The kitchen is a country in which there are always discoveries to be made.—Grimod de La Reynière
IF THE 1980S WAS the era of nouvelle cuisine, the 1990s is set to be the decade of regionalism. Raymond Sokolov, who in the 1970s recorded the ‘fading feasts’ of America, wryly observed a decade later that: ‘People I had interviewed in the ultimate boondocks of the country in order to record the death of the regionalism they were still preserving turned up in food-page articles as purveyors of luxury specialities to Manhattan and Los Angeles restaurants.’
One might cynically observe that near-saturation of the cookbook market demands increasing specialisation. Or, more charitably, take a broader view and point to a worldwide movement in the second half of the twentieth century for some degree of regional autonomy, from the Basques to the Bretons (linguistically), culminating in the disintegration of uneasy unions in eastern Europe. But in the world of food, the vogue for regionalism seems to me to be also a reaction to the internationalism of nouvelle cuisine, at the same time as being its direct extension.
Regionalism goes hand-in-hand with tourism which, at the end of the twentieth century, has come to mean big money. Countries, states, regions, all want to attract tourists and their credit cards, and in a competitive arena each must be able to show that it has something special that other countries, states, regions do not have—beaches or mountains, historic houses or fabulous shopping, exotic gardens or national parks. And something deliciously different by way of food and drink, since all tourists want to eat and, if possible, enhance their travel experiences through food, sampling barramundi and buffalo in Darwin, camel and kangaroo in Alice Springs. Thus the search for regional specialities and regional cuisines. Tourism, which at the beginning of this century happened upon and ‘discovered’ the hidden regional cuisines of France, is today, ironically, the driving force behind their development in Australia.
Regional food and drink specialities are generally easier to identify and promote than regional cuisines. In France several different systems have been set up for this express purpose, one of which is the IGP—Indication Géographique Protégée—a kind of appellation effectively equivalent to that applied to wine. The fishing port of Collioure on the western Mediterranean coast, for example, has applied for recognition of its anchovies under this system. It’s a guarantee of quality but also a vehicle for promoting the anchovies, thus ensuring the continuation of local industry and tradition. Similarly, Castelnaudary has applied for IGP recognition of the appellation ‘cassoulet de Castelnaudary’. For years a large sign outside the town has proclaimed Castelnaudary ‘world capital of cassoulet’, a hearty dish of white beans, fresh pork, pork sausage and duck confit cooked in an earthenware cassole. Local producers and vendors of cassoulet are now seeking its official authentication, fearful of seeing a deeply rooted local tradition become dispersed and deformed through the proliferation of supermarket cuisine.
Certainly, the IGP certification can give selected products a competitive edge in the marketplace, but at the same time it ensures quality, encourages the continuance of local skills and traditions and promotes a sense of regional identity. These are also the motivating forces behind the series of guides sponsored by the National Council of Culinary Arts in France, collectively known as the Inventory of the Culinary Heritage of France (L’inventaire du patrimoine culinaire de la France). Each book contains a catalogue of regional products (foods and beverages, both raw ingredients and manufactured products) that meet the pre-defined criteria, a selection of regional recipes, both traditional and ‘re-invented’ by celebrated chefs of that region, together with a comprehensive bibliography and a contact list of names of producer organisations and associated professional groups. In calling attention to the gastronomic riches of the regions these books are as much for locals as for tourists.
Seals of authenticity are destined to become more and more prevalent throughout Europe as local and regional specialities are detailed, catalogued and systematised. The French, who are probably the most vigorous in such activities, have a long history of classifying and certifying, beginning with the classification of Bordeaux wines in 1855. The gastronomic guides to the various regions of France have inspired the extension of the cataloguing scheme to cover the whole of Europe, under the banner of the Euroterroirs Project. It will eventually produce a database of about 4,000 European regional food specialities such as the Denby Dale Pie, an enormous celebratory beef-and-potato pie baked approximately every 25 years in the village of Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, England. The information collected will be published as a comprehensive encyclopaedia, together with smaller volumes for each country. The project does not merely represent information for information’s sake; it may also generate naming schemes (appellations) and promote tourism and rural development. The IGP certification seems to go further in that it’s not simply an assurance of quality but also a kind of rallying banner for regional patriots.
