CHAPTER 11
The history of our nation in a pumpkin scone
You can tell a lot about a society’s connection with the land from what they eat, and even more from what they cook, or don’t cook. Australians’ diet today is much the same as most people in the developed world: packaged cereal that can be simply poured into a bowl, vegetables flown across the world, and the bread of multinationals, spongy and tasting more of dough conditioners than flour. Since about 1900, the introduction of refrigeration and rail transport, and later aeroplanes and diesel trucks, has meant that most of the food Australians eat can be grown far away.
But you can also tell much about a society and its land use by looking at its iconic foods. Iconic foods aren’t necessarily the same as the ones we eat every day. Scots prefer curry to haggis these days, but haggis is still carried in with mashed neeps (turnips) and much ceremony on special occasions. Few women in the United States make ‘mom’s apple pie’, and the weekly roast beef of England almost vanished with the arrival of mad cow disease in the late 1980s (which should probably be named ‘mad agribusiness’ disease, caused by feeding ground-up dead animals to cows).
The food we eat is a product of the land and how we farm it, but we also change the land to fit the foods that we prefer. Just look at damper, pumpkin scones, Anzac biscuits and lamingtons and you have our history in an afternoon tea.
Most nations have iconic foods based on indigenous ingredients, like pumpkin pie, chille (chilli), boiled peanuts, corn on the cob and wild rice in the United States; Mexico’s chipotle with lime-softened maize; Southeast Asia’s rice; Russia’s wild mushrooms; England’s mint sauce and crabapple jelly (originally made with honey, not imported sugar); Scotland’s kale; Japan’s bonito and seaweed dashi. But in Australia, apart from cultivated macadamias (and until recently even those were a variety bred from Australian seedlings taken to Hawaii), indigenous seafood and to a lesser but growing extent indigenous meat like ‘kanga bangers’, our bush tucker is served mostly as a curiosity.
Colonial settlers brought not just a vision of ‘proper farming’ but the plants to do it with. Bunya nuts may give a bountiful harvest, but nuts like chestnuts and almonds were already an established part of European cuisine. Why experiment with murrnong daisy roots when you already had potatoes, beetroot, carrots and other root crops? The ground seed of several edible wattles (most are inedible, even toxic) is delicious replacing part of the flour in biscuits, bread, macaroons and cakes, and edible wattle seed can be grown in areas too hot and dry for almonds to thrive. But in these days, when food is routinely shipped vast distances, almond meal is easier to process and buy.
Bush tucker bounty and a land without recipes
Much of northern cuisine has grown from the need to store foods over long, cold winters – jam, fruitcake, fermented fish sauce – or to make cultivated staples less boring with herbs, spices and varied cooking methods. Although many Indigenous nations had developed semi-permanent settlements by 1788, most, if not all, also travelled to take advantage of seasonally available foods.
There are many and varied Indigenous cooking methods: wrapping fish or murrnong roots in seaweed, paperbark or various fragrant leaves like lemon myrtle to roast in coals or underground ovens; smoked fish and eel; bogong moth or bunya nut cakes to take back to those who were too young, old or frail to travel to the feast; delicious crisp or oily bread from grass seeds baked on hot rocks by the fire. But there are no equivalents of combining many flavours and cooking techniques to make a dish, like a complex Thai salad, an Indian korma or an Italian pizza. The most delicious indigenous dishes are the simplest, and the ones Australians still devour pretty much as they have been for tens of thousands of years: grilled barramundi, Murray cod, flathead, oysters straight from the shell and still sweet with their juices, and boiled yabbies so fresh they need no sauce.
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How to boil a yabby
First, catch your yabby. Get up at dawn and go to a dam or waterhole that is not polluted either by cow or sheep manure, blue-green algae, or seeping sewerage systems and other gifts of the past two hundred years of settlement. (This may involve sending off a water sample to be analysed before you begin to catch your dinner.)
Find a clean pair of old pantyhose. Place a fist-sized rock in each toe, then a piece of stinking meat in one toe and a rotting hunk of lettuce in the other. Hold onto the waist end of the pantyhose, whirl them a couple of times then cast out the heavy toes into the water, keeping a firm hold on the waist end.
