Paul van Reyk

For generations, Australian families have dined at home, with varying frequency, on some version of spaghetti with a sauce of tomato and minced beef. Indeed, spaghetti bolognaise, or spag bol to give it its typically Australian abbreviated name, is so entrenched a part of Australian food culture that it regularly secures a place in polls of Australian national dishes. It can evoke memories both fond and fraught, usually depending on your mother’s cooking skills, adventurousness, and resourcefulness. (And it is always your mother’s, never your father’s: food memories evoked for him are about the success or otherwise of family barbecues, mostly otherwise).  This article traces the development of an Aussie icon

Straight after school we headed for the fish shop opposite the station. One or two would stay with our bags at the bus stop while the rest of us went to get the chips. They would be sitting in a pile to one side of the deep fryer pale oblongs of varying sizes. We ordered. Whoever was behind the counter would slouch towards the chips, collect a heap in a metal basket-if that's the right word for something that was like a small cage with one side open-drop the basket into the hot oil, handle balanced out of the deep fryer. A few minutes later the doneness of the chips was checked by lifting the basket and giving it a good shake. Back into the oil it would go for a couple of minutes more. Meanwhile the staff would have got a couple of sheets of butcher's paper-so called because it was also used by butcher to wrap the meat you bought sprig of parsley for garnish and all-and flattened the sheets out on a counter next to the deep fryers.

In what follows I have taken the liberty of collapsing together items from several newspapers and across the two colonies of New South Wakes and Van Diemen's Land. I've got guests coming to early supper tonight. So today will be spent provisioning for supper and also some of my larder foodstuffs need replenishing. This is the provisioning plan. First things first. Off to John Moses, Bread and Biscuit Baker, and Confectioner who sells exceptional 'Loaf Bread, at 3½d per Loaf'. 1 I'll have to get in early to get a couple of loaves. He may also have some drop biscuits I can buy and scoff during the day. And yes, they are what they sound like, biscuit batter dropped on a hot surface.

Sri Lankan cuisine has been a part of the Australian foodscape since at least 1895 when the earliest recipes for Sri Lankan - Ceylonese at that time - curries were published.  I’ve written extensively about Australan cuisine over the past years. The time felt right to turn my attention to Sri Lankan cuisine within Australia.

This focus of this article is Ceylonese/Sri Lankan cuisine as published in newspapers, magazines and cookery books  from 1895 – 2023.

I use four sources:
• Recipes published in newspapers and magazines accessed through Trove, the digital depository managed by the National Library of Australia.
• Four cookery books of Sri Lankan cuisine published between 1968 and 2023. ; Doris Ady’s 1968 Curries from the Sultan’s Kitchen. Recipes from India, Pakistan, Burma & Sri Lanka; Charmaine Solomon’s 1976 The Complete Asian Cookbook; Peter Kuruvita ‘s 2009 Serendip; and O Tama Carey’s 2022 Lanka Food.
• Other Australian cookery books. I looked here for specific references to Ceylonese or Sri Lankan dishes. I also used them to find examples illustrative of one point or another made in this article. There were nine cookery books that had recipes which met these criteria,. They are listed in the Bibliography.
• Three restaurant guides: The SBS Guide to Ethnic Eating in Sydney  1992, and 2005: The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food  Guide 1992; Sydney Eats 1992 and 2005

We broke up, condensed milk and I, when I gave up sweetened milk tea in early adolescence. I recently encountered it anew as an ingredient in two salad dressings in the 1952 reprint of  The Commonsense Cookery Book compiled by the New South Wales Public School Cookery Teachers Association. I was gustatorily challenged. Was this just an instance of invention gone mad or did Australians in the 50’s really pour this over their salads? What about earlier generations?

Thomas Shepherd is one of the contributors to the early development of the Australian foodscape who his rarely acknowledged.  This article seeks to redress this through documenting his work in establishing and managing the Darling Nursery, one of the first commercial nurseries in Australia,  and reviewing his writings on horticulture -  letters to newspapers and his 1834 series of lectures  on cultivating fruits and vegetables published as Lectures On the Horticulture of New South Wales Delivered at the Mechanics’ School of Arts .  Shepherd also lectured on landscape gardening and these lectures are printed in Lectures on Landscape Gardening in Australia.

