Paul van Reyk March 2024 One of the unexplored areas of Australian culinary history is the place of colonial nurserymen (and the documentary evidence is that they were all men) in …
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SAOs: The ways of an iconic Australian biscuit
31 March 2024
2024 My first encounter with a SAO biscuit was soon after arriving in Australia in the early 1960’s. I had never seen or eaten a biscuit like it. A bubbled surface, …
A National Dish?
25 March 2024
March 2024 What would you say was the Australian National Dish? Posing the question and asking for nominations is sort of going where angels fear to tread. But that’s what I …
Paul van Reyk The Aristologist: vol 14: p 9- 35. Napier, New Zealand. 2023 Recently my culinary curiosity has been circling around the story of the eggplant in Australia. The fat, glossy …
March 2024 In 2008 I gave a paper to the 16th Symposium of Australian Gastronomy in the Hunter Valley. The theme of the paper was Australian songs about food and rivers. …
Of eggs and buns: Easter eating
7 March 2024
March 2024 As we approach Easter I thought it would be of interest to gather from friends what they/their family have traditionally eaten over the Easter period - Holy Thursday through …
Diggings 4 March 2024
4 March 2024
Solving the supermarket: why Coles just hired US defence contractor Palantir What Palantir sells is fundamentally a way of seeing. Its dashboards promise a God’s eye view that can stretch across an entire organisation …
The culinary road to the first banana bread
2 March 2024
January 2024 I made my first banana bread the other day, that traditional way to use up overripe bananas. I used a recipe from the 1950s and it turned out pretty …
February 2024 For the last twenty years I have been a food historian/ food writer focusing on Australian cuisine. In the course of doing research for my book True to the …
Fair suck of the sav. Glimpses of the saveloy in Australia
5 February 2024
January 2024 Before the frankfurter roll (1931), before the hotdog roll (1922), there was the saveloy roll (1911) a hot red sausage snuggling between the sides of a cloven bread roll …
Diggings
5 February 2024
Tucker-shopping I read an article about tuckshops in Britain in an online food magazine recently and it set me remembering my tuckshop days at St. Joseph’s Primary School at Singleton in …
Chutney, yes, but also … A survey of one hundred years of mangoes at the Anglo Australian culinary table
28 January 2024
January 2024 After primary school in Sri Lanka I would go with my bothers and classmates to the achcharu woman sitting just outside the school grounds. We would pool what was …
January 2024 I read an article about tuckshops in Britain in an online food magazine recently and it set me remembering my tuckshop days at St. Joseph’s Primary School at Singleton …
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