Mobile Food

My last post elicited a number of anonymous impassioned comments taking me to task on my review of Alain Ducasse's Nature. I have chosen not to publish those comments here because I think they would be best read in the context of the complete review. So for a different take on M. Ducasse's book please have a look at what Nikki has to say here where you can also scroll up and read my thoughts.
And while you are over at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf have a look at my latest offering, a review of Anissa Helou's Mediterranean Street Food (here). I've mentioned her blog before where she often discusses something unusual, like a recent post on Middle Eastern sheep and their fat tails (here). One of the things I like about Mediterranean Street Food is the way it celebrates the exuberance of street life and those cultures where the preparation of food, and the sight and smell of food are a not just part of the everyday but very much part of the public domain.

Ready to go in Jame' el Fna, Marrakesh

 Snack time near the spice market in old Delhi.

For the outsider though street food carries with it that hint of danger and the prospect of holiday disaster. I have to admit that we weren't game enough to actually eat any of the food in either of the situations photographed above although we came under a lot of pressure to do so. And I am sure this is not the sort of thing that  is intended when the food trucks finally roll out on the streets of Sydney.

The concept of mobile food is not new although the food truck idea might be the latest trend. Horse-drawn tamale carts worked the streets of Los Angeles more than a century ago. New York City has long had its share of mobile food -for ice cream and hot dog carts see Edible Geography here  and for the results of last year's annual awards for street food see here.

 India is perhaps one of the most exciting places for food let alone street food. For some fabulous photos of  'bicycle based commerce' in Mumbai here and for the top ten places to eat on the street, also in Mumbai see here.

Even Paris has caught the food truck bug with the delightfully named 'Le camion qui fume' which you can read about in French here or in English, albeit with an American slant, here.

Last time I mentioned the French post office style bread box which seems like a very good idea. The cupcake ATM however (which you can read about here) does not have the same appeal.

Month in Review - February 2012 .

There has been a bit of a French theme this month - by coincidence rather than by design.
First up there was my encounter with Alain Ducasse, well with his book  Nature. Simple, healthy and good which I reviewed for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf (here). I didn't know much about M. Ducasse but there was something about this book that made me think he was trying, perhaps a bit too hard, to be sort of modern and with it, to be more one of us rather than a super chef. It's all a bit cutesy and clever and somehow doesn't manage to get away from being, well for want of a better description, very French. For one thing I suspect he has shares in a company producing Piment d'Espelette (his seasoning du jour). Can you imagine going to your local green grocer and having a choice of different varieties of turnip? Still not to bother because I won't be cooking up 'Poached foie gras with turnips' any time soon. And I am forever going to wonder whether a pumpkin gratin tastes better made with a Queensland Blue or a Muscade de Provence or a Courge Longue de Nice  or even a humble potimarron.
M. Ducasse deserved a better editor and/or a more thorough translation to make this book both more appealing and more user friendly but what struck me more than anything was the implication that there was something new or revolutionary about his approach to food

Plenty of fruit and vegetables, raw and cooked, cereals, preferably wholegrain, a little meat or fish, and all cooked in olive oil. That's the basis of my cuisine and of the recipes in this book

Is it just that M. Ducasse isn't normally associated with the sort of food you and I might cook at home or is this enthusiasm for simple, healthy food meant to come as a surprise to the French? I'm still not really sure of the answer to that question but it did send me off on a quest for more information.

Which meant that I finally got around to reading Michael Steinberger's Au Revoir to All That. The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine. According to the blurb Marco Pierre White considers this 'one of the greatest books I've read' which perhaps says something about the amount of time Mr. White spends reading. This is not a great book - no book which includes a sentence which begins 'One hundred years later, it was déjà vu all over again,' could ever be called great - but it is a jaunty journey through French culinary history and the political, economic and social issues which have contributed/are contributing to the current malaise in France in general and French cuisine in particular, and he devotes a whole chapter to Alain Ducasse. Hot on the heels of Skye Gyngell's decision to throw in the towel at Petersham Nursery now that she has earned a Michelin star Steinberger's stories about the scandalous influence of the Michelin Guide made for very interesting reading.
If nothing else Au Revoir to All That gave me a clearer appreciation of the influence of the French and the changes in the restaurant business over the last twenty years or so and I would recommend it as an easy and sobering read especially for those of us far enough away to be pretty well insulated from the nuances of European life.
Depressed by the news that la malbouffe has been not so much warmly welcomed as enthusiastically embraced by the French (France is McDonald's second most profitable market and their latest promotion sees hamburgers served on a baguette and topped with POD (that is Protected Designation of Origin) cheeses such as Cantal) it was another cruel blow to read about the French bread crisis! But all is not entirely lost. This little piece (here) about an entrepreneurial French baker bringing fresh bread back to the village suggests that there is some hope for  the future.