It’s often said that Australians will add pineapple to anything foodwise, the classic Aussie hamburger, chops on the barbie, pineapple on pizza being proffered as evidence The last is easily countered as being an American invention , and I‘ll concede the hamburger and the barbie. But what of other dishes like soups, souffles, sandwiches? Have we added pineapple there also? The question    intrigued so I set out to investigate.  To make the investigation manageable I decided to carry it out via newspapers and magazines accessible through Trove, the digital repository managed by the National Library of Australia.

To structure the findings I used the categorising in the Country Women’s Association Cook Book –  Appetizers, Mains, Desserts, Baking and so on.  Doing this meant that I was unlikely to miss recipes in a whole category, like different kinds of puddings – baked, milk, steamed, cold. In each section I have identified the earliest reference to the use of pineapple. In some sections  I have given several references to cover the range of uses more fully e.g. Beverages and Meat.

This article is the result of that investigation. It is in three parts.

Part One is a brief history of the pineapple in Australia with a little myth-busting along the way.

Part Two is a list of the recipes I found together with the date for each entry and its source, and some comments on the recipes.

Part Three is the recipes for each entry in the foregoing list.

No farm should be without rosellas. They are easily grown, they bear heavily, they make an excellent preserve, and are infinitely preferred to the mulberry for puddings.  The fruit also makes a delicious wine.
Kitchen Garden
The Bundaberg Mail and Burnett Advertiser 1911

My first encounter with the rosella was a red tendrilled fruity homunculus dropped into a glass of champagne, turning the champagne red and sweet. I’ve grown a rosella plant and harvested it and made jam from it. But it wasn’t till I came across it while researching chutney in Australia that my interest was piqued enough for me to turn my attention to it.

In May 1913, the Australian Town and Country Journal published in its ‘Questions Answered’ column this response to an inquiry by G.F.T. of Inverell for a recipe for rosella chutney:

Rosella  Chutney
Rosella chutney may be made as follows:— Pack sufficient rosellas into a preserving jar. After packing them, pour over enough boiled spiced vinegar, sweeten with sugar to taste, and season with a teaspoonful of salt. Fasten down at once.

I came across the letter when researching chutney in Australia as part of my project to broaden the understanding of Australian cuisine in early modern Australia, to write differently about it, to  challenge the view that it was all meat and three bland British veg.  I have previously written on this about chili  and tamarind . While researching both of these chutney kept pressing its claim to be my next article.

Being a sometime maker of rosella jam and of chutneys I was intrigued. What was the backstory of this and other chutneys in Australia? I took as the boundary years for the research 1864, the year of Abbot’s recipe and 1914 being 50 years later and just after G.F.T.s letter. The questions I asked were simple: What happened in the nearly 50 years intervening between Abbott and G.F.T.? What chutneys were made, who made them and how? And what does this tell us about the early days of Australian cuisine? A search in Trove , the digital repository managed by the National Library of Australia, turned up 1100 chutney recipe published in newspapers in Australia between those years. Taking my cue from G.F.T. I decided to limit my inquiry to recipes submitted to newspapers from home chutney makers. These recipes were submitted by correspondents (sometimes called subscribers) to the household matters or mutual aid columns of newspapers, the latter either in response to an inquiry about a recipe or as an entry in a recipe competition.  There were 90 of these recipes.

I look at the recipes in the context of a sample of contemporaneous Australian cookery books  and two Anglo-Indian cookery books and the commercial production of chutney at small land large scales.

TAMARIND FRUIT - Would some subscriber of the 'Sunday Times’ inform me how I could make use of  tamarind fruit for home consumption? — E. W. Rockhampton, Queensland (1909).

The tamarind has a culinary history going back many millennia in tropical Africa, to where it is native, and South and South East Asia.  It is a leguminous tree which puts it in the same botanical family as      beans, soybeans, chickpeas, peanuts, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, alfalfa, and clover.  Its name is derived from the Arabic thamar-ul-Hind translated as the date of India.  It’s the pulp of its bean-like fruit - pods - that has the primary culinary use.  The green fruit is rarely used being very sharp almost bitter. As the fruit matures the flesh softens to a brown pulp surrounding the seeds in the pod. The flavour of the pulp becomes sourer with a light degree of sweetness.  It is this quality that is used in food preparations.

