Convict heritage and food
I should never have given you a recipe for drop biscuits. Here we eat drop scones or pikelets and life would have been fine if I had spent the day thinking of them. Instead I’ve developed a charmingly bad cold (hard to check spelling and typing if you can’t see clearly!) and my mind dwells on drop bears. Drop bears are inedible. That is all you need to know of them. Unless you’re really gullible, in which case I can send you to a number of sites for more information.
Just now I was casting my mind back to the interesting history of Jewish food in Australia. It’s not like Jewish food in the US or even the UK. Or it wasn’t. It’s more cosmopolitan now.
It started off as part of mainstream food history in this country. The first Jews here (as far as we know – maybe there were a host of fleeing Jews in the sixteenth century who set up a secret country in the middle of Western Australia, but we have no evidence. It’s possible.) came with the First Fleet. Jewish history started off as colonial history in Australia.
This means that Jewish food in the nineteenth century was very much the product of the London area, with the important change of more meat and better vegetables. Chops and steaks and sausages and a roast once a week. Fry-ups for breakfast: chops and sausages and eggs and tomatoes and mushrooms and toast. Some families ate bacon and some didn’t.
The important thing about the nineteenth century and Jewish food and Australia is that it wasn’t nearly as careful and kosher as twentieth century Australian Jewish food. The other important thing is that this is where the 1950s recipes I’ve been giving you came from. My grandmother’s recipes. She was born in the late nineteenth century and her cooking retained many of the characteristics of that earlier cuisine. That’s why I give you the recipes: they’re the memory of a lost cuisine.
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