Food History

Since each and every way I turn right now I find bushfoods, I thought I should inflict the same thing on you. Not that it’s an affliction for me, since I have packets of herbs and spices, ready to cook, but for you, you get to hear anecdotes and then decide whether or not you want to cook with the ingredients or contemplate their history or ignore my post and hope for maybe a decent historical biscuit recipe tomorrow, to make up.

I’ve chosen just two herbs to introduce you to today. There’s a reason for this. Popular lore has it that the early British settlers used tea tree when there was no tea to be had. Apart from this and some rather good stories about native animals from a slightly later period (which I need to check up, since I suspect I’m teaching Colonial Australian food in a few weeks) the general feeling about Australian native ingredients is that we’ve ignored the bush and ignored the foods of indigenous Australia until very, very recently.

This turns out to be only half true. The early settlers used herbs like salt bush (Atriplex nummularia) and sea parsley (Apium prostratum) and then later settlers replaced salt bush with rosemary and sea parsley with common parsley. These two herbs are in front of me now, since they were part of my swag from the Show.

Maybe the move away from local ingredients and to European plants was due to homesickness. Maybe it was a distrust of the strange environment they now lived in. Maybe it was linked to the change in attitudes towards the original inhabitants of this land: the first settlers accepted that they were invading and their leaders tried to respect at least some of the indigenous rights; later settlers developed an acceptance of the concept of Terra Nullius and denied people a depressing number of human rights.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for evidence of the two shifts and see if I can work out if they happened at the same time or were linked in any way. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. I won’t have time to actively research it, though, so it may take a while before I can piece out a pattern.

Watch this space.