2024
I had occasion lately to eat a stick of cabanossi, a thin, dry, red, spiced and smoked crumpled sausage. It produced a food memory of lounge rooms and wine bars in the 1970s where sliced cabanossi and a cube of cheese on a Jatz biscuit was bound to appear some stage. This broadened into recalling delicatessens at which I had bought cabanossi and other smallgoods like ‘Cyril’s Fine Foods’ established by Cyril Vincenc in the Haymarket, Sydney, near the central produce market in 1956. It was something of a Mecca for those wanting food items from middle and northern European countries for the next 60 years.
It wasn’t a big step from there to wondering what the story was of delicatessens in Australia.