This article looks to answering E.W.’s question of what to  do with tamarind fruit. My sources are:are newspapers and magazines dating from 1803, digitised by the National Library of Australia for the online library database Trove, and from a sample of Australian cookery books published between  1843  and 1909 when E.W. asked his question.

This article is a survey of the culinary uses of chilli over 50 years  - 1871 - 1921 - of published recipes with chillies as an ingredient in newspapers, magazines, and cookery books in Australia. My source for magazines and newspapers was Trove, the online library database owned by the National Library of Australia. The cookery books were sourced from my own collection and copies held in the State Library of New South Wales.

There’s no getting away from it. Food, sex and politics have been inextricably linked since Adam and Eve dallied with a snake over an apple in the Garden of Eden. In all visions of heavens and hells, earthly and otherwise what we will eat and how we grow and distribute it has a lot to do with who and how we fuck and how we treat each other in the civil, moral and legal spheres. All utopias inevitably are versions of the Garden, and all dystopias are visions of the consequences of our expulsion.

If she'd thought about it, Gertrude Stein might have written 'A picnic is a picnic is a picnic'. But for the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a picnic, like a Tolstoyan family, is a picnic in its own way. In her 1972 article Deciphering a Meal, Douglas schematically decoded the meals in her home to show how a meal can be a way of 'discovering the intensity of meanings and their anchorage in social life'.1 I happened to re-read Douglas' paper the day after having the second of two lunchtime picnics held on consecutive days in different venues at different events and with different people. I so much enjoyed her analysis that I thought it would be interesting – and fun – to see what applying it to the two picnics would show were the 'meanings' coded in each. The two picnics The first picnic was the lunch meal at the 5 th Food and Words (F & W), a one-day writer's festival devoted to food held annually in Sydney, Australia.2 It was devised by James Viles from biota, a Good Food Guide hatted fine dining restaurant, noted for its use of locally sourced, sustainable seasonal produce.3 The picnic came in individual cardboard boxes which participants directly ate from while sitting in the courtyard of The Mint, a re-purposed colonial sandstone building in Sydney's Macquarie Street, venue for the event. In the box were a humus and fava bean dip with wafers; a mushroom and onion pie; a quinoa, kale, chickpea and beetroot salad topped with tender batons of chicken; a wedge of sheep's cheese accompanied by slices fig salami; a thin slice of biscuit bread; and a dessert of stewed fruits. Each of these came in an individual plastic dishette (the dessert being in a plastic glass) with all of them neatly nestled like in a bento box. We could drink white wine, mineral water or juice. The picnickers, the event attendees, were singles or small groups of friends, more women than men, mostly middle-aged and older, and would probably see themselves as being in the broad church of small 'f' foodies. The second picnic was also a lunch, this one was a belated Father's Day celebration for me and my children held in a park adjacent to the beach at Stanwell Park, south of Sydney. It preceded our attendance at the annual Ganesh Visarjan, a Hindu festival which we usually got to for the spectacle of its parade to the sea though none of us are Hindu. We sat in a circle on picnic blankets and ate off individual plates with each of us contributing a 'dish' to the meal. The food was: a shoulder of lamb covered in marmalade then wrapped in pastry and baked; a green leaf salad with a red wine vinegar dressing; a potato salad with wasabi mayonnaise; slices of double smoked ham; slices of a hot sopresso; two cheeses with thin wafers; a loaf of sourdough; a horseradish relish; and a sponge and fruit 'flan'. We had white and red wine, mineral water, beer and non-alcoholic beer as well for one of us who does not drink alcohol. Our ages ranged from 15 years to 64 years and we were evenly gender mixed.

Bill Harney's Cook Book first published in 1960 is unique among Australian cookery books on two counts. First, it deals almost exclusively with recipes for cooking native animals and plants. Second, it incorporates Northern Australian Indigenous food knowledge and practice. That it is in the genre of bush cooking recipes takes nothing away from its achievement. This article reappraises the Cook Book.