Australia has not (yet) produced inventories or catalogues or certifying schemes for foods, but there is increasing recognition of regional specialities—Young cherries and Bowen mangoes, King Island beef and Kangaroo Island sheep milk cheeses, Queensland mud crabs and South Australian King George whiting, Tasmanian leatherwood honey and Riverland dried fruit. Oysters are increasingly identified as to their place of origin and Mudgee wines have their own appellation. And now that ‘Australian’ cuisine has achieved some kind of status, the quest for distinctive regional characters has engaged attention. But is it now, and will it ever be, possible to speak of regional cuisines in Australia? Or will we have to be content with showcasing the bounty of a particular area and inviting ingenious chefs to create one-off dishes from these ingredients, as if to demonstrate a potential regionality? Can regional cuisines be invented by compiling an inventory of local resources and announcing a recipe competition? Should a regional cuisine reflect the practices and preferences of the inhabitants, so that it develops from the ground up, as it were—or can it be imposed by ‘experts’?
Years ago, when people in Australia were far more reliant on local produce, you could find regional specialities based on ingredients proper to the region. Most of them are probably now extinct. In Australia today, when the typical dinner is laconically described as ‘meat-and-veg’, what people eat anywhere in the continent more frequently reflects what is available on supermarket shelves—which might mean cheese from another state, fish fingers from New Zealand and canned fruit from anywhere in the world. At the same time, paradoxically, the different regions are producing an exciting diversity of quality foods—specialised cheeses and smallgoods, farmed freshwater crustaceans, unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables.
Ingredients alone cannot make a cuisine, nor does a cuisine spring spontaneously from the ingredients. Whatever authentic food traditions exist in Australia may have had their roots in particular ingredients, whether indigenous or naturalised, but from the kangaroo steamer to the quandong pie to the pumpkin scone they also needed the mediation of culture. None of these specialities was particularly ‘regional’—in the early days, the kangaroo steamer was eaten in both the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Quandong pie probably originated in the period of pastoral expansion and was presumably made wherever and whenever quandongs were found. Pumpkin scones were born of a surplus of pumpkins, often the only vegetable that could be grown in the outback. But these are isolated examples, and can hardly be said to constitute a cuisine.
A regional cuisine is usually epitomised by a collection of recognised dishes that depend on certain locally available ingredients and illustrate certain flavour combinations and cooking and preparation methods characteristic of, if not particular to, the region. These dishes might appear daily, or seasonally, or for particular festivities. Often they rely on local produce, but this is not a necessary pre-condition—think of all the regional specialities around the Mediterranean based on imported salt cod. Often they belong to the repertoire of the domestic cook, but they might also be restaurant specialities or products of the butcher or pastrycook. They are recognised and claimed by the people of the region.
In Australia there have been attempts to coax some semblance of regional cuisine into existence through imaginative combinations of local ingredients. About ten years ago a recipe competition to promote the use of local (regional) ingredients in the McLaren Vale wine area in South Australia was won by a recipe for ‘Cinnamon-and-tea-smoked duck breast with pickled black olives, almonds and blackberry glaze’. Admittedly, the purpose of this contest was not to encourage the development of a regional cuisine, nor to enhance awareness of this possibility. It was simply a recipe competition—like the ones that used to be run by flour or margarine manufacturers—in quest of a dish displaying originality in the use of local ingredients. Yet the winning recipe was presented for tasting at the local Bushing Festival some months later, almost as if it were, or could be, an example of the local cuisine. Its fate was to be forgotten.
In Aragon the Lanzon was immediately accepted as part of the region’s cuisine because it represented the people’s desire to express themselves as Aragonese. Similarly, experience in Canada has shown that trying to artificially create or resuscitate regional cuisines succeeds best when there’s already some awareness of regional identity, some cultural cohesion.
In an endeavour to promote regional cuisines in Quebec, a state with almost twice as much colonial history behind it as Australia, the province was divided into a number of geographic divisions, and in each one church groups and other community organisations were asked to collect their favourite recipes as the basis for an inventory of local ingredients and local dishes. After much grading, correlating and organising, a selection of more than 30,000 recipes was assembled to be tested in the kitchens of the Institut de Tourisme et d’Hotellerie du Québec. The best of these were referred back to local regional committees for their deliberation. Those approved were returned to the Institut for re-testing, and for standard quantities to be established.
