Looking for Flavour by Barbara Santich

Author:Barbara Santich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, WB, CKB031000
ISBN: 9781743052082
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

OPPORTUNITY LOST

Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.—Waverley Root

MARCUS CLARKE, author and journalist, fancied himself one of the few gastronomic connoisseurs of late nineteenth-century Australia, though his fluctuating fortunes meant his connoisseurship was infrequently exercised. Enthusiastically vaunting the ‘Cafe Panard’, a fictitious establishment modelled on one or other of the better restaurants of Melbourne in the 1880s, he commended its ‘Soup of the clearest, red wine of colonial growth, but of fair flavour; an omelette, fried potatoes, chicken and mushrooms, a salad dressed with oil and vinegar merely’. At this restaurant, he added, ‘your soup is hot but without grease; your steak seems made for toothless gums; your salad bowl is filled with unbroken lettuce, and your coffee is as fragrant as the spice islands’.

While priding himself on his own good taste, he deplored the conduct of his countrymen who would ‘vulgarise the place. They will begin by demanding beef and legs of bullocks, and get on to Yorkshire pudding, or perhaps roast pork and apple sauce. One monster—if you read this, sir, you will blush—after gobbling a perfect menu, asked when they were going to bring in the “solids”. The solids! Another said audibly that—something his eyes—he would rather have a pot of porter and a raw onion with some bread and cheese than the whole blessed lot’.

Clarke himself was not unprejudiced. He simply thought French cuisine more elegant, refined and sophisticated than English cooking and looked down on those who did not share his preferences. While it was not uncommon in England to sneer at foreign—and ‘foreign’ almost invariably meant French—cuisines, this attitude was exaggerated in late nineteenth-century Australia, when the prevailing spirit was one of optimism and unbounded faith in a new country, seen through idealistic eyes as a land of promise. Such expression of dislike and distrust of foreign cuisine can be described as culinary xenophobia, and to the expatriates in Australia, foreign was synonymous with non-British. This attitude of culinary xenophobia paralysed the development of an Australian cuisine in what should have been its formative period, the second half of the nineteenth century.

Initial reports on Australia’s gastronomic potential were downright unflattering, to say the least. In the 1830s, however, after the first difficult decades had been survived, its natural resources were re-examined and its native inhabitants reappraised. Lieutenant Breton commended kangaroo meat at the same time as he recorded some of the Aboriginal dialectal names for various members of the marsupial family in New South Wales. James Atkinson, who in 1826 reported that there were no indigenous fruits worth eating, revised his opinion in 1844 to say that they had never received the attention they deserved. Robert Dawson, chief agent of the Australian Agricultural Company, enthused over the abundance of game and fish, and the vice-regal table gave indigenous produce the seal of approval. The ordinary ­citizens who congregated around the shores of Sydney Harbour turned oyster-gathering into a Sunday ritual.

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