What is Australian Cooking? 

If people living outside Australia think about answering this question, they would probably answer: roast kangaroo, steak & eggs, fried mutton chops, pavlova, and billy tea - that's if they thought about it at all.

But we have much more than that, even though the question is no easier to answer for someone living in Australia. Our cooking, or cuisine if you want to be more up-market, is the product of a combination of ideas from the waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia, of scenes from TV and movies from Europe and North America, and from overseas chefs brought to Australia to show us "colonials" how cooking should be done. All of this adds up to a cosmopolitan or multi-cultural style of cooking and food. A buffet lunch I ate last weekend had Italian lasagne, Greek salad, Dutch and Swedish-style cheeses, Thai chilli chicken, and Welsh potato and leek soup, among other cold and hot dishes. This sort of combination is quite normal for Australian meals.

One potential source of food and cooking has been almost ignored - our indigenous foods. Australians have not made very much use of the food plants or animals that are native to Australia, except as novelties for tourists, both domestic and international. In fact, more overseas tourists have probably eaten kangaroo than have Australian-born people.

So what is the style of Australian cooking and food? I'll try to answer that over the next few months in this section of the Aussie Foodies Anonymous page. If you would like to contribute an idea or suggestion or two, send me an e-mail message, and I'll publish it here.

The first permanent European settlement of Australia was on the east coast in 1788 by a group of people from Great Britain. They brought with them animals, seeds, plants, and views of cooking and food from their previous homes in England. They came to a continent where the rainfall regime, temperature regime, soils, and vegetation are almost totally different from those they were used to. And it took a long time for them to adjust their cooking and food - and some people still haven't done so.

So the early settlers persisted with their roasts and their hot dinners and the rest of their heavy 19th century English middle class cooking styles. This has persisted, in fact, until the present day in some households. So the first wave of migrants still have a major influence on our cooking.

The main meat that the settlers had was mutton; sheep were plentiful and cheap. Beef and poultry were for special occasions, such as weddings and Christmas. In fact, their diet was mainly meat; fish and fresh fruit and vegetables were not considered important - and they were scarce in the new colony. Some country people used some of the native animals for food, such as wallabies and possums, but they usually disguised it to look like their traditional dishes. But the early cookbooks contain recipes that are remarkably similar to some of the ones that I still use. The big difference is in the source of those recipes and styles of cooking. England was virtually the only source in the 19th century Australian food scene. We use a far wider range of sources today.

After the first decade of settlement, food was never scarce in Australia. The diet might not have been well-balanced, and the ordinary food rather unimaginative, but few went hungry. The best hotels and restaurants were equal to the best anywhere (except, maybe, Paris). Numbers of people out of work in years of the Great Depression of the early 1930s suffered from food shortages, and the whole population was short of some types of food during World War II. But apart from those times, Australians have, in general, eaten generous quantities of food, even if the quality of the cooking has not always been high.