In April 1834 the Hobart Town Courier published ‘Some Remarks On the Roots and Other Indigenous Esculents of Van Diemen's Land’.  I think I can safely claim this as the first published comprehensive
survey of edible native plants in the colonies (which would become Australia), albeit limited to Van Diemen’s Land.  It was one of 11 such articles published in the press between 1834 and 1934.

Why were the surveys written? How did the authors get their knowledge of which plants were edible? What did the surveys say about how to cook with them? Answering these questions forms the first part of this article.

I had occasion lately to bring up the subject of tripe with my coffee-and-dog-walking crew - I’d recently seen the bible/book version of it in a  Chinese butchery. I asked had any of the crew ever eaten tripe and did they like it? The reaction from them generally  was revulsion based on their experiences of eating it as a child. I asked how it was cooked and the description was much like this:

TRIPE—SCOTTISH RECIPE (1926)
The desired quantity of tripe, 2 or 3 onions, about 1 pint milk, a little flour, some butter, chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Wash and simmer the tripe for a few minutes (it has already been cooked) and cut it into convenient pieces. Cut the onions small and steam them till soft in butter. Make a thickening of flour and milk, add seasoning and parsley, and stir one way over the gas until it boils. Add the tripe and some of the liquor in which it simmered, and the onions. Simmer all gently for about ten minutes, adding more milk if necessary.

I wondered whether the tripe story in Australian cuisine was indeed as monotoned as was experienced by my cohort.

I found was ample evidence that circulating in Australia since 1866 were recipes for tripe beyond tripe in white sauce.

This article is a survey of the culinary uses of chilli over 50 years  - 1871 - 1921 - of published recipes with chillies as an ingredient in newspapers, magazines, and cookery books in Australia. My source for magazines and newspapers was the material digitised by the National Library of Australia for the online library database Trove.

The article is in two parts: the first part is the survey of chilli uses; the second part is an Addendum of a menu for a ‘Festival of the Chilli’, a day’s dining on chilli dishes plus recipes for the dishes on the menu. There is a second Addendum which has three recipes for the medical use of chilli, the reason for which will become clear in the article.

... There is a risk here that women and men who come together only for the purpose of donor insemination may become financially enmeshed in what will no doubt be waggishly called non-sexually transmitted debt. Page 54. VAN REYK: BABY LOVE 51 Benefits that might accrue ...

It was the kind of observation on Australian history by a new chef that ever-so-slightly irks the food historian in me and sets me sleuthing for the evidence to back up it up. Phil Wood, chef-owner of up-scale restaurant Ursula's, in Paddington in an April 2022 article by journalist Max Brearley on a revival of 'old-school,1950s grandma food' is quoted as saying this of flummery: While flummery's English cousin is centuries old, the Australian version of flummery was born out of postwar necessity, says Wood. The original recipe combines packet fruit jelly and evaporated milk. The evaporated milk must be "made really cold, and when you whip, it whips up like fake cream". The fruit jelly is left in the fridge until almost set. Then you "fold those two things together, ending up with this flavoured mousse". 1 Was the 'Australian version of flummery' actually 'born out of postwar necessity'? Did the 'original (Australian) recipe' in fact combine 'packets of fruit jelly and evaporated milk'? Well, no on both counts. The history of the flummery in Australia is longer and more interesting than that.

Violence against lesbians and gays is a world-wide phenomenon. Its source is based in heterosexism, an ideological system that denies, denigrates or stigmatises any non-heterosexual form of behaviour, identity, relationship or community. Heterosexism exists at the level of the individual’s attitudes and beliefs and at the level of social structures and practices. There have been three successive reports on violence against gays and lesbians in NSW over the period 1990-94. The Streetwatch report, produced in 1990, by the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby; the Off Our Backs report in 1992, specifically looking at violence against lesbians; and the Counter and Counter Report produced in 1994, both of the latter produced by the Lesbian and Gay Anti Violence Project (AVP). Overall, the studies indicate that between eight and 30 per cent of lesbians and gays report being survivors of physical violence at some time in their life, where that violence is seen to be based on their sexuality. The v...

