THE OLDEST FOODS ON EARTH

A HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN NATIVE FOODS WITH RECIPES

INTRODUCTION

By Phillip Searle. Phillip Searle is one of the must influential of Modern Australian chefs, through his restaurants Possums in Adelaide and Oasis Seros in Sydney and his long association with the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy.

When was the last time you seared a kangaroo fillet and served it with a pepperberry sauce? Have you ever eaten quandong? Riberries? Magpie goose? Did you know that before we arrived in 1788 the Aboriginal people of the tropical North chose from among 750 different plant and animal foods? Did you know that Australian native rices (Oryza rufipogon and O. meridionalis) were an abundant and widespread resource in floodplains across monsoonal Australia and were harvested and consumed by the First People for thousands of years? Only now are they being cultivated for wider consumption.

This is a book about Australian food. Not the food that European Australians cooked from ingredients they brought with them, but the unique flora and fauna that nourished the Aboriginal peoples of this land for over 50 000 years. Indeed, it is because European Australians have hardly ever touched these foods for over 200 years that I am writing this book. The reason we virtually ignored the foods that were here when we came is part of this story. But only a part. The real story is that these foods are, finally, beginning to be used by home and professional chefs. It’s somewhat tentative – especially in the home – but it’s a start. There’s a long way to go yet.

The first time I ate kangaroo was in 1993 at a long-gone restaurant called Oasis Seros. I was reviewing the restaurant for The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide. The chef was Phillip Searle and the dish was Kangaroo with Pickled Beetroot. I have never forgotten it. The combination of the lightly seared roo with the complex acidity of the sauce was, for this diner, unforgettable. For this book, I made contact with Phillip, and he very kindly gave me the recipe, which you’ll find at the end of this introduction.

In more than 200 years of occupation of this continent, European Australians have turned their backs on the vast majority of the foods the Indigenous people have been eating for more than 50 000 years; ignored their sage and intricate management of the environment and its abundant foods; overlaid an alien system of agriculture which began the process of ecological imbalance the continent now finds itself in; and began exporting back to Europe the exotic foodstuffs they planted and raised. And, for around 150 years, stuck stubbornly to the diet of the first settlers.

In short, we lived on and not in this continent. We did not put down roots and did not see, as American food historian Waverley Root asserted, that ‘food is a function of the soil, for which reason every country has the food naturally fit for it.’ Every country, that is, except Australia.

As I was writing this I flicked across to the Sydney Morning Herald website. There was a clickbait headline: ‘Where to taste the world’s best cuisines.’ Alright, I’ll bite, tell me: Japan, Peru, France, Spain, Morocco, Argentina, Taiwan and Italy. There appears to be something missing. And it’s not the cultural cringe, though we’re good at that.

Later I’ll discuss those foods breathlessly referred to as ‘superfoods’ in the health pages of our glossies. Why do they always come from somewhere else, some usually exotic place? The acai berry from Amazonia; the goji berry from the Ningxia Hui region in north central China or the Xinjiang Uighur region in far northern China; quinoa from Peru and Bolivia. If those imports are superfoods, the foods that have been growing here for thousands of years, Australian native foods, foods that we’ve virtually ignored for the 200-plus years we’ve been here, are super-duperfoods.

In this book, I deal with what pioneer native foods chef Jean-Paul Bruneteau calls ‘food racism’, the kind that has, in the past, played its part in the rejection of these foods because they were Aboriginal foods. It is only one of the many kinds of racism directed against the Aboriginal people, even today. My own belief is that non-Indigenous Australians must accept that the original inhabitants have carefully stewarded this land for the entire time they have lived here, and have the oldest unbroken culture in the world, before that racism – culinary and otherwise – will disappear.

And there’s something else really puzzling about our rejecting and ignoring the foods that grow here. Australia has absorbed, with minimal racial problems, more nationalities than just about any country on earth. And as the philosopher and historian Anthony Corones has shown, Australia is not just a multicultural society, but a multiculinary one. As pioneer native Australian food restaurateur Jennice Kersh once said, ‘We have embraced multicultural food more than any country in the world. Australia jumped in there and hugged it all. They’d go to a Thai restaurant – any kind of restaurant – and have no fear.’ We’ll happily eat boat noodle soup – with beef blood stirred through it – or stinking tofu, but not kangaroo. Which dispenses with the theory of neophobia – fear of the new: in this instance, new food.

There’s something else going on here in the rejection of native foods. Moving on from that rejection can only be good for Australian culture.

A study carried out in Malaysia concludes by noting that ‘When two or more ethnic groups share foodways, they become closer.’ The report also suggests that when different ethnic groups share food, it strengthens social bonding and alliances among communities and ethnic groups – an important consideration in multiculinary and multicultural Malaysia, a country often riven by racial and ethnic conflict.