I also have to thank Mr Steinberger for introducing me to a new word - zaftig. This looks for all the world like one of those desperate combinations you come up with in Scrabble and then reject because it seems so unlikely, but  no, it is in fact an adjective which describes women who have a full figure -and as such should be used with some care.

Month in Review - January 2012

It hardly seems possible that the first month of the year is over - and with precious little to show for it. When not hacking away at the garden with a machete (so much rain, so much greenery, so little of anything else - tomatoes taking weeks to even turn pink and then being picked off by the possums, eggplants staunchly refusing to do anything much more than look attractive, and who knew that possums also have a liking for broccoli?) I have had my head buried in old recipe books by the likes of Harriet Wicken and Amy Schauer. Never much of a cake maker I am more than happy not to have had to follow recipes which call for the amount of baking powder you can fit on to a sixpence and give no information at all about tin sizes but do suggest you beat the mixture for 20 minutes! Even my poor old Sunbeam Mixmaster would draw the line at beating for 20 minutes. Authors like Wicken were big on advice and short on the sort of precision to which we have become accustomed. I hope I never need to remember this but you might like to know that you can check the oven temperature by placing a piece of paper in the hot oven for three minutes and then investigating what colour it has turned - if dark yellow the oven is hot enough for large cakes, light yellow and you are ready for small cakes.

Australia Day always generates some press about our lack of a national cuisine.  Coles supermarkets took on the challenge this year and rose to the opportunity to, and I quote from The Sydney Morning Herald, 'turn our jingoism into the jingling of coins in the till'. Among other things they managed to persuade Masterfoods to package tomato sauce in blue plastic bottles (instead of the usual red) and talk Arnott's into producing Australia-shaped biscuits (but not, of course, Tasmania shaped biscuits).
For a glimpse of what a visiting American foodie had to say about Australia Day see here.  And for a laugh from Sam Kekovich if you haven't already you should have a look at his "Barbie Girl" video with lines like 'be my mate while the chops marinate' and 'marination leads to salivation' and his rant as Lambassador where he complains that a 'lack of lamb has led to a littany of lamentable behaviour'. Both videos are here at his official web site and the 'Barbie Girl' is also here.

Ever since seeing 'Jesus Almagro and the Golden Bocuse' (which you can read about here) I have had a fascination with the Bocuse d'Or competition (I wrote about it again here too) so I was pleased to see that the Americans are back in the race for the event next year. You can read about the USA finals here. The Australian bid, if there is one, doesn't seem to get anything like the same amount of attention, which is perhaps not altogether a bad thing.

Month in Review - December 2011

First up this month a Christmas Quiz (in time for next year perhaps) from the Guardian here and the answers here.

In the latest issue of Gastronomica (Volume 11, number 4) there is an article about Dione Lucas by Jean Schinto ('Remembering Dione Lucas', pp. 34-45). Dione Lucas may be a forgotten name these days but in the 1950's she was appearing on American television - well before the likes of Julia Child. She had trained under Henri-Paul Pellaprat at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in Paris and she set up the Ecole du Petit Cordon Bleu school and restaurant in London with Rosemary Hume in the early 1930s. In 1940 she sailed to America and from then on made her career there. She opened her own Cordon Bleu Restaurant and Cooking School in New York in 1942 and first appeared on television in 1947, demonstrating French cuisine to American audiences when Julia Child was still learning to chop onions (Schinto, p. 34). By all accounts a complicated and rather difficult personalty Mrs Lucas regarded cooking as a serious business and as Schinto puts it 'her personality was at odds with the whole idea of mass appeal'.
What Schinto doesn't mention in her article is that Mrs Lucas made at least three trips to Australia, in 1956, 1958 and 1960 which included demonstrations in department stores and television appearances. The tours were sponsored by the Australian Women's Weekly  and promoted through the publication of special supplements of her recipes. In addition the magazine ran a series of her recipes in 1957 and again in 1966.
In her photograph on the cover of Book for Cooks, the recipe supplement which complemented her visit in 1956, Dione Lucas appears stern and competent, with her apron tied firmly around her waist in her 1950's kitchen with peg board behind the stove on which to hang the copper saucepans. She is referred to as 'America's blue-ribbon chef' (Australians were not yet ready for cordon bleu?) who has come to 'demonstrate to women how to make artistic creations from ordinary kitchen ingredients'.