As a child in Sri Lanka egg curry meant some version of whole hard-boiled eggs in a curry gravy. There isn’t a recipe for this in the cookery book of my grandmother Ada de la Harpe. She does have recipes for Devilled Eggs and Savoury Eggs which I will come to.  Curries were usually made by our cook Rosalind except or a few specialties that my grandmother either made or supervised Rosalind in the making thereof. We were a Burgher household (a community of mixed Sinhalese/Tamil and Dutch/Portuguese/French and curries were usually a mid-day meal, dinners being given over to English dishes in the main.

It was something of a surprise to me then, to first encounter the Australian combination of eggs and curry in the form of a canape of half a hard-boiled egg of which the yolk had been removed, mashed to a paste, then mixed with curry powder and heaped back into the white shell. Often, they were garnished with a dusting of paprika and a single leaflet of flat-leafed parsley.

In October 1983, Ron Penny, Associate Professor in Immunology at St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, diagnosed the first case of AIDS in Australia. The man was admitted under Penny to Ward 7 South of the Cahill Building, the Immunology ward. Over the next two decades the ward, later redesignated Ward 17 South, arguably was to bear the brunt of hospital care for people with HIV/AIDS.

Prior to 1492 there existed a tradition of classical psittacophagy (parrot eating), interrupted by the relative scarcity of parrots in the Middle Ages, that could have revived once the Americas began to yield a regular supply of these birds for the European market. But by the 1600s it is clear, instead, that Westerners tended to think of parrots as pets and as zoological marvels and annoyances, but seldom as dinner....Europe in the Age of Exploration developed a new context for psittacophagy, in which eating parrot is associated not with classical luxury, but with American barbarism.

A paper for 'Cooking and Eating in times of adversity', New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy & Food History, November 2020 looking at food in Australia during the 1929 - 1933 Depression drawing on draws on interviews by Wendy Lowenstein in her 1978 book Weevils in The Flour. An oral record of the 1930s depression in Australia, and the Australian Women’s Mirror magazine during the Depression years.

There’s no getting away from it. Food, sex and politics have been inextricably linked since Adam and Eve dallied with a snake over an apple in the Garden of Eden. In all visions of heavens and hells, earthly and otherwise what we will eat and how we grow and distribute it has a lot to do with who and how we fuck and how we treat each other in the civil, moral and legal spheres. All utopias inevitably are versions of the Garden, and all dystopias are visions of the consequences of our expulsion.

What Australians ate during the 1929 - 1933 Depression drawing on interviews by Wendy Lowenstein in her 1978 book Weevils in The Flour. An oral record of the 1930s depression in Australia, and the Australian Women’s Mirror magazine during the Depression years.

When I first read Oh, for a French Wife! my gaydar twitched. When I read the Sydney Morning Herald obituary notice of his death, it went into overdrive: no mention of a wife or children, the kind of obituary of that time, April, 1982, whose coding could be read by other homosexuals, like me, but not by the general public. This paper uses the framework of gay male culture and camp developed by gay academic David Halperin to read three cookbooks authored or co-authored by Moloney as gay culture/camp texts.: Oh, for a French Wife! (1953), Cooking for Bachelors (1959 later republished as The Young Gourmet’s Cookbook 1968) and Cooking for Brides (1965). The paper places the books in the context of the gay culture in Australia of the 1940s – 1970s.

When I first read Oh, for a French Wife! my gaydar twitched. When I read the Sydney Morning Herald obituary notice of his death, it went into overdrive: no mention of a wife or children, the kind of obituary of that time, April, 1982, whose coding could be read by other homosexuals, like me, but not by the general public. This paper uses the framework of gay male culture and camp developed by gay academic David Halperin to read three cookbooks authored or co-authored by Moloney as gay culture/camp texts.: Oh, for a French Wife! (1953), Cooking for Bachelors (1959 later republished as The Young Gourmet’s Cookbook 1968) and Cooking for Brides (1965). The paper places the books in the context of the gay culture in Australia of the 1940s – 1970s.

Grandmother was a great cook. But then most Burgher ladies of a generation ago were experts in the culinary arts. In those days the housewife provided the family with excellent traditional fare-whether it was in savouries, in sweetmeats or richly garnished rice dishes. 1 Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands on that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. 2