Food History

I’ve just returned from Sydney. Due to the wonders of time-stamps, posts appeared magically these last few days. A kind of time travel - not the same kind of time travel as this bread, however.

I wasn’t in Sydney for Thanksgiving. I was in Sydney to spend quality time with some of my favourite relatives and to attend a science fiction event and to catch up with friends. I managed to elicit a cheer from the audience when I announced that the working title of my novel-in-progress was “Chocolate Redemption” but that’s the closest I got to combining food history and science fiction.

Other days were better. I regularly explore the Queen Victoria Building and did my annual trip there on Friday morning. It has a range of food outlets and watching how they change over time is fascinating. I have been watching for twenty years now (which was a surprising statistic - I hadn’t realised it had been re-opened that long) and good cakes of continental European varieties, big breakfasts and chocolate have been constantly available. I suspect chicken schnitzel lunches have also lasted. Most of the food there is cafe food and QVB caters to cafe society. If you want food courts or proper restaurants, you walk down to the bottom level. From there, you can find a series of food courts making a web under Sydney streets. This underground shopping is a relatively new phenomenon for Australia and it skews food provision towards lunchboxes with rice, or nori rolls - anything that’s not messy and is portable. Just out of curiosity, I looked for the staple of takeaway food in my childhood: chips. Not fries. I found fries in the fish stalls and in the Lebanese stall, but they weren’t chips. Chips in the sixties here were thick and substantial and the only place I found them in all my wanderings on Friday were in Woolworths (a department store).

I visited other places. I ate raspberry and chocolate gelati from an Indian movie rental place, right next to a Korean supermarket in Ashfield. I walked through Paddy’s Market and found that the fruit and vegetables are a bit better than they have been but not as good as in Paddy’s heyday. (The handbags in Paddy’s are identical to those in Victoria Market in Melbourne, for what it’s worth, and Victoria Market has also lost most of its interesting and gourmet food. Not that I eat handbags.)

My last regular visit was to Burlington’s, the big Chinese supermarket a few blocks from Central Station. My friends and I used to get a lot of our supplies there in the eighties, when we had interesting cookups and when it was the only really decent speciality supplier. It’s still big and still has a bunch of good stuff (if you want seahorses in your medicinal soup, go to Burlington’s) but its range is way less vast. I couldn’t get any of the herbs and spices I was after. They were even out of galingale! In fact, the only food I bought from Burlington’s was pickled mustard for my cousin and jasmine agar agar mix for bring-a-plate emergencies.

Small changes in foods - big changes in cities. These days you often go outside the city centre for the really good food shopping.