Melbourne Chinese food
Tonight my parents and I went to a Chinese place in Ormond for dinner. Tea and Rice was its name, and my mother and I went there a couple of years ago and we had both turned all kinds of nostalgic. It has a more extensive menu now and maybe a change of management, but then it served very much the sort of Australian Chinese food that we both thought was long-gone. Bland, a little over-cooked, but very emotionally satisfying. It harked back to Australia-past, where the Australian Chinese (Chinese Australian?) population had to adapt their public cooking to majority food tastes. There have been Chinese Australians (Australian Chinese?) here since the 1850s or earlier and the restaurant tradition is not new.
I didn’t remember eating Chinese food as a child, but that was because it wasn’t kosher back then. These days there is a kosher Chinese restaurant in Melbourne. And these days Chinese food can be regional and sophisticated and all kinds of special. My stepfather remembered back to the plainer food of of the 1940s. The changes are good, but what’s even better is remembering how important Chinese culture and cuisine has been to Australia for the last 150 years.
January 9th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Ah, yes. I remember crispy chicken, which was just deep fried chicken. And lemon chicken, which was chicken smothered in something that tasted like lemon curd - much, much too sweet.
My mum used to make a ’stir fry’ made of mince meet, grated carrots and cabbage that had no resemblance to any eastern stir fry.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Trudi, that’s what my parents called chop suey - albeit with some chicken noodle soup added as well
My dad’s somewhat adventurous when it comes to spicing things (which he passed down to me), so over the years it changed considerably. The last one I remember was full of curry powder and soy sauce as well. And Instead of serving it with rice, I think rice was added to the pot so it cooked with the rest of i t- the only bad part about that was having to stand there and stir it constantly so that the rice wouldn’t sink to the bottom and stick!
Must call and ask if they remember that recipe, I did love it!
January 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
You know, I may be nostalgic about the cooking style, but I *don’t* miss that ‘chop suey’>
January 11th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I do - so much that I called my mum and checked that my memory of the basic recipe was correct!
February 2nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
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