Nasi Goreng, Telor Besengflek, and  Chilli Crab.  Australian / Asian Culinary Engagements to 1976

    3 July 2025

    July 2025

    I recently had occasion to re-visit Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook published in 1976. ‘My aim  in writing this book’, Solomons said in her Foreword, ‘ has been to make it possible for keen cooks everywhere to explore the cooking of Asia’. I was struck again with how comprehensive the book is in covering the cuisines of Australia’s northern neighbour nations, those that form South East Asia –  Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam.  What, I wondered were the opportunities for ‘keen cooks’ in Australia to explore their cuisines pre-Solomons.

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    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.