When Dione Lucas tells her Australian audience how to cook she will be doing what she does five days a week in front of the TV cameras for her audiences in America. There she creates in half an hour complicated, mouth-watering delicacies that would take an ordinary cook at least twice as long to prepare.

Mrs Lucas's philosophy makes for interesting reading. Although a capable and independent woman herself (she was a divorced mother of two boys) she was no feminist but as her son says of her 'an artist in cookery' (Schinto, p.39)

I believe housewives these days spend far too little time in the kitchen planning and preparing meals. They depend too much on quickly prepared meals, so losing two of cookery's most worthwhile ingredients - glamor and artistry in food. 

Cooking, to my mind, is as much art as painting, dancing, or composing poetry, and cooking a masterpiece for the table can be a creative outlet for the modern housewife. (Book for Cooks)

She saw no need to 'spend vast sums of money to produce the most artistic and tasty meals', advocating the use of the cheapest cuts of meat along with heart, brains, liver, kidneys and 'the most maligned of all meats' tripe. For Mrs Lucas economy was achieved 'by substituting skill and careful preparation for expensive ingredients'. She emphasised planning so that meals could be 'integrated', simple menus ('concentrate on making masterpieces of each of a few dishes'), doing your own shopping 'rather than ordering by telephone' and using 'spices, herbs, butter and wine' to bring out the best in your ingredients.
Most importantly she believed 'there are no short cuts to real cookery success.

As with every other art, it takes time and practice to acquire and learn the many techniques needed by a creative cook.
I have three rules for mastering the art of cooking. First, learn to cook by making mistakes; second, learn to save the food you spoil; and third, remember not to repeat your mistakes. (Book for Cooks)

On her 1956 tour she demonstrated numerous different menus which included exotica like Coronets de Jambon Lucullus. This recipe required the hapless housewife to prepare a foie gras mousse which she then piped into ham cornucopias (made by lining cream horn tins with slices of ham). Each cornucopia was topped with a thin slice of truffle and sealed with aspic jelly (which said housewife had prepared earlier) and served on a bed of rice salad. She also demonstrated delicacies such as cabbage strudel (including making the strudel pastry), Vacherin aux Peches, piroshkis, Mousse de Saumon Judic (salmon mousse made with tinned salmon and served with sauce Bercy and braised lettuce), Lobster Thermidor, Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Tenderloin en chemise Strasbourgeoise and prunes stuffed with sauteed chicken liver and wrapped in bacon which were baked in the oven until the bacon was crisp then speared with a toothpick and attractively presented atop a head of cabbage. All rather a far cry from making the best of inexpensive ingredients.
But then as now there was more to cooking than just technique and practice. According to the recipe supplement to emulate Dione Lucas the modern cook also needed a Sunbeam frypan and mixmaster,  a Kelvinator refrigerator, a Metters oven and a Namco pressure cooker as well as Nestle milk products, Champion's malt vinegar, Mayfair ham, Aunt Mary's baking powder, Davis gelatine, Meadow- Lea table margarine and Wade's cornflour.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is by Anissa Helou (you can read about her background here). She has written a number of books including Lebanese Food and The Fifth Quarter (about offal, which I think has recently been re-published) and my current favourite Mediterranean Street Food. Two of her recent posts about yufka pastry (here and here) were particularly interesting. All her work is well researched and she takes great photographs.

