Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Lecture 23: African and Aboriginal Cuisines

 Before that point of contact, aboriginal cuisine relied exclusively on

indigenous plants and animals. There are a wide variety of tubers,

vegetables like bush tomatoes and fi nger limes, wattle seeds, fruits

like the quandong, bunya nuts, and macadamia nuts. Witchetty

grubs and honey ants, fi sh and eels in streams, kangaroos and

wallabies, emus, bandicoots, bush-tailed possum, goanna (lizards),

and snakes could all be hunted with spears or a boomerang.

 Cooking methods are very simple. Cooking involves making a fi re

and throwing in the meat or digging a hole, putting leaves over hot

coals, and wrapping foods in leaves or bark so they don’t burn.

Alternatively, a wooden trough can be fi lled with water, and hot

rocks can be thrown in to cook food. Resourcefulness is essential

because they didn’t have pottery or meat implements.

 Practically none of Australian indigenous food is eaten anywhere,

even in Australia. Perhaps even more amazing is that an entire

cuisine could be transplanted in its entirety from England. That’s

not to say that Australian cooking hasn’t also been infl uenced by

Asian cooking or the immigration of Greeks, Syrians, Germans,

and other groups. Of course, there are many foods that have been

invented in the past two centuries.

Carney, In the Shadow of Slavery.

Harris, High on the Hog.

Opie, Hogs and Hominy.

Matooke and Luwombo

These two dishes are common in Uganda and go together so beautifully

that it is well worth trying. Matooke is simply a small starchy banana

that is steamed and mashed. You can substitute plantains, but a closer

approximation can be found in African or even Southeast Asian groceries.

Suggested Reading

Culinary Activity