Poke a sharp stick into the pantyhose to secure it into the ground. Go and boil the billy or have a snooze.
In the late afternoon, haul up your pantyhose. The yabbies will have hooked their claws into them, unable to get away. Bash them quickly on the head with a rock, then throw them into a pot of boiling water for five minutes. If you don’t have a pot, use a small rock pool or even a watertight leather bag or double thickness dried animal bladder filled with water. Add the yabbies, then use a pair of sticks to quickly and carefully drop very hot rocks into the water. The water needs to boil for least two minutes, so you’ll need at least six rocks, even for half a dozen yabbies. Eat hot or cold. If you’re not going to eat the yabbies straight away, half fill the bath with water and keep them in that for a day or two. Don’t fill the bath brimming full or the yabbies will crawl out, under the fridge or into your bed. Don’t freeze your yabby. A frozen yabby’s flabby.
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How sheep and damper led to pumpkin scones
The colonists’ earliest foods had to survive not only the eight-month voyage from England but also a land without the storage facilities they were used to: cool cellars, wheat silos and stone dairies or icehouses, where straw-covered ice was stored through summer. They also had to be cooked without an oven.
So we have damper. Damper exemplified the early colony’s love of wheat bread, and its stubbornness in trying to grow wheat, despite the cost to the land. Round loaves of bread in Australia are still called ‘damper loaves’ in their memory.
Probably every culture has a grain-based staple, from African teff to South American quinoa and amaranth, the poi (from taro) of Hawaii, or rice, cassava and tapioca from Southeast Asia and Polynesia. Colonial Australia persisted with wheat, even though from the first colonial harvest it was obvious that maize grew better, adapted more easily to climatic extremes and was far easier to store than wheat, which needs parching and dry silos to maintain its quality in storage. Maize can be piled into a barn, still in its protective papery husks, to be used as needed. I have cobs of red and blue corn that I grew nearly twenty years ago sitting in an ornamental bowl by our front door. If I chose to grind them for flour it would still be edible. Millet, too, grows faster and requires less water than wheat, and will grow in far less fertile soil, even orange shale or in the clay banks of dams. Barley, buckwheat and oats are also less demanding cereals in terms of soil and water.
But the British convicts, soldiers and settlers demanded wheat. Maize bread, or ‘yellow cake’, was the food of poverty. Later, in the Irish potato famines from the late 1840s onwards, even the hungry would reject heavy, gritty yellow cake and demand good, soft, well-risen bread – at least until they were truly starving.
Instead of adapting to the land, colonial Australians adapted the way wheat was grown. The stump-jump plough was invented here to make wheat growing easier in roughly cleared country. William Farrer and other scientists developed rust- and drought-resistant varieties of wheat.
The first century of wheat growing depended on vast areas of unused (virgin) land that could be flogged for wheat growing and then abandoned, or left to cattle or sheep grazing. In the Braidwood district there were six flour mills in the 1870s, with wheat the district’s major crop. Now no wheat is grown – the topsoil blew away. The drought of 1877 to 1903 and the wheat rust from subsequent wet years put the nail in the coffin of wheat growing in this district, but the coffin had been crafted by growing an annual crop i
n land that was ridden hard by gale-force winds, hail, drought and crushing thunderstorms, all of which washes away the soil year after year. Australia had relatively few native annuals for a reason: perennials hold the soil together in a land of ‘drought and flooding rain’.
Bread needs yeast to make it rise, but I can find no records of good bread-making yeast being imported on the First Fleet. It is technically possible that it was, even though dried yeast hadn’t been invented then – a cook or servant would simply have had to feed the yeast culture every day with a little flour. There are references to all guests being asked to bring their own bread rolls to dinner at Captain Phillip’s table on the journey, but even those rolls might have been the yeastless soda bread – and that’s where Aussie damper comes in.
Damper’s Irish ancestor
Damper is the Aussie version of Irish soda bread. These days soda bread is made with self-raising flour or baking powder, but the first white settlers to Australia arrived before baking powder was patented in 1848.
