, Banburies, queen cakes, date rolls and ginger nuts. … three-storeyed sponge cakes mortared together with scented cream … cream puffs and éclairs."

Turn-of-the-century recipe books usually devote considerably more pages to pies, puddings, cakes, scones, and biscuits, etc. than to savoury dishes of meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables. While most of these sweet recipes were direct imports from Britain, a number of Australian specialities were developed, including anzacs, butterfly cakes (small cup cakes with a circular wedge cut from the top, the hollow filled with whipped cream, and the two halves of the wedge placed on the cream so as to look like butterfly wings), melting moments, LAMINGTONS, the SPONGE CAKE, the Australian BROWNIE, a simplified version of BARM BRACK, and PAVLOVA.

It would be easy to describe Australian cuisine as static during the first half of the 20th century, though tastes subtly shifted from mutton to lamb. Suggested family menus show little change, with dishes such as roast mutton, braised steak, STEAK AND KIDNEY PUDDING, and SHEPHERD’S PIE, typically followed by stewed fruit and baked and steamed PUDDINGS. Hostesses who entertained might have presented more sophisticated French-influenced fare, such as roast quail or squab, grilled lobster or chicken CUTLETS garnished with mushrooms, pineapple ice, or rum omelette. Nevertheless, some subtle changes are evident. First, a more urbanized population was less reliant on native foods and ingredients, and both local game and fruits faded from use. Second, changes in technology ushered in new dishes. With the introduction and acceptance of refrigerators came ICE CREAMS and ice blocks and an increased variety of chilled desserts (especially dishes using commercial gelatine and jelly crystals); with electric and gas stoves, and the new oven-to-table cooking and serving dishes, came casseroles (cooked in the oven) and ‘mornays’, a mainstay of mid-century entertaining.

On the other hand, the post-war period introduced enormous changes in what was produced, cooked, and eaten in Australia. Increased affluence coincided with a growing interest in wine, food, and in eating out, and with increased numbers of restaurants. Travel brought contact with other cultures and cuisines, both Asian and European, and familiarity with new ingredients and foods at the same time as waves of immigrants from Europe, particularly Mediterranean Europe, and then Asia, made these ingredients and foods available in Australia. The once traditional Sunday family dinner of roast leg of lamb with mint sauce has been replaced by the casual BARBECUE where kangaroo sausages might cook alongside bratwurst or MERGUEZ, chicken SATAYS next to oregano-marinated lamb KEBABS. The net effect has been the virtual extinction of the British-inherited diet and cuisine and the encouragement of distinctly and characteristically Australian culinary expressions. This has involved a reappraisal of indigenous resources, including kangaroo, emu, and other game as well as native fruits, seeds, and herbs, such as the QUANDONG, MACADAMIA NUT, bush tomato (Solanum spp), wattle seed and wild lime (Microcitrus spp). Other additions to the larder are the wide variety of Asian vegetables, fruits, and herbs which can be grown in Australian climates. There is increasing recognition of regional diversity, such as the particular qualities of oysters from different sources, and of the gastronomic identity of different regions. The potential of long-established and climatically sympathetic species such as OLIVES (first introduced to Australia in 1800) is being realized. Specialized, small-scale agriculture and food initiatives—growing PISTACHIOS or producing goat- and sheep-milk cheeses analogous to traditional Mediterranean varieties—are being encouraged.

Australian kitchens have embraced Asian culinary techniques and flavour combinations; stir-frying is probably as common as were grilling and frying in Muskett’s day (most gas cooker tops are now specifically designed to accommodate a wok) and GINGER, GARLIC, and SOY SAUCE are as much staple ingredients as TOMATO sauce. In restaurants, ‘Australian’ cuisine acknowledges influences from both Asia and Europe, especially the Mediterranean regions, adapted to accommodate Australian ingredients.

By Barbara Santich in "The Oxford Companion to Food" edited originally by Alan Davidson and second edition by Tom Jaine, University of Oxford Press, USA, 2006. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.