 Australian Cuisine is difficult to pin down. Traditional Aboriginal or Indigenous cuisine is a highly sophisticated subsistence/ hunter & gatherer diet that is still being recorded and explored. Much of Australia's indigenous foods are still not well known although that is steadily changing. Traditional Australian cuisine, at least up until World War II was based mostly on the Anglo-Celtic traditions of the first European settlers filtered through the basic rations imposed since convict days: flour, meat, tea and sugar. Meat was abundant and cheap; 3 meals a day of meat was common and as a consequence rarely innovative - a working developing nation demanded plain wholesome food. However, since the 1950s influenced by the myriad waves of immigration and refugees, the growing wealth and sophistication of diners and cooks, Australian cuisine has undergone unbelievable change and is developing one of the world's newest cuisines; one that borrows from Mediterranean, European, Middle Eastern, South East Asian and Asian ingredients, techniques and dishes and merges them with traditional British and Indigenous elements. Today Australian cuisine is one of the world's most innovative and exhilarating. Australian cookbooks traverse the wide range of influences in Australian cuisine. In keeping with the diversity of food, Australian cookbook publishing is also recognised as some of the best in the world, particularly over the past 25 years. |
