It is not, as its subtitle claims, ‘A History of Eating in Australia’ but chiefly a history of eating in New South Wales, predominantly Sydney and Berowra Waters, and Victoria, predominantly Melbourne. As it has a good index (and those are rare today) there is no point in more detail here except to suggest a glance at entries under ‘Restaurants’.

One of Symons’s central theses is that Australia never had, nor is likely to have, a ‘national’ cuisine because it never had a peasantry – i.e. people growing and eating, from local farms, as for instance in Tuscany, the whole of a balanced diet. Mutton, damper, tea, and sugar were, and are, not a balanced diet. Agreed. I don’t know, or much care, where that leaves North America which has more unique raw materials, game, fish, edible plants etc. than we can boast. Apart from splendid local foods, like soft-shell crabs, the most national thing I remember about American food is its imaginative adaptation and adoption of foods from every corner of the world, and its own dreadful contribution of machine-oil ‘mayonnaise’ smothering everything from beautiful bread to excellent pastrami.

With some justice Symons deplores certain aspects of industrialised food but what he decides to deplore is capricious, debatable, and not confined to Australia or America. Although some of the most far reaching advances in food technology of modern times are European (notably English, French, and Swiss) the poor old United States is lumbered with the role of arch-villain.

Refined and processed foods are Symons’s bugbears. Certainly those populations that switched, when technology made it possible, to highly refined white flour, forwent the benefits of wheat-germ, many vitamins, and fibre, but they escaped the dreadful epidemics of ergotism that, under various local names, once swept peasant populations in many parts of Europe causing madness, death, a good deal of European folklore and witchcraft belief.

Refrigeration excepted, the book scarcely, or not at all, notices what are, I believe, some great Australian, and world, food revolutions of the past 150 or so years – here I mention five.

My first is universal or near-universal literacy. The cuisines of non-readers are limited not only by the available materials of their regions, but by memory. Memory and personal ingenuity are fine for many kinds of food, but not for dishes that depend upon more exact chemistry: elaborate cakes, confections, brews, etc.

Secondly, although Symons discusses the mid-nineteenth-century introduction of, first the wood-fired range or stove, and then the gas stove, he insufficiently discussed the revolution wrought by the domestic oven. Well into this century working-class city and country people in England took their baking dishes with joint and vegetables to the baker for baking, usually on a Sunday, and that was their only roast meal for the week.* They relied, as once did urban Australia, upon the baker for bread, cakes, and pastries. Many Chinese cuisines with their steamed yeast buns and cakes, reflect an absence, even today, of domestic ovens. I suspect that the great virtue that once adhered to ‘home-made cakes’ was originally snobbish for city and suburban houses. (In this country mansions in the city and even modest country homes had bread ovens in lean-to kitchens.) If you owned an oven (and a servant or two), you could produce your own sponges, gem scones, or meringue shell. I shall come to Pavlova! Home-made cakes were prosperous, upwardly mobile middle-class goodies. (As to the nineteenth-century Australia I suggest you re-read Jonah for urban-working-class treats and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony for more ‘genteel’ party food.)

The third overlooked revolution was cheap granulated sugar. Before the mid-nineteenth century when centrifugal machines were introduced to sugar refineries, whether you lived in Australia, Europe, or America, you had to chip your sugar either from blocks set in a barrel or from moulds set round a wooden stick, and then pound it to powder by hand, in a mortar. Australia had cheap granulated sugar fairly early, thanks to the dreaded (by Michael Symons) CSR company. And we are getting warmer, as to Pavlova.

My fourth revolution is more recent, though my mother, and many of her friends and my indubitably ‘working class’ elderly cleaning lady when I was first married, had electrically operated food processors of the type with beaters and bowl, some four decades ago. After Mum acquired hers we never bought ‘mayonnaise’ again but made the real McCoy, nor, again did we substitute that vanished favourite, ‘boiled salad dressing’. More recent processors with blades and shredders make all kinds of kitchen work a breeze. I can whip up a pint of mayonnaise using lemons, basil, and parsley from the garden (and only one whole egg no matter what the recipe books say) in five minutes. Without this aid I’d never be bothered with hair sieves and pestles and mortars – as it is we frequently enjoy gazpacho, vichyssoise, and various sorts of cooked and raw minced meats.

Symons would have us believe that most of us buy every ingredient we use, and often of poor quality. That is a debatable assertion both for past and present in every Australian area known to me. Symons does not discuss the present proliferation of ‘hobby farms’ nor does he give home gardeners of all types and ‘classes’ credit for the fruit and vegetables they grow now, and always have. Yates Garden Guide is a long-standing Australian best seller – so are vegetable seeds, herbs, citrus trees, and other fruits.

Chooks are less often kept in suburbia than was the case even twenty years ago chiefly because of sensible Local Government regulations and the horrendous summer fly population has been reduced; but bee-hives are increasingly common.

Digression of Pavlova. As basil to salsa verde so the South American passionfruit to Pavlova. This fruit, as Symons mentions, we adopted as peculiarly our own. But we did not invent Pavlova. Certainly, as he discusses at some length someone either in Australia or New Zealand hit on this name for a long existing favourite of Europe and America (where meringue, at the turn of the century, was sometimes called ‘kiss’.) I suspect the wide popularity of ‘pavlova’ in Australia happened because publicity about it coincided with the introduction of electric beaters and easily regulated domestic ovens. It must also have reflected the availability in Australia of cheap white granulated sugar, plentiful eggs, and facilities for cooling cream. In other words its explosion of popularity in the 1930s and 40s coincided with various inventions and, despite the Depression, the widespread introduction of refrigeration to shops and houses. Your homemade ‘Pav.’ was not only a delicacy, but a sign of your prosperity and modernity.

Digression of Supermarkets. In the 1930s I walked daily past an elaborate fruit shop much patronised by wealthier people. In the early morning the proprietor arranged shining pyramids of fruit – he spat on every piece and polished it on his apron. Inside were baskets of eggs labelled ‘New Laid Eggs’, the most expensive, ‘Fresh Eggs’, cheaper, and, on the floor, a sinister container labelled ‘Eggs’. Food poisoning was more prevalent then than it is now. So were flies, cockroaches, rats, and mice. The milk saucepan in which unpasteurised milk was scalded was a daily horror to wash up. Three hearty cheers for the bright, clean, health-regulated Supermarket say I. I’d prefer to swallow a few mouthfuls of preservative than ptomaine or gastroenteritis bugs.

Without wishing to sound like a female chauvinist knocker I do think this book devotes too much space to present-day trendy restaurants, their patrons, their cooks, and not enough to the prevailing domestic situation. (In any case we’d all dispute his selections.) My fifth revolution concerns plentiful domestic hot water, efficient detergents, and easy care cooking and storage utensils. There is no index entry for hot water, detergent, soap; dishwasher; porcelain or stainless steel sinks; plastic storage jars, bags, bottles, and wrappings; aluminium foil (or aluminium anything), and so it goes ...

As can be seen this book has made me good and interested as well as good and mad. It is an invaluable first attempt at an aspect of social history not covered by glossy ‘how to’ books. I warmly recommend it and hope it will inspire someone, preferably a home cook and provider, to take up where it leaves off, fill in some of its gaps, do better if he or she can. Meanwhile, warmly recommended.

*Carol Adams, Ordinary Lives a Hundred Years Ago, Virago pps. 142–167.