We've gone global and we didn't notice

"I noticed, leaning against the tiled outside wall, a tall blackboard covered with white-painted words. At the top it read AUSSIE FOOD. Below it was a menu. The first item on the menu - lasagne." John Newton - Wog food

The origins of this post are just as 'ordinary' as the pub menu - it's Coles Magazine - again!

This particular edition had a feature called 'Just add'. For virtually every recipe there was a small box with suggestions for something else you could add to vary the dish in question, or to use the featured ingredient. As I was idly flicking through I noticed that one of them said to add "some crisp greens to a yellow or red Thai chicken curry - stir in trimmed and halved snow peas and bok choy just before serving.". Thai chicken curry, snow peas, bok choy! Even my spell checker on this website doesn't recognise bok choy as a word. But of course it's a commonplace item in our supermarkets these days. As are Thai chicken curry and snow peas. Yes I know that the Coles magazine is probably expecting the Thai chicken curry to have been made from a jar, but nevertheless it's quite an assumption is it not that 'ordinary' people would be making Thai chicken curry at home - even if it was using some kind of premade spice mixture - or even a frozen Thai chicken curry? After all the Thais themselves probably buy premade curry pastes as well. So I flicked through all the other 'Just add' boxes and found all the following dishes referred to in one way or another: salsa, tzatziki, rice paper rolls, fried rice (several times), pesto, frittata, polenta, pizza, nachos.

This magazine has made an assumption that its readers would know what they meant by all of those things. And remember this is a free magazine found in every Coles supermarket and so therefore aimed at the ordinary man or woman in the street - not the people who shop in the David Jones Food Hall.

And let's not forget other typical 'Aussie' dishes and snack foods - chicken parma, chiko rolls, souvlaki, hamburgers and the ubiquitous pizza. Debased maybe but very Aussie and simultaneously very foreign.

Some of those above mentioned items from the Coles Magazine have become so common - pizza, nachos, fried rice - that like the lasagne in the pub menu they have almost become standard Aussie food. But I knew none of them as a child. No not even pizza. Curry maybe but it would tend to be sweetish and include sultanas. And later, chop suey and sweet and sour pork.

Now England post war was still enduring food rationing into the 50s, and any excitement they may once have had about food had been killed off by wartime austerity. Elizabeth David attempted to revive them out of their torpor by writing A Book of Mediterranean Food in 1950. In the Introduction to the 1955 editions she says that her purpose was to make them dream again:

"To produce the simplest meal consisting of even two or three genuine dishes required the utmost ingenuity and devotion. But even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them, to escape from the deadly boredom of queuing and the frustration of buying the weekly rations, to read about real food cooked with wine and olive oil, eggs and butter and cream, and dishes richly flavoured with onions, garlic, herbs , and brightly coloured southern vegetables."

In 1950 you could not get olive oil, eggs, butter and cream. In 1955 when she wrote her introduction to a revised edition, she was also able to say:

"So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient , however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country, even if it is only in one or two shops." Elizabeth David - A Book of Mediterranean Food 1955.

Skip forward seventy years and Jamie Oliver can say:

"Walk down any British High Street and it's clear to see that our food embraces much more than a handful of old recipes. Our history has been one of invasion, exploration, colonisation and immigration, and the evidence of that is everywhere: on our plates, in our supermarkets and in our cupboards." Jamie Oliver - Jamie's Great Britain

For Great Britain, substitute Australia. For the same has happened here, albeit with different immigrant influences perhaps. The Italians have taken the world by storm. Wherever you go these days you can probably find lasagne. Well you might have to look a bit harder in some parts of the world, but I'm sure Italian food has had a global reach. Certainly anywhere that the Italian diaspora has gone. And in Australia, simultaneously we had the Greeks, and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean peoples, plus the Jewish post-war diaspora. All of these immigrants brought with them their food.

In a recent book that I read, I can't remember which one now, one of the characters - a greengrocer in England - was not at all disturbed by new waves of immigrants. He would ask 'what do they eat' and stock his shop accordingly. It was good business. And maybe this is all that has happened. People move to a new country. They leave their culture and their food behind, and rather than just accepting what is on offer, they busily go about recreating their own food. Some of it can be done straightaway. The ingredients are available and the same as their hosts' in their new country. It's just the way that those ingredients are put together that changes. Some of them start restaurants to feed their people, some of them start businesses importing or making the foods that are missing and before long the message has spread to the locals and they are stocking those items too. Witness the vast variety of international foods on offer in your local supermarket. And sadly, as I mentioned in yesterday's article on Warrigal greens, it is actually the indigenous foods that are hard to find and available in only one or two shops.

"One of the most exciting and unique things about being British is our ability to be open-minded and willing to embrace anything that looks and tastes good from any new neighbour." Jamie Oliver - Jamie's Great Britain

Again - for Britain read Australia - which was colonised by the British. Some cultures are not so welcoming. You will not find as many different world foods available in Italy or France for example. There are some - and they are associated with the peoples of their former colonies - couscous is almost a national French dish these days, but on the whole there is not the variety that you get here. In Melbourne you can find just about every cuisine there is. I wonder if there are any whose food is just not tasty at all.

And the final step in the process is fusion. The process by which clever chefs combine techniques and ingredients from several different cultures to create something new. There used to be a wonderful restaurant called Chinois - I think in South Yarra or Toorak which cooked delicious fusion food - the fusion being between France and Asia. I think the owners were the Donovans who now? run Donovans in St. Kilda. And Greg Malouf too has been good at combining the food of the Middle-East with a European touch.

Like everything - evolution. Well almost everything.