Sailing around our island home gave me a great cause to think about our cuisine; what we eat, why we eat it. And I began to wonder about the origins of the dishes I cook, and the food we call Australian. It made me think about how my mate Nick named a cheese 1792, in honour of the first French visit to Tasmania – a nod to just how would our cheese culture have developed if they’d stuck around? Probably little like it looks today.
A lot of our food, of course, like our cheese culture, has British roots. They came, brought familiar ingredients from home, and ignored much of the local tucker. Later waves of immigrants brought their own food, but why don’t we have a clearer identity of what we eat, based on indigenous ingredients? A cuisine that no-one else in the world could have, because the raw produce only grows here?
I think there are two reasons we don’t eat a lot of bush tucker. One is that Australia’s old soil and tough climate have produced a heap of plants that are really good at surviving predation. Put simply, they just aren’t that palatable. Some need washing of bitter or toxic components. Some are better after a cooking and a long wait, and some just haven’t been bred, as most European or other ingredients have, through thousands of generations, to become yummier.
What makes a cuisine is a long period of isolation, the fact it’s eaten in just about every local household, or the unique availability of ingredients.
But part of it must be cultural. Old timers in Tassie tell me they often ate what they could shoot or find, but most of what they liked was meat or seafood. If we go back to colonisation, Aboriginal people, ushered off their lands, shot or poisoned or relocated, weren’t able to pass on much knowledge to the newcomers of what plants they ate, when they could find them, and how to cook or serve them. Add to this a cultural aversion to local food. A couple of years back, when we served a ‘game’ terrine, to a bunch of interstate visitors, some were shocked that it contained wallaby and possum from a local game abattoir. “Why don’t you serve Tasmanian food?” we were told. Like salmon, or trout, which both hail from the northern hemisphere.
Australians like to think our cuisine is distinct, often describing dishes as ‘modern Australian’ when such combinations are as likely to be found in Singapore, London or LA as they are in Hobart. What makes a cuisine is a long period of isolation, the fact it’s eaten in just about every local household, or the unique availability of ingredients.
Thank goodness for seafood. Much produce from the ocean that does grace our plates these days is unique to our shores, or at least confined to few places. Southern rock lobster. The magnificent striped trumpeter. Native angassi oysters in some climes and Sydney rock oysters further north. Multiple species of fish often only found here or in nearby New Zealand. And if you lace them with local flavours, pepperberry, for instance, or native tomato, you do get a flavour of this place and no other.
We can’t go back to the rudimentary food of Australia’s first inhabitants. Our palates have moved on. Much of what would pass muster from the colonisers a mere 200 or so years ago, wouldn’t sit well on a dinner plate today. But we can learn from all our cultures, embrace local flavours, and one day, maybe one day, achieve a cuisine that we can call our own. For that, however, you first have to accept that possum, not salmon, is a truly native ingredient.
