1901: A Cake Odyssey
The Age
Tuesday February 13, 2001
Forget laksas, lattes, brasseries and brunch. Think meat. Mutton in particular - boiled or roasted and eaten at least twice a day, served with a hunk of damper and a big mug of billy tea. Australians' annual meat consumption in the
19th century was among the highest in the world - a staggering 125 kilograms per person. Gastronomic variety came in the form of the odd lamington, if luck was on your side.
One hundred years ago, eating was a grim affair for white Australians, their dining tables heavy with British tradition and light on local ingredients. It would be decades before migrants from Europe and Asia would stir some life into the local cuisine.
Melbourne playwright Louis Esson wrote scathingly in 1918: "This country was pioneered on corned beef and damper, that is why the Australian in general takes plain and heavy food, looking askance on anything exotic, and why the general run of our restaurants lack enterprise and variety."
In fact, some of our forebears were far more innovative than we give them credit for. Michael Symons' excellent book One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia, now sadly out of print, describes the first Australian cookbook, published in 1864 by Tasmanian society gentleman, Edward Abbot.
Writing with gusto and enthusiasm for local produce, Abbot suggested a colonial banquet that wouldn't look completely out of place today: asparagus, followed by turtle soup, Tasmanian trumpeter fish with butter sauce, lamb, roast kangaroo, Australian blue cheese and fruit.
For a family meal he recommended rabbit curry, rice and (locally brewed Tasmanian) beer followed by green apricot pudding.
He promoted the delights of roast wombat, porcupine and emu. But Abbot was an exception; most of the population lacked such adventurousness.
There were those for whom necessity was the mother of culinary invention.
Mina Rawson's Queensland Cookery Book of 1878 included recipes for wallaby soup, baked bandicoot, pigweed salad and boiled thistles. Living on an isolated bush property, she depended on the "wonderful bush lore" of local Aborigines to vary the farm diet.
In the year of federation, Symons believes Melbourne experienced a gastronomic revival, thanks to innovative new restaurants and a wide range of fresh and affordable ingredients for the domestic table.
In 1901 The Argus reported Melbourne's restaurant and cafe boom was prompted by the imminent royal visit. "A big tearoom in Collins Street is so enlarging its premises that it promises to seat 400 visitors. And what is now a huge stone barn will be radiant with electric light, divans, flowers, white linen and silver."
Another restaurateur told the paper he was ordering an extra 100 dozen cups and saucers "having 600 pairs of fowl on ice; 5000 dozen eggs in lime and 300 pounds of fruit and seed cake".
The menu of the official 1901 federation "Conversazione" (an evening of conversation and music) given by the state government at the exhibition building featured Australian wines and an elaborate supper including oyster and game patties, "fancy" almond cakes, a selection of jellies and "creams", including "Charlotte Russe Cream a la Suisse", and raspberry water ice.
If we could wander the streets of central Melbourne at the turn of the century looking for somewhere to eat we would find plenty of options.
Sixpenny restaurants clustered along Bourke Street offering cheap fare, although as John Stanley James wrote in The Argus in the 1870s "there are generally, and especially in summer, more flies in the dishes than refined prejudices might fancy. The sausages in all are bags of mystery ..."
The well-heeled could be found at Maison Doree, the Crystal Cafe or La Mascotte, where the fashion was for French-style cuisine. Or at the bohemian Fasoli's, a Lonsdale Street trattoria serving home-made salami, spaghetti and osso buco.
Spring Street's Windsor Hotel, built in 1883 as The Grand, has had its dining room meticulously restored to its former 1901 glory. There are stained-glass domed skylights, richly patterned carpets and buttoned leather dining chairs. Writes Chrystopher Spicer in Duchess: The Story of the Windsor Hotel: "a string orchestra played to help with digestion and to fill in the conversation gaps ... there was also a second smaller dining room for nurses with children; the hotel's policy was to keep young children out of the public rooms".
The first vineyard was planted in Victoria in the 1840s and by the 1880s there were estates in the Yarra Valley, Sunbury, Geelong and Rutherglen.
Victorian wines did well at international wine shows, says David Dunstan in Better than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria. But by the early 20th century whole districts were out of production, due in part to the vine louse, grape phylloxera, and the economic collapse of the 1890s.
At home, it seems, cooking was plain and hearty and ingredients were affordable. Young journalist Richard Twopenny, writing in Town Life in Australia in 1883, remarked that "to the working and the middle as well as most of the wealthy classes, cooking is an unknown art".
Culinary creativity appears to have been lavished on cakes rather than savory dishes. Turn-of-the-century recipe books devoted considerably more space to baking - which brings us back to the lamington.
Eating through the century
1901
* The average diet for a working man was chops or steak for breakfast, lunch at a basic but cheap "sixpenny restaurant" with roast beef, boiled mutton, sausages, boiled vegetables and steamed pudding on the menu. Dinner was eaten at home at six o'clock and featured hot or cold meat. He would drink two or three large cups of tea at every meal.
* In Melbourne there were probably less than 50 eating places in the city: fourpenny and sixpenny restaurants offering the Edwardian equivalent of fast food; shilling restaurants serving alcohol had a separate room for business ladies. Some pubs offered counter lunches and there were at least 10 upmarket establishments with French-style cuisine.
* Victorians consumed a modest gallon or so of wine annually per head. Coffee palaces or "dry" hotels sprang up in response to the temperance movement, serving tea and scones.
2001
* The millennial Australian diet can range from pho to pasta but is likely to feature cereal or toast and OJ for breakfast, a canteen-made salad roll or fast-food takeaway for lunch followed by a cappuccino and Tim Tams mid-afternoon. Dinner might be stir-fried chicken and a glass of white wine.
* We love to eat out and the central city reflects this with more than 600 restaurants - from a quick bowl of noodles in Chinatown to white linen and long wine lists at Southbank - as well as many more cafes, wine-bars and fast-food outlets.
* Australians quaff an estimated 19.9 litres of wine each per year and there
are around 146,177 hectares of vineyards across the country. Unlike our
forebears, we don't prefer wine to be doctored with brandy to give it a kick.
And we'd rather sip a long black, made by the barista of our choice, than tea.
How times change ...
1901 2001
Pound mutton 1?d-4d $4-$5 (?kg lamb)
Pound tomatoes 2d $1-$3 (?kg)
? pound strawberries 2d $2.50 (punnet)
Alcoholic drink in a Victorian bar sixpence $4-$6 (gin & tonic)
(all prices approximate)
© 2001 The Age