I do believe that Australian multiculinarity – accepting the food of ‘the others’, eating our neighbours’ food – has helped us ease our way into what is generally a remarkable multicultural stability.

If the acceptance of foods can help Australians become more tolerant of new arrivals to this land, surely, then, it can do the same with the food of those who were here long before we arrived. Food is more than nourishment. Food is culture; food shapes culture; food binds us together and forces us apart. In the same way, accepting the food of this land, which we are only just beginning to do after almost 230 years, will, I believe, contribute towards what I call culinary reconciliation.

There are also environmental advantages of eating more of those foods that have adapted to the climates of the land, which for the most part don’t require chemical interventions to protect them from weeds and insect predators. The same goes for the native animals: they too have adapted to live lightly on the land. This could be the most compelling reason of all.

There are signs that cultural change is happening. More generally, I’d point to the success of films like The Sapphires and Charlie’s Country, and ABC television shows like Redfern Now and Black Comedy. I simply can’t imagine these shows – especially Black Comedy – appearing on mainstream Australian television, even the ABC, even ten years ago. And, slowly, it’s happening with food. A new generation of young Australian chefs who don’t carry the racial baggage of the past are beginning to use native Australian ingredients. Chinese Australian chef Kylie Kwong has added lilly pilly (riberries), wallaby tail, quandongs and saltbush to her Chinese–Australian menu. Visiting English molecular chef Heston Blumenthal incorporated lemon myrtle and pepperberries in a range he developed with a local supermarket. Both home cooks and restaurant chefs are picking riberries from street plantings of lilly pilly, foraging for warrigal greens and experimenting with kangaroo. Sales of native ingredients are increasing. The ingredients are a-changing.

And about bloody time.


A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY


While I prefer the term First People, I will be using the words Aborigine (noun, sparingly) and Aboriginal (adjective) to describe those people who have occupied, farmed and cared for this land for over 50 000 years. While these words are a little old-fashioned – especially Aborigine – they seem to be accepted by the community. I’ll alternate Aboriginal with Indigenous, a term with mixed acceptance, but one that’s here to stay.

Unlike New Zealand’s Maori people, in Australia there are some 500 nations, with many different terms for each other – Koori in New South Wales, Murray in Queensland, Nyoongar in southern Western Australia and South Australia, Palawa in Tasmania being just a few. Even deciding what to call the original inhabitants of this country is complex. It has been estimated that before the colonisers arrived there were some 700 language groups, of which 250 have been recorded.

In spite of this, as Bill Gammage shows in his magisterial book The Biggest Estate on Earth, there was a cohesive farming and land management plan across the entire continent, or ‘estate’ as Gammage calls it. How was this done? Gammage writes, ‘Although comprising many ways of maintaining land, and managers mostly unknown to each other, this vast area was governed by a single religious philosophy, called in English the Dreaming.’

I will refer often to Bill Gammage’s book. His research completely destroys the myth of the ‘wandering savages.’ He carefully and thoroughly shows the impact that the Indigenous people of this country had on the land, and shows, as Henry Reynolds writes in the foreword, ‘the scale of Aboriginal land management [and] the intelligence, skill and inherited knowledge which informed it’. If this book does no more than lead its reader to Gammage, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

The terms that I come across often in conversation with Indigenous Australians and those who work with them are Whitefella and Blackfella. I like them very much. They differentiate without discriminating. But they don’t work so well on the page.

And then there are the terms used by the Black-fellas to indicate Whitefellas. There are a few: Balanda in Arnhem Land and the Northern Territory; Gubba or Gub in south-eastern Australia; Wajala in Western Australia; and Walypala in parts of northern Australia.

While we now know that to label the Aboriginal people as hunter-gatherers is inadequate to describe the complex and time-honoured ways in which they managed the entire country, I will use this term as shorthand from time to time, as it continues to be used in the literature to the present day.

At the beginning of this Introduction, I wrote ‘European Australians have turned their backs on the vast majority of the foods the Indigenous people have been eating for more than 50 000 years.’ You will all be aware that there are, of course, Indigenous foods we have always eaten, for example oysters, crabs, rock crayfish, yabbies and marron, and all the fish that swim around us. As the chef Tony Bilson reminds us, these fish include many of those used in the French dish bouillabaisse: rascasse (here known as red rock cod), daurade (similar to snapper) and mullet. These were all familiar to the new settlers (although, as I show later in the book, the snapper was often shunned as not good enough for the dinner table). And there were familiar game birds – varieties of duck and quail, for example.

But outside the familiar are an estimated 6000 edible plants, including 2400 fruiting trees in south-eastern Queensland alone, 2000 truffles or subterranean mushrooms, and a number of game birds and mammals, including the kangaroo, which is still scarcely eaten domestically. There is much still to explore in the unfamiliar, and this book will explore at least some of them.

