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Food For Thought

Do we have a genuine, Australian Cuisine, and what is a Cuisine? Alan Saunders ponders the mystery

As my taxi nosed its way through The Rocks, the driver said he had a problem. Japanese tourists often asked him to take them to a restaurant where they could have genuine Australian Cuisine. What was he to do?

Mostly he took them to a Black Stump Restaurant, reasoning that steak well-done was a pretty Australian sort of thing to eat. Fair enough too. I have to say though, never having been to one of these places, I don’t know that their steaks are capable of exciting the extraordinarily high expectations of Japanese punters accustomed to Kobe steak (which is meat from cattle brought up on a diet of beans and beer, massaged tenderly and generally killed with kindness in ways that you probably don’t want to think about).

I did suggest, though, that he might try somewhere devoted to Indigenous Australian ingredients, Riberries or Edna’s Table. He sounded grateful.

You don’t really believe any of those do you? You know as well as I do that the mythical taxi driver, repository of popular opinion, is a drunken journalist substitute for serious research (just invent a taxi driver and put into his archetypal mouth any rumour that you want to run). Trust me, it really did happen, even though it is particularly implausible now that we know officially that the Japanese don’t think that we have Cuisine of our own.

Personally, I don’t blame them. I don't say that if I’d been a Japanese immigration official, I’d have refused a visa to those two Australian chefs who weren’t let into Nagoya until a couple of weeks ago, but I do think that the boys with the rubber stamps have a point - we don’t have a Cuisine in the way the Japanese have a Cuisine.

But what is a Cuisine? It isn’t easy to say. The Oxford English Dictionary claims that it’s a "manner or style of cooking", which is not at all helpful.

What’s a manner? Is it a method of cooking? If it is, then there are lots of Cuisines but not very many national Cuisines, because nearly everybody boils, fries, roasts and so on.

What’s a style then? The idea of a style of cooking (with its suggestion of fads and fashions) does at least come close to one of the things we mean when we talk about "Cuisine". In the 70s, just about every French chef worth his toque seems to have had a "Cuisine" of his own, like nouvelle Cuisine (not much food but an awful lot of plate) and Cuisine minceur (even less food and even more plate).

However, every one of these Cuisines was recognisably part of French Cuisine, so the idea of Cuisine must be wider than that.

Perhaps all these French "Cuisines" - nouvelle, minceur, naturelle, du soleil - amount to the one language being spoken in a variety of accents and voices. So what makes the French speak French, gastronomically speaking and the Japanese speak Japanese.

Well to begin with, there’s the choice of ingredients. This is naturally enough, governed in part by availability. The idea of availability doesn’t take us very far. Obviously if you haven’t got something, you can’t eat it, but people will go to extraordinary lengths to get something they haven’t got and, on the other hand, they’ll refuse to eat something they have got.

Then again, having decided that they're not allowed to eat something, they'll go to great lengths to redefine it so that they are allowed to eat it (the Japanese used to do this: they decided that the deer was a sort of whale and therefore a fish and therefore acceptable to vegetarian Buddhists).

Having chosen your ingredients, you have to choose your manner of cooking. This too, can be dictated by local circumstances. China, for example, has never been rich in fuel, so the Chinese had to find means of heating their food quickly and efficiently. Stir-frying was the answer.

But we still haven't worked out why, say, a Chinese fried chook is part of an ancient Cuisine recognised and respected even by Japanese immigration officials but an Australian fried chook isn’t. The answer must be flavour.

If we look at almost any ethnic Cuisine, be it Indian, Vietnamese, Hungarian or Mexican, we will find within each culinary traditions "the pervasive use of uncertain combinations of seasoning ingredients" says the American food writer Elisabeth Rozin. "Every culture tends to combine a small number of flavouring ingredients so frequently and so consistently that they become definitive of that particular Cuisine".

So its soy sauce, rice wine and ginger in China; fish sauce, lemon and chilli in Vietnam and paprika, lard and onions in Hungary. It's difficult to think of any flavours that define Australia in quite the same way. In a splendid defence of the barbie, Graham Pont, philosopher and gastronome, has movingly evoked "delicious memories of burning gum, overdone sausages and chops and powerful red wine", but this isn’t the sort of combination of flavours that Rozin is talking about. However well we cook our chooks, an Australian chook will probably never seem typically Australian in the way that a Chinese chook will seem typically Chinese.

We could, of course, try spicing our chooks with Indigenous Australian flavours like lillipilly and lemon myrtle, but while this is well worth doing for its own sake. It’s not going to give us a Cuisine of our own. Cuisines evolve over centuries of comparative isolation (or total isolation in the case of Japan).

You can't knit your own any more than you can buy yourself a set of new ancestors.

This is bad news it you’re trying to get a visa at Nagoya or wondering what to do with a taxi-load of Japanese tourists, but I don’t think the rest of us need to panic. We can just lie back and enjoy the extraordinary competence of our cooks and the flexibility and spirit of adventure that are our substitutes for a Cuisine of our own.

Alan Saunders presents The Food Program on ABC Radio National

 

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