Meat and a skewer. One hundred years of the kebab at the multi culinary Australian Table

    29 March 2025

    March 2025

    I have wanted for some time to write about elements of South Asian cuisines other than curry. For instance, the tandoor, the thali, sweet confections like gulab jamun, and kebabs.

    Kebabs have come to the fore by way of me coming across a recipe for them in 1892:

    Poultry Livers — Poultry livers can be substituted on all occasions for calves’ liver, and are exceedingly delicate … If strung on skewers alternately with pieces of bacon and mushrooms, and broiled, they also make a most enticing form of kabobs.

    What, I wondered, has been the story of kebabs in Australia since then?  

    Read more.

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    Small Mulch

    Paul van Reyk
    My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.