The history of Middle Eastern food in this country is a history of people,
movement and spices smuggled in suitcases, writes ALECIA SIMMONDS.
The story of how Australian palates came to delight in
braised lamb or the sweet scent of orange blossom is quite
brief. “If you look at the Australian food scene, the history
of Middle Eastern cuisine is only 50 or 60 years old,” explains
Kasif, “yet words like falafel, tahini or shish are all part of
the vocabulary now.”
Kasif’s choice of dishes is telling: although the Middle East
encompasses many nations, its flavours mostly came to Australia
with Turkish and Lebanese migrants. And before Anglo
Australians could enjoy their food, the government needed to
shift from a policy of assimilation to multiculturalism. Australia
needed to be liberated from the tyranny of shepherd’s pie.
But the history of Middle Eastern cooking in Australia
is much longer. It’s a secret history that can only be gleaned
through peering into the homes of families like the Abbouds,
looking into their kitchens or strolling through certain suburbs,
such as Sydney’s Redfern, which during the late 19th-century
was known as “Little Syria”, to uncover the lives of those whose
survival depended on concealing their aromatic herbs from
delicate Anglo-Saxon nostrils.W
hen Ibrahim Kasif’s grandparents arrived
in Sydney from Cyprus in the 1950s, they
had to buy their olive oil from pharmacies.
Anglo-Saxons didn’t then see much use
for it beyond treating ear ailments. “There
was simply nowhere else that sold it.” Joseph Abboud’s parents
shared similar stories. Once, they told him, family friends had
the police arrive unexpectedly when they tried to bake pita in a
wood-fired oven in the backyard. Sirens wailed as za’atar-dusted
bread spiced the air.
Passed down between generations of Middle Eastern migrants,
these stories of culinary deprivation lend a heroic quality to the
recipes that survived. They speak of a time when taste could be
treasonous and, for chefs like Kasif and Abboud who run three of
the most innovative Middle Eastern restaurants in Australia today
(Kasif with Stanbuli and Abboud with Rumi and Bar Saracen),
they remind them of their debts. “We have the luxury of saying,
‘oh, you’re stuck in your ways’ to our parents,” muses Abboud.
“That’s because they did the hard yards. They’re not stuck in the
mould, in fact they broke the mould.”68 GOURMET TRAVELLER