Food History

Thanks to the canny eyes of Trudi Canavan, I suddenly own a copy of a TV Week booklet of Graham Kerr’s recipes. It isn’t listed in the Wikipedia entry about him. It’s from the mid to late 1960s and was published just before Australian cuisine took its amazing turn and became less mundane.

Kerr did his best to change Australian eating habits to fit his food vision. The curious thing is that - despite his great influence and his TV shows - the final direction our cooking took wasn’t the direction he pushed for.

Firstly, he got the wine right. Every meal he demonstrated had a wine attached. In the sixties Australia was still known as beer-drinking. The switch from Fosters to Chardonnay is not insignificant. I made a little wine list from Kerr’s book: Houghton’s White Burgundy (WA), Hamilton’s Dry Red Hermitage, 1958, Penfold’s Traminer Riesling Bine 202, 1964 Lindeman’s Riesling Bin 23, Thomas Hardy’s Eden Moselle, McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant Hermitage 1962 and McWilliam’s Lovedale Riesling are the ones listed for programs 1 through to 7.

The big change in wines is that with penetration into the international market, Australian winemakers have had to change their nomenclature. We can’t belong to the OIV and ignore them. Wines are named after grape types or local regions now, instead of winegrowing regions on the other side of the world. So no more Hock, Moselle, Champagne, Burgundy. At first there was a great deal of protest: established names were being dumped and it all looked fearfully bureaucratic. Now that we’ve got used to the new names, it all looks straightforward and it’s easy to wonder what the fuss was about. Change is like that.

And now that we’ve got used to a more Mediterranean cuisine, it’s easy to look at Kerr’s recipes and wonder why he thought that his flavour combinations were so very magic. In the sixties, though, they were innnovative. Not directions I would have chosen - difficult for vegetarians, tough for Moslems, almost impossible for Jews. And very few of his dishes are lasting inventions. But at the time he devised the content of the cookbook, Australia was a different country. The big changes were breaking through in suburban Australia and Kerr’s TV enthusiasm for the new and the exotic helped Greek and Turkish and Italian cooks share their recipes with friends. And those shared recipes are where the big changes started to occur. When Indian and Asian and South East Asian techniques and ingredients were gradually added to the mix in the seventies and eighties, and when bushfood crept in a bit after that, the landscape was changed. A world class cuisine had sprung up, seemingly from nowhere. The truth is that our food has always ben malleable and always been constant. We still eat scones and jam and cream on Sunday afternoons. Then we pick up a souvlaki or a kebab or some sushi for a lazy dinner. It’s just that the sixties and the seventies were a time of particular change.

Graham Kerr played a role in this change, despite the faddish nature of many of his dishes. He made it seem normal to push food boundaries. He helped make change comfortable. And now you know why I’m so very pleased Trudi spotted this little booklet.