Australia’s favourite recipes isn’t the best title for this post, which was sparked by an article I came across recently. “Australia’s Best Recipes” contains recipes for sausage rolls, coronation chicken and queen pudding, among others. Nominating these dishes as “best” is arguably ambitious, although they are wonderful dishes. But, as with anything, what’s “best” for some, isn’t for others. Personal taste inevitably sways judgement. Unless of course you’re a judge at The Adelaide Royal Show Cookery Competition  tasked with choosing the supreme cream puff out of several dozen identical looking contenders. 

Lacking the culinary expertise of such judges, I’ve decided instead to focus on “favourite”. Again, an arbitrary term, but I’m confident research has been done to determine this.  “Favourite”, or even “best” depends on many other factors, such as where and when you were born, whether your grandmother cooked these things for you, (and the mellow nostalgic glow of an aromatic farmhouse kitchen has coloured your view) and whether, even if everyone else in the schoolyard was tucking into the tuck shop’s pie with sauce, you weren’t allowed to buy one, in which case you may well harbour a resentment of pies with sauce, or your stingy parents, or both.

You won’t be surprised to learn there are many books on Australia’s favourite recipes. Leila McKinnon in “Australia’s Favourite Recipes” (which looks gorgeous and I covet it) includes Pavlova, Anzac biscuits, Lemon Delicious (my personal favourite of favourites*) and many others. She also features spaghetti bolognaise and lamb souvlaki which obviously owe their roots to other national cuisines. What this suggests is that Australia’s cuisine has been for decades so heavily influenced by other cultures (which is a great thing) that our favourites today would have been unknown (let alone favoured) by our parents’ or grandparents’ generations.

Delicious online magazine offers another take on the subject. In an article called “65 Recipes That Are Certified Aussie Classics” such dishes as Artichoke and Oregano Stuffed Lamb Leg, Fish & Chips, Saltbush Pepperberry Crocodile and Chicken Parmigiana are given the Aussie Classic label. Apart from the crocodile dish, the others have been adopted and adapted from elsewhere, but because we love them so much, (well perhaps less so in the case of the berry tussied up crocodile) we’ve made them our own (as in the best blended families).

As regards research to back up claims of “best” or “favourite”, a cursory search of the internet didn’t reveal any evidence-based conclusions. Perhaps it’s just too ambitious a project. How would you go about data collection and analysis, testing for bias and so on?  We may be better off veering towards a more objective examination, for example the traditional, which can’t be subject to too many variances, surely. 

There are lots of excellent resources for investigation here, for example, food historians, one of which, Barbara Santich, was at least partly responsible for my interest in food writing. Michael Symons, writing in The Australian Geographic  on Australia’s cuisine culture, notes “in Adelaide in the 1950s, my grandmother was our family cook, turning out such standards as shepherd’s pie, lamb chops, and apple pie and custard”, giving himself away as a contemporary of mine. 

He also makes the same point as I did less articulately earlier, that “Such is the proliferation of foods and techniques that it may seem nonsensical to search for a distinctively ‘Australian’ cuisine …”. If however, you look back far enough as he does, there are dishes, that if not ubiquitous today, have helped define what we think of as traditional Australian fare, for example the campfire meal of damper and billy tea.

However, despite the relatively new phenomenon of bush tucker, few of us today would consider knocking up an evening meal of damper and billy tea, unless in fact enjoying that other Aussie tradition, the camping holiday (heaven forbid).

When we think of favourites, classics or traditional Aussie fare, things like Vegemite, Lamingtons, Barbecued Prawns and the like, more usually spring to mind. And I don’t know about you, but I’d happily forfeit Vegemite forever for a freshly cooked lamington.

For me, and the baby boomer generation to which I belong, it was the Green and Gold Cookbook that influenced, if not dictated, our ideas about food and cooking. First published in 1923 (considerably before my time), it became the culinary bible for many women both rural and suburban. It was certainly the most dog-eared, well- thumbed and food-stained of my mother’s and grandmother’s collection of cookbooks. 

According to QBD Books, it was “first compiled in 1923 as a fundraising initiative of King’s College (now King’s Campus, Pembroke School, South Australia).” 

I once had my own copy, and I remember when I was first married referring to it, not for some old family favourite, but for instructions on how to boil an egg. Despite the example set for me of a grandmother permanently aproned and floury-handed, and of a mother who tried to emulate her, but mostly failed, I showed zero interest in food or cooking growing up. Apart from one misadventure when, inspired by what I thought was the exoticism of it, I made a tomato dessert. I got the idea from a glossy magazine, as I did many others. Either something went wrong, or my family failed to appreciate the exoticism, but they all pronounced it inedible. Secretly I agreed with them.

My own G&G cookbook has disappeared or is languishing at the bottom of one of the many removalists’ cartons that have followed me around from one place to another for most of my grownup life. It’s a sad loss, not so much for the recipes, as you can find almost anything online now, but for the nostalgia it evokes, and the memories of my grandmother and mother and their kitchens. 

This image isn’t of my grandmother’s kitchen, but it’s not that far removed. Lacking electricity, they got by with such archaic appliances as a wood fuelled stove, kerosine lamps, a meat safe, and an ice box. Visiting the farm was a leap back in time, more than compensated for by the milk straight from the cows, fresh hen-warmed eggs, butter from the butter churn and thick heavy cream from the dairy. 

Some of the pleasure in these reminiscences comes from a form of what’s called “taste memory“, where we associate certain tastes with particular life experiences. While I like to think back on the rustic kitchen with its smell of woodsmoke and fresh bread and see in my mind my grandmother enveloped in her black apron, wispy hair escaping from her scraped back bun, there were things about staying at the farm that I hated. The outside dunny, for one, having been told to watch out for spiders and snakes, the squares of newspaper left there as unforgivably inadequate substitutes for toilet paper, and the antediluvian bathroom in the lean-to, with its booming water heater and enormous deep bath in which I could have drowned. There was apparently a risk of being joined by a reptile or two in there as well.

But I elide these less salubrious aspects of staying at the farm because the enjoyment of remembering the food and the people who featured in its cooking is too precious. Even today when I open my kitchen cupboard where I keep my spices and condiments and that rich nostril tickling aroma escapes or remember the taste of Bickfords Coffee and Chickory Essence, which we were allowed to drink mixed with milk, (on the assumption it was better for children than real coffee), I’m transported to that kitchen and opening the door of the massive timber pantry cupboard, which to me was like opening the door to paradise. Simple pleasures, or so they seem now.

Whether you define food and recipes you love as “best”, “favourite”, “classic” or “traditional” is probably irrelevant. It’s largely a matter of association, sensory and sentimental, that determines what we place at the pinnacle of our most loved foods.

*Having mentioned Lemon Delicious pudding earlier as one of my absolute favourites (in fact I’d go so far as to say I’d nominate it as a “last meal” dish), I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

So it’s only fair to expand on it (as you will in fact if you eat too many of them). It’s rather a magical dish, in that in baking it creates its own sauce (it’s a self-saucing pud in other words, however bearing no likeness whatsoever to those mother’s helper instant desserts of the same name). 

Its magic lies in the blending of sweet and tart, the ethereal lightness of the cake and the rich silkiness of the sauce. Warm from the oven, draped with cream or accessorized with ice-cream, it’s divine. It’s easy to prepare, but does take 50-60 minutes to bake, so if you get an unbearable craving, it will be a case of delayed gratification, but oh so worth it.