Taste Australia
Australia
Indigenous foodways, immigrant restaurants, and a backyard grilling culture with excellent produce. The interesting plate names its sources.
First Nations ingredients and knowledge, Greek and Italian postwar kitchens, Vietnamese bakeries, Lebanese grills, Chinese regional restaurants, and a café breakfast habit that got out of hand in a good way. Lamingtons are sponge, chocolate icing and coconut — a cake with disputed parentage and a firm national opinion. ANZAC biscuits are oats, golden syrup and a wartime story that should not be turned into a marketing slogan. Chicken parmigiana is a pub schnitzel with tomato and cheese, Italian-Australian in the way that actually happened. Damper is a camp bread, simple and easy to over-romanticise. Smashed avocado is a café export, not ancestral. Fairy bread is for parties and arguments about butter.
20 recipes · 1 cuisine
Essential dishes
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Further Australia listings, including shorter editorial recipes and imported methods.
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Regional cuisines
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20 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Australia food quizFood history
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander food systems are the oldest continuous food cultures on earth. Colonial British cooking sat on top of them, often destructively. Meat pies and Sunday roasts arrived with settlers; so did the habit of ignoring whose land the cattle were on. The modern table that is worth taking seriously treats produce as local, names immigrant cooks, and does not treat native ingredients as a garnish for export branding. Regional differences — tropical north, wheat belt, southern dairy — still beat a single national flavour.