Irish soda bread was made by dripping water through wood ash to make strongly alkaline lye, or baking soda. Lye can be added to fat to make soap, but when the alkaline lye (or saltash) and flour is mixed with acidic buttermilk the soda bread rises up, rich, light and crusty. Traditional buttermilk was also fermented, unlike the modern supermarket variety, and this helped tighten the loaf in much the same way yeast does. The flour in the first decades of colonial Australia might have been years old, sour and full of weevils, but the sour flour mixed with alkaline saltash, and with water instead of the traditional buttermilk – cows and their milk were a rarity in early colonial times – also produced the air bubbles that would expand when the bread was cooked. This simplified version of soda bread became known as damper in the colony.
Good damper is delicious when warm, steaming and fragrant, though it needs to be eaten fresh. Cold damper becomes heavy and dries out faster than yeast-risen bread, even without the additives that make modern bread stay ‘fresh’ for days or weeks. The damper of early colonial Australia was rarely good. The new colony had few cows (and most of those escaped) to give buttermilk. Goats’ milk is naturally homogenised and can’t be used for butter. No butter equals no leftover buttermilk. So Australian damper became dryer textured than Irish soda bread, and cooked in the ashes instead of a three-legged pot on the Irish hearth, which is how it got its name – the fire was ‘damped down’ when you raked away the hot coals, threw in the dough, then raked the coals back over it. Half an hour later you thrust in your spade, shovelled out the damper, whisked off the ash with the switch from a bullock’s tail (preferably without the bullock attached), threw away the crust if you were fussy, but otherwise ate it, grit and all. (An English saying, ‘We all must eat a peck o’ dirt before we die’, might possibly have consoled those who dined on damper.)
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How to make a great Australian damper
You will need:
a good fire, burnt down to red-hot coals
a spade
a camp oven, billy with lid or a large tin can and with a thin rock to top it with
3 cups self-raising flour
1 cup water (or buttermilk or coconut milk - either makes the damper sweeter and moister)
butter, cooking oil or mutton dripping
Optional: half a cup of currants, and/or half a cup of chopped dates, and/or 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and/or 1 teaspoon mixed spice, and/or quarter cup mixed peel and/or half a cup of sugar
Mix self-raising flour (and spices and fruit if you are using them) and liquid with a knife till all the flour is incorporated. Do it quickly and lightly as this is the secret of a light, fluffy damper - knead as little as possible.
With the butter or dripping, grease the bottom of the camp oven, or the sides and base of the billy or tin can. Make sure the damper doesn’t take up more than a third of the space as it will expand.
Put in the damper dough. Put the lid on the oven or find a rock to cover the billy or tin (warning: the rock may explode so cover well with your coals), or use aluminium foil.
Use the spade to scrape the coals from the fire and place the oven, billy or can where the coals were. Now scrape the coals back over the billy or camp oven - all around and on top as well. (Damper cooked on top of the fire gets a hard burnt bottom and a raw middle). Leave your damper to cook for three quarters of an hour, then use a spade to bring it out of the ashes.
Eat your damper straight away - they don’t keep well - with butter or just a trickle of golden syrup. Damper is also good with jam and cream. (Even old doormats are better with jam and cream.)
In the oven
Preheat the oven to 200°C - this is important, as damper placed in a cold oven will be heavy. Place the dough on a greased tray, make two deep cuts in the top (to help the dough expand) and bake till the crust is pale brown and it sounds hollow when you tap it. This should take about thirty minutes.
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Gradually the great Australian damper became more refined, especially with the invention of baking powder in 1848 and the camp (or Dutch) oven, a heavy cast-iron pot with a lid that could be shoved into the coals, with more coals loaded on top so the damper browned evenly.
A good cook knew exactly when the coals were right so their damper was neither burnt nor soggy. They knew how much water to add as well: too much made it heavy, too little and you got dry, crumbly damper and insults like, ‘Who called the cook a bastard?’ ‘Who called the bastard a cook?’