The questions of when the first humans arrived on the Australian continent, and whether there was one arrival or several, are still being disputed. Without getting into the multiple arrival argument, I’ll briefly examine the claims around dating.

Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River in western Australia about 40 000 years ago. Tasmania, which was then connected to the continent by a land bridge, was inhabited at least 30,000 years ago. Analysis of sediments at two grave sites at Lake Mungo confirms that Australia is the site of the world’s oldest known burial with red ochre and the oldest cremation, thus providing additional evidence that early humans first reached Australia about 50 000 years ago.

The anatomy of the very first physical records of the humans found at these gravesites also complements this picture. We see a morphology (a branch of biology dealing with the form and structure of organisms) in the remains of what have come to be known as Mungo Man and Mungo Woman that would not look out of place in Aboriginal Australian populations today. Astonishingly, Mungo Man and Woman are fully modern people in every sense of the word, and indeed represent some of the earliest modern human remains within the whole Australian–Asian region. Europe at this time was still the domain of the Neanderthals.

There have been claims that some sites are up to 60 000 years old, but these claims are not generally accepted. Neither is the evidence from south-eastern Australia, which suggests an increase in fire activity dating from around 120 000 years ago, which has been interpreted as evidence of human activity.

At the time of writing it seems reasonable to adopt ‘over 50000 years’ as the most generally accepted dating of the arrival of humans on the Australian continent.

RECIPE

KANGAROO WITH PICKLED BEETROOT

I ate this dish at Oasis Seros while reviewing it for the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide in 1993 (review published in the 1994 edition), and have never forgotten it. JN

200 g of kangaroo tenderloin per person
enough peanut oil to marinate the kangaroo in, with ground black pepper, star anise, orange rind and a few drops of coconut vinegar added
small amount of game or veal stock
1 tsp fresh horseradish (if in season), pureed in a small amount of coconut vinegar

Tomato pickle

(this makes more than you will need for the recipe)
1 tbsp black mustard seeds
250 ml malt vinegar
15 cloves garlic
200 g fresh ginger, chopped
250 ml peanut oil
3 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp ground turmeric
900 g palm sugar
2 kg peeled, seeded, ripe tomatoes

Pickled beetroot

3 medium-sized beetroot
enough peanut oil to rub them generously with
4 cracked star anise
500 g grated palm sugar
200 ml lime juice
600 ml coconut vinegar
100 ml peanut oil
fish sauce, to taste

1. Start marinating the kangaroo a day ahead. Put it in a bowl with the peanut oil, ground black pepper, star anise, orange rind and a few drops of coconut vinegar. Cover the bowl and leave in the fridge.

2. Soak the black mustard seeds in the malt vinegar overnight. To make the tomato pickle, first dry roast the black mustard seeds until they begin to pop.

3. Toast the cumin seeds then grind in a mortar and pestle. Make a paste by pureeing the mustard seeds with the garlic cloves, ginger and peanut oil. Sauté this in a braising pan until it begins to colour. Add the cumin and the turmeric, and cook for 5 minutes.

4. Add the grated palm sugar and cook until it dissolves. Add the tomatoes and cook a further half hour. Pour into sterilised jars. Set aside till they cool, then refrigerate.

5. To make the pickled beetroot, rub the beetroot with the peanut oil and place them in a roasting tray with the star anise. Cover the tray with foil and bake the beetroot until they are cooked – that is, softened. The pan should have a residue of beetroot juice and oil. Strain the juices and reserve.

6. Peel the beetroot (the skin will rub off if they’re cooked). Make a pickle by first mixing the grated palm sugar, lime juice, coconut vinegar and peanut oil, plus the reserved pan juices. Add fish sauce to taste, as you would salt. Bring the pickling mixture to the boil, then allow it to cool. While they are hot, add the beetroot to the pickling mixture.

7. Remove the kangaroo from the marinade. Sear over a very hot flame on a hotplate, or in a skillet, on all sides for about 2 minutes. Optionally, flame it with rice wine. Rest it for ten minutes, catching the juices.

8. To assemble the dish, slice the beetroot into slices 1.5 cm thick, and put in a pan (the skillet you cooked the kangaroo in, if you used one). Add a tablespoon of the beetroot pickling mixture and three heaped tablespoons of tomato pickle. Heat this through.

9. Add the juices from the kangaroo and a small amount of game or veal stock. Taste, and adjust seasoning if necessary.

10. Right at the end, add the fresh horseradish pureed in coconut vinegar (do not heat it after adding this). Place the beetroot and sauce on a plate and the (now sliced) kangaroo on top, and drizzle any further juices from slicing the kangaroo over it.

By John Newton in "The Oldest Foods on Earth - A History of Australian Native Foods With Recipes", NewSouth Publishing, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, Australia, 2016. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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