Two other books this month. First  Giorgio Locatelli's  Made in Sicily (my review is at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf  here.) I had thought that Mary Taylor Simeti had the last word on Sicilian food but I enjoyed Locatelli's book where the recipes are a bit more accessible for those who want to avoid some of the historical background.
The other read (which I haven't started on yet) is by Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, entitled Home Cooking in the Global Village. Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Despite a cover which doesn't seem to do the content justice - a pirate with an eye-patch and a parrot on his shoulder holding a platter of food from 'Blackbeard's Burgers' - this is a book about globalization. More specifically it is about Belize and how globalization has been influencing patterns of food consumption there for over three hundred years. None other than Sidney Mintz (he of Sweetness and Power) says

'Wilk's narrative food history of  a timberland backwater reborn as a tourist mecca redefines the term 'colonial'. It makes a solid theoretical contribution to clarifying the real meanings of terms like 'fusion' and 'blending', when applied to food in the modern world. A thoughtful and stimulating essay on the present, pitched entertainingly against a tatterdemalion and ragged colonial past.'

Sounds irresistible doesn't it? I am pleased to say Wilk himself doesn't go in for words of any more than about four syllables.

And another historical/anthropological read which might be of interest - Rachel Lauden on servants and how the survival of 'traditional' laborious cuisines depends on having someone prepared to do the work - here - with  links to some other interesting articles.

Looking for Lamingtons and Chasing Čupavci

In an earlier post (here) I raised the issue of the provenance of the Australian lamington having discovered, in Croatia, the exact same cakes calling themselves  čupavci. (When I made my notes on a scrap of paper in a cake shop in Split I wrote down čupavac which Google has persuaded me is the wrong spelling. Čupavci is obviously the plural -we would translate this as lamingtons - but I don't know whether the singular lamington is the čupavc or the čupavca, such is my knowledge of Croatian.)
From the little research I have been able to do, thanks to the internet, the general consensus seems to be that čupavci are a traditional cake/dessert in Croatia with no hint of how far back that tradition might go. Since coconut seems to be the defining feature of both lamingtons and čupavci the answer would seem to hinge on the availability of dessicated coconut. The process for drying coconut was developed by a gentleman by the name of Henry Vavasseur whose company began producing commercial quantities of dessicated coconut in Ceylon (as it was then) and shipping it to Europe in the 1890s. This would suggest that both lamingtons and čupavci could have been 'invented' at around the same time and certainly no earlier than 1890. Advertisements for desiccated coconut imported from London began appearing in Australian newspapers in 1895.*
Lord Lamington was governor of Queensland from 1896 until 1901. According to Dr. Katie McConnel, curator of Old Government House in Brisbane, Lady Lamington mentions the cake named after him (or her) in her memoirs and credits their French chef, Armand Galland, with its creation. ** Galland stayed in Brisbane after the departure of the Lamingtons, where he established a wine business. I couldn't find an obituary for Armand (who died in 1923) but that of his wife, Cladie, who died in1934, confirmed that she was born in France, not Tahiti as I quoted previously, and that the couple came to Australia in 1897 ( The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 23 June 1934). Armand was not employed at Government House until some time after that, perhaps as late as 1900. In none of the early newspaper references I could find is  the creation of the lamington attributed to Armand Galland, or indeed to anyone else.
In The Brisbane Courier 19 July 1901, Galland is advertising himself as 'open for engagement to do Luncheon, Afternoon Tea or Dinner Parties in private houses' but he does not promote his association with sponge cake dipped in chocolate. Nor would it appear that the lamington was instantaneously well known.
In the 'Mutual Help' column of The Queenslander (Brisbane), 14 December 1901, the editor responds to a reader's query with 'Have not heard of a 'lamington cake'. Can you give some clue to the appearance and ingredients of the cake?' So it seems that by the end of 1901 the lamington was known outside the confines of Government House but only to a select few. Perhaps the few who had sampled afternoon tea as prepared by M. Galland.
Subsequently (4 January 1902) The Queenslander  publishes a lamington cake recipe, the first to appear in a newspaper, submitted by 'a subscriber'. Although called lamington cake rather than lamingtons this first recipe was for small cubes of cake exactly as we know lamingtons today. Now would have been the perfect moment for Galland to claim ownership of the recipe but he did not do so.
On 26 November 1904 The Queenslander again publishes a lamington recipe this time provided by Miss Schauer of the Brisbane Technical College. Amy Schauer trained at the Sydney Technical College and was appointed to the Brisbane Technical College in 1895 where she taught until 1937.   Miss Schauer  and M. Galland were at least acquainted - Galland was an examiner of chefs at the Technical College in 1902 - but she does not attempt to credit Galland or acknowledge his claim to the recipe for lamington cake. It has been suggested that the lamington may have been invented by Miss Schauer but she makes no such claim at the time her recipe is first published or throughout her long life (she died in 1956). Perhaps neither M. Galland or Miss Schauer thought that the invention of the lamington was anything special or indeed anything to be proud of. Nonetheless lamington cakes quickly became established in cookery competitions at local fairs and horticultural shows and recipes appeared regularly in newspapers and began to be published in cookery books in all states.
Very recently David Lebovitz wrote about lamingtons on his blog and garnered a tremendous response from his audience. There was no mention of čupavci but two responses linked lamingtons to Hungary and other responses confirmed a link with Eastern Europe through the popularity of 'coconut bars' in of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland boasts a sizable population with Eastern European ancestry. In particular large numbers of Hungarian immigrants came to Cleveland between 1870 and the beginning of World War One and it is claimed that at one time Cleveland had the highest Hungarian population of any city outside Budapest (see here).
'Coconut bars', called kókusz kocka (coconut cubes) in Hungarian, described as 'smallish, stout oblong cakes entirely covered by a thin icing of chocolate and shredded coconut' are a speciality of Jewish bakeries in Cleveland and almost unknown elsewhere in the US (see here and here). It would appear undeniable that 'coconut bars' were brought to Cleveland by immigrants from Europe. If my original assumption is correct, that is that lamingtons, čupavci, and coconut bars all date from around 1900, when desiccated coconut became readily available, the question then becomes why Australia, or more specifically Brisbane, and Hungary? Which came first, the lamington or the kókusz kocka, or is it possible that identical cakes were produced at roughly the same time in both Hungary and Queensland?