The damper evolved with sometimes delicious variations: adding sugar and fruit and spices turned your damper into ‘brownie’; frying thin rounds of damper dough in fat in your frying pan made ‘Johnnie cakes’; wrapping a thin pancake of dough around green sticks and cooking them over the fire created ‘sinkers’.
All could be served with ‘cocky’s joy’ (golden syrup) or sometimes treacle. Sugar dissolved if your bullock wagon rolled into a creek, or became hard lumps in humid weather, but cocky’s joy came in tins so could survive flood, upset and cyclone, and lasted for years. The tin could then be used as a ‘billy’ to brew your tea or cook your stew, or filled with water then placed under your table and bed legs to prevent ants or smaller spiders from climbing up them.
The mutton eaters
A love of roast or boiled mutton and a cuisine based on dripping goes a long way to explaining Australia’s love affair with sheep, and its consequences. From the 1820s until the 1970s, when the combined effects of migration, Federation, more efficient transport and the knowledge of what cholesterol was doing to Australian arteries gradually helped olive and other plant oils take over from mutton fat, sheep ruled our meals, whether it be mutton, lamb or hogget (a sheep that isn’t a lamb but not an old ewe either). The term hogget has vanished from consumers’ lives these days, but in my childhood that was what most cooks wanted: hogget had flavour without toughness.
Why sheep, not goat or cow? Goats are harder to herd in a land without fences, and before refrigeration even a small cattle beast gave too much meat for a farm family to eat before the meat went off. In the days when every meal contained meat if you could afford it, a skinny old ewe or a young fat lamb would be eaten in a week, and the carcass of a sheep hung up in the meat house, away from the flies, would last that long, even in the heat of summer. But mostly, a good fat sheep oozed lots of fat, otherwise known as dripping, the large amounts of liquid that oozed from the meat as it roasted, flavoured with burnt crusty bits of pumpkin or sometimes rosemary, and saved to solidify in the traditional teacup that had lost its handle on the bench by the stove.
Bread and dripping was cheaper than bread and cheese or butter, both when cheese was expensive in the early colony and in subsequent wars and depressions when butter was scarce or cost more than you could afford. Dripping was also the basis for soap, candles, slush lamps, furniture polish, hand cream and liniment for aching backs. It was a remedy for baby’s cradle cap or chapped bottom, and kept the damp out of your boots. Dripping went into sc
ones and pastry instead of butter. My Grandma Edwards fried tomatoes in dripping for our breakfast, or lamb’s fry (sheep liver) and onions with gravy, or thinly sliced sheep’s kidney, or fried bread.
Recipe books from 1890 to 1950 might list butter in recipes for cakes and biscuits, but all thrifty housewives knew that dripping could take its place, and kept better in the heat. Vegetables fried in dripping are crisper than those fried in vegetable oils, and pastry made with dripping is lighter than pastry made with butter or oils. Up until the cholesterol conscious 1970s vegetables, cakes, puddings, pies and even bread were made with a good addition of dripping. I probably will never eat the deliciously moist apple pie pastry of the cake shops of my youth again. Its texture, and its lightness, came from lard.
Early colonial mutton was usually plainly boiled or grilled over an open fire. But to get the best out of a sheep, you need to know how to cook it, slowly roasting that tough bit of meat till the sinews melted and the fat dripped away and it’s tender enough to eat with a spoon, the fat poured off to become dripping.
A lack of trained cooks (and women) in the colony led to a badly cooked and monotonous diet, where much of the outback cooking was done by Indigenous women using unfamiliar ingredients, or by men who didn’t know much about food preparation in the first place, the classic pre-1950s shearers’ cook. (Post-1950s shearers made sure they got good food indeed.)
The general lack of cooking skills slowly changed, especially with the work of reformists like Caroline Chisholm and her ‘God’s police’. The Scottish brides in particular knew all about tough mutton and how to cook it. Most Scottish chimneys had a niche in the side of them to smoke a leg or two of mutton, or barrels outside to salt them, and a big black pot over the fire for a neck of mutton stew with plenty of potatoes and turnips (the latter was called Irish stew till the 1960s, as it was also popular with Irish cooks).
Let the Land Speak Page 28
