If you’ve followed an old link to this site you may be a little surprised (or even disappointed) with what you’ve found here. This site does have some posts about food history, but my food timeline now has its own address. There’s a link in this post.
Nanny’s Christmas pudding just wouldn’t be the same without Nanny’s brandy cream. Plain whipped cream was provided for the children.
It’s not uncommon to read diatribes from (mostly older) Australians fulminating against American fast food, American music, American computer games and, especially, certain American politicians. But when did all this Americanisation start?
Me and My Big Mouth is a personal account of how Australian food has changed in the baby-boomers’ lifetime. It’s the story of a generation that can remember life before pizza – a generation that has seen the demise of the local grocer and, decades later, the resurrection of the small local deli.
South Australian eating habits have always been a bit unusual. Which brings me to doorstop bread. I recently had a phone call from the ABC in South Australia, asking whether I could contribute to a segment that explores long-lost favourites.
How did Tim Tams get their name. Who invented the Chiko Roll? My book A Timeline of Australian Food: from mutton to MasterChef chronicles 150 years of Australian food, from the first Australian cookbook in the 1860s to MasterChef in 2010. Sadly, it’s now out of print. Your library may have it on the shelf.
The custom of enclosing a savoury (or sometimes sweet) filling in bread is probably as old as bread itself. But the modern sandwich has come a long way from a limp filling between two slices of white bread.
Since man first picked up a piece of flint to cut into an animal carcass, people have been devising various implements to replace fingers in the messy art of eating. Cutlery evolved to include a host of specialised knives, forks and spoons rarely used today.
Back in 1929, did Brisbane’s Italians really put dessicated coconut on their risotto? And were the smart set already using chopsticks in Chinese restaurants. A look at multicultural dining in Brisbane on the eve of the Great Depression.
Whipping up a curry was not a sign of multiculturalism in the 1950s. Indeed, curry had been part of the British cookery tradition since the 18th century, when Brits posted to the colonial outpost of India embraced spicy local dishes.
Toothpicks have a long history. Bronze toothpicks have been found in prehistoric graves, while examples made of wood or precious metals were common in ancient Greece and Rome. In the 1930s, cocktail teasers – the ubiquitous cubes of cheese speared on a stick with a cocktail onion – made their first appearance.
This is the story of a family business that began with one small shop, opened by a Scottish baker in Adelaide’s rough and ready colonial days. I wrote the company history for Balfours in 2018 but the full text was never published. There’s a link to it at the end of this post.
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