A lamington by any other name.

The humble lamington. Photo by John Woudstra, The Age, 29 October 2011.

A recent article in the weekend paper ('Time to advance, Australian fare' by Sue Bennett here) raised that perennial recurring theme in Australian food writing – the lack of/need for an Australian culinary identity. The article opened with the question

'If we defined Australia by its food, what would it be?'

What is meant here? – Defining Australia by the food which is eaten here is not the same as trying to come up with some sort of national dish. And the issue of an Australian national dish always seems to involve the use of indigenous ingredients despite the fact that the examples of other nations (in this instance Italy characterised by tomatoes, basil and olive oil; Japan characterised by soy sauce, seaweed and fish and Thailand by coconut milk, curry and kaffir limes) makes it clear that it is neither indigenous nor unique ingredients or flavours which become associated with particular cuisines. It is what cooks do with those ingredients which lead to something special and different.
Its all very well for chefs to play around with lilly-pilly ice-cream and finger lime mousse, and these may very well be the flavours that the world may come to associate with Australia, but, for the moment, this is no more what Australians eat in their own homes than Rene Redzepi's food is what the Danish sit down to for dinner every night of the week. Few if any of us use these ingredients or would recognise them if we tasted them.

Looking to more exotic indigenous ingredients to provide unique flavours suggests that we might have given up the idea of promoting the kangaroo as the meat Australians love to eat. The kangaroo issue is just too fraught. There is the debate about eating wild animals to say nothing of the practicalities of trying to farm kangaroos and the emotional arguments surrounding consuming the national emblem. It seems we can't promote Skippy as a unique symbol of Australia in the flesh and serve him up stewed as well. On the other hand kangaroo meat is at least available in the supermarket which is more than can be said for finger limes

Why try to define a culture by just one national dish? What we should be concerned about is the breadth of our shared culinary culture in a large country with a broad range of climatic and geographical areas , with a population made up of people from such a wide range of backgrounds and with so much choice available to us. We should be celebrating what we have and interpreting our cuisine as it is not trying to develop a cuisine which says what we think we want to say about ourselves.

Whilst the barbecue may not be an entirely original idea there is an argument for a peculiarly Australian approach to the barbecue. What we cook, how we cook it and the social rituals which surround our style of barbecue certainly distinguish a barbie here from what one might encounter in say North Carolina. And as I have argued here before the barbecue also serves as a unifying theme in the diversity of food cultures imported into Australia.

But the problem with the barbecue is perhaps that it is not glamorous enough, it isn't haute cuisine, it wouldn't put Australia up there with the great cuisines. It is so much easier to add a new flavour to something from the French canon, a mousse for example, than really develop something new or wait around a hundred years or so for traditions to develop and mature.

The meat pie is a great Australian tradition which could answer both questions. What does our food say about Australia? Just like a Massaman curry pie or a tandoori chicken pie or a Moroccan lamb pie, exotic flavours encased in a traditional English pastry, Australia is a mixture of a variety of other cultures wrapped around with an Anglo-centric veneer. And if we want a food that represents Australia why not a pie with a filling of kangaroo in red wine. But even with sophisticated flavours the poor old pie isn't sophisticated enough to rate as 'cuisine'.

Other than indigenous ingredients with unique flavours which still have a long way to go before they are part of our day to day food culture and kangaroo meat which is never likely to be more than a novelty, is there anything which Australia can claim to have invented?

As Ms Bennett notes in her article, aside from the pavlova, which the New Zealanders claim as their own, Australia has always had the lamington. The accepted wisdom is that this sponge cake dipped in chocolate and coated with coconut was first created by a French chef, Armand Galland some time around 1900.* At that time Galland was working for Lord and Lady Lamington at Government House in Brisbane and his creation was a happy accident, something he put together quickly as a matter of necessity, and named after his employers The lamington has gone from strength to strength, although perhaps no longer a tea time staple, it is a school lunch box regular, a feature of the cake stall at the local fete and a sure fire fund raiser. Many Australians think that the lamington is a unique part of their food culture. But is it?

Before I went on holidays recently I was part of a discussion at Syrup andTang on the history and origins of the vanilla slice. It seems that Australians have their own definition of a vanilla slice although its origins are doubtful. My money is still on the galaktobureko as a precursor rather than anything French, but it was intriguing to discover that there was something very similar from Croatia. The krempita (pita pastry, krem cream/custard) is made in the same way as the vanilla slice – puff pastry and custard thickened with cornflour, each prepared separately and then assembled. So which came first or do both the vanilla slice and the krempita owe their origins to the galaktobureko? Or is the similarity mere co-incidence? After all there are only so many ways you can put custard filling and pastry together.

An investigation of Croatian cake shops proved that the krempita is popular there and tastes just like our vanilla slice although with a slightly citrus-y note. There is also a version which includes a layer of cream as well as custard, and Gina, who contributed to the Syrup and Tang discussion and grew up in Croatia, suggested there were slight variations which characterised the krempita from Bosnia and Serbia.

Whilst I was tracking down the vanilla slice in Croatia I was totally unprepared for the discovery of the čupavac. Čupavaci are none other than lamingtons by another name! So was chef Galland's bright idea so original after all? Have the Croatians been eating lamingtons for centuries? Who knows? I certainly haven't been able to dig up much information on the origins of the čupavac. It is suggested that dipping cake in chocolate is a French technique and that Galland may have been influenced by his French Tahitian wife to use coconut, so were French chefs with Tahitian wives also busy whipping up afternoon tea in Zagreb and Split?

Čupavaci not withstanding there is no reason why we should not claim the lamington as an important part of our culinary culture. Despite the fact that it was introduced by a Frenchman, contains no indigenous ingredients and is neither original or unique it is part of our food history and our collective food memories. For those of us who have ever eaten a lamington they are, like it or not, part of how we define ourselves, even if they are a 'none-too flash bit of sponge cake'.

*All information about the history of the lamington came from an article ('Let them eat cake: French take a bite of our lamingtons') by Cosima Marriner, The Age, 6 June 2009.