* All the information I have managed to glean from newspapers is thanks to the wonderful National Library of Australia Trove database.
** The Age, Melbourne, 6 June 2009

Month in Review - November 2011

On two separate occasions this month I had much the same discussion with friends about how we were all scrambling to keep up to date with the latest information on the things that interested us - food, books, films, food events - and how, even with the best intentions, we struggled to share what information we did have. So from now on the Month in Review won't be a digest of the fascinating things I have done during the month, riveting reading though that may be. Instead I thought I could use the blog as a means of  spreading the word. This first effort only includes journals, articles and books which I have come across lately which I think might be of interest. In future I hope to get contributions from friends so that I can include up-coming events and reading which covers a broader spectrum.
However, given that we have to start somewhere, here is the Month in Review for November 2011.

The Australian Humanities Review is an on-line journal  published quarterly by ANU which 'provides a forum for open intellectual debate across humanities disciplines, about all aspects of social, cultural and political life, primarily ... with reference to Australia'. The November 2011 issue is entitled 'On the Table: Food in Our Culture' and can be accessed here. I haven't worked my way through all of it but there are articles by Colin Bannerman, Barbara Santich and Adrian Pearce which are worth a look.

Locale The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies (here) was launched this month. The first issue covers a broad range and includes among others an article by Jacqui Newling on tea in the early days of the Sydney penal settlement, one from Helen Leach (the New Zealand pavlova queen) on regional dishes and one entitled 'Unearthing Paradox: Organic Food and its Tensions'.

For the anthropologists, I have only just discovered  a new book by Carole M. Counihan, A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2009) which the reviewer in Gastronomica described as a 'beautiful feminist ethnography'.

My friends know of my on-going interest in the effect of technology on our food lives, which is why I recommend reading this article from the New York Times entitled 'Are Cookbooks Obsolete?'

And finally I had a bit of a chuckle over this piece from The Guardian, a review of Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking first published in 1951. Needless to say Ms David remains well know whereas the author of the review, Lucie Marion, - well have you ever heard of her? Ms. Marion had herself published a book on French cooking, Be Your Own Chef: Simple French Cooking in 1948 and no doubt saw ED for the rival that she was. Whilst her criticism of ED may well be justified it didn't do her any good.

For anyone who has the time or the inclination to venture to Melbourne the programme for the Wine and Food Festival in March 2012 is now available. One of my criticisms about the similar event in Sydney is that it centres on restaurants and chefs rather than programming a wider range of cultural offerings.  Well not so in Melbourne where they include a week of Foodie Films!

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.