Eventually, a book was published: Cuisine du Québec, a collection of 600-odd recipes said to typify the regional cuisines of the province. However, because the ‘regions’ were constructed more-or-less according to administrative divisions and did not necessarily correspond to any cultural reality, many Quebec residents believe the whole bureaucratic exercise to have been futile. The only real regional cuisines, they contend, are to be found around Quebec city, which has remained more stolidly French, and in multicultural Montreal, which welcomed a stream of immigrants over a century ago. Further, they point out that the most commonly eaten dish throughout the whole province is of Italo-American derivation, spaghetti with a meat-and-tomato sauce. (What they could also point out is that it is a typically Québecois meat-and-tomato sauce, seasoned with the spices that characterise much of the cooking of Quebec and, incidentally, the same ones that were common in France several hundred years ago: cloves, cinnamon and allspice.)
Australian regions are not well defined, culturally, but if there’s a case for the promotion of regional cuisines in Australia, the Barossa Valley must be one of the first to be nominated. Of all the potential ‘regions’ of Australia, it has perhaps the greatest claim to individuality. Gastronomically it is largely self-sufficient. Alongside the vast vineyards of the large wine companies are the mixed holdings of small farmers. In the towns butchers and bakers continue to practise the old crafts of smoking, sausage-making and yeast cookery. The Barossa has a biennial vintage festival, an annual Gourmet Weekend, and an annual music festival. There’s a sense of regional identity in the closely linked triangle of towns and, since a significant proportion of the population is directly or indirectly dependent on the wine industry, a degree of cultural and economic unity.
Further, the Barossa has a long-standing reputation for fine food, a quality often associated with a recognised regional cuisine. Mention to a Frenchman that you’re going to, say, Burgundy, and he’ll smack his lips, rub his hands together and assure you, with patriotic emotion, ‘Ah, oui, on mange bien en Bourgogne.’ My second edition of The Barossa Cookery Book (first published 1917, and surely one of the first regional cookery books in Australia) is subtitled: Four Hundred Selected Recipes from a district celebrated throughout Australia for the excellence of its cookery (my emphasis!).
All this would seem to favour the existence of a Barossa regional cuisine. Certainly, the Barossa does have some genuinely traditional dishes, whether of German or Anglo-Saxon origin or a hybrid of the two. Local traditions—such as dill pickles—still exist in the home kitchen, along with the handed-down hand-written recipe books in a spidery script. Family customs have been retained in some households, even if their German origins have by now been forgotten. Some of the traditions belong to religious festivals, others are associated with everyday eating: dumplings, noodle soups, cream-and-vinegar dressing for salads of shredded lettuce (or sliced cucumber, or tomato and onion)—a dressing that, incidentally, is an echo of the tradition of the Alsace region of north-eastern France, climatically and geographically not too far distant from the homeland of the first immigrant Silesian farm workers.
But in Australia the repository for the cuisine of a region is usually assumed to be its restaurants, where the homely products of the domestic family kitchen rarely appear. So what is represented as Barossa cuisine is more likely to be the deliberate creation of the restaurant kitchen, the product of gastronomic rationalism. It uses local produce and ingredients, certainly, but seems designed more to harmonise with the region’s Mediterranean climate than to reflect the cultural heritage of a large proportion of its population. While there is a certain logic to a resource-based regionality, it should also be recognised as an artifice. Cuisine, after all, is the product of ingredients and people, and however unfashionable or politically incorrect popular practices might be, they should not be ignored.
Regionalism in Australia is not as deeply rooted, nor as well cultivated, as in Tuscany, for example, or in Normandy in France, but it could be encouraged and nurtured. Beginning with an awareness of the region’s identity, its unique character—gastronomic, historic, ethnic—a regional cuisine can start to develop. It requires local ingredients, whether or not these are particular to the region, and it should respect the seasons as well as local customs and practices. It should be featured in the region’s restaurants but be equally adaptable to domestic kitchens so that it can be proudly presented in the home. But most of all, perhaps, it needs patience and the realisation that a cuisine cannot be created overnight. If the cuisine is truly to represent the region it has to last longer than fashion.