Everything You Want To Know About Chillies & Australian Cuisine

Something we lack as Australians is a strong cultural link with our food.

Why ? Because;

Primarily

• Australia is only 200 years old and culture/cuisine is something that builds up over centuries.
• No predominantly peasant culture for a significant period. Poverty, over time, is a great driving force for people to develop ways to make the most of their food. Regional Italian foods are a great example of this.
• No predominant aristocracy. While this sounds like a counter-intuitive statement to the previous point, excess money, arrogance and the importance of status are also key drivers for creativity with food. French haute cuisine is an example of this and it is a major influence in modern French dishes.

Secondarily;

• Early influx of inhabitants dominated by British cuisine which, despite the opportunities, never really had a creative flair to it.
• No early adoption of native foods. Early adoption of native foods would most certainly have led to the development of a signature cuisine. Even today, we are the only people we know that cook kangaroo at home despite the fact that quality meat is even available in the major supermarket chains !

As a result, we do not have a distinctly Australian cuisine. Pies, and prawns on the BBQ is not a cuisine, it’s a cliché.

So What ?

What has this got to do with chillies ?

When we look at regional examples of cuisines we are not just tasting the food. We are looking at the culmination of one facet of a culture that has taken hundreds to thousands of years to develop.

We contend that to really appreciate the product that we are tasting, we need also to at least acknowledge the history behind it. Virtually every great cuisine around the world has developed from a peasant/agri-dependent population having to do the best they can with the little they could produce or obtain. Food production and cooking was an integral part of their everyday life in a way that we cannot really comprehend in our current lifestyle.

Imagine the link you would have with your food if instead of jumping in the car to go and get a hamburger, you had to kill the cow, dress the carcass, cut the meat, mince and season the meat, cook the meat, sow the wheat, harvest the wheat, mill it to flour, bake the bread, grow and harvest the sauce ingredients, produce the sauce, and then you could have a hamburger. Wouldn’t that change your perspective ? Wouldn't you care more about the primary produce now that you can see directly how it comes to you ? You would have a real link with your food !

So, let’s go forth with a slightly deeper perception and when you cook a recipe keep in mind that the dish may have a history that began before Australia was discovered.

Australian Cuisine

We said above that we do not believe Australia has a unique, signature cuisine.

Do we believe that one is developing ? Certainly !

We believe that the style of cooking that is most likely to be the precursor of an Australian signature is the fusion style. Our location and our history put us in a unique position to adopt the influences of our history (European) and location (south-east Asia) and meld them into something new. Both these influencing regions adopted chillies hundreds of years ago and as a result chillies will play an important part in the ongoing development.

Added to that we have an abundance of unique native ingredients that are unlikely to be adopted elsewhere on large scale.

Development of this fusion style has been the result of an enourmous number of participants dominated by chefs and restauranteurs. Maggi Beer, Stephanie Alexander, Tetsuya Wakuda, and Neil Perry, are just a few players in a cast of thousands.

Don't get us wrong, fusion style is not an Australian signature style, but the seed from which we can develop one.

We could go on, but I believe we have made my point.