Source : the age
By David Free
It’s funny how the implications of a word can change over time. Take the word barbecue. When I was young, the word connoted a lot of things: heat, flies, cricket, eskies full of canned drinks. But one thing it certainly didn’t connote was mouth-watering food.
Things have changed. Some of the most delicious food I’ve eaten this summer was cooked on a barbecue. I’m talking about cumin-rubbed lamb rump charred over coals. I’m talking about premium swordfish steaks paid for by somebody other than me, seared to perfection on a gas grill. These days, when you hear the word barbecue, you ready yourself for next-level food – food that’s a cut above what you generally cook indoors.
Most things have become worse, but not the great Australian barbecue. Credit: Getty Images
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, things were the other way around. The food at barbecues was rudimentary, and way less enticing than the average home-cooked meal. Two forms of protein dominated the hotplate: sausages and steak. When I say “steak”, I’m not talking about something that would seriously be called a steak today. I’m talking about the kind of leathery, jerky-like slivers of so-called steak that you used to get with a motel breakfast.
As for the snags, they were invariably made of beef. Where I lived, there was no such thing as a non-beef sausage. Moreover, there was no such thing as a thin sausage. When I was young, the thin snag was not yet even a thing. When they first came in, they were called “breakfast sausages”. People said they would never catch on.
When I try to recall the flavour of a 1970s barbecue, I find that the dominant note was carbon. Everything tasted burnt. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the barbecuing was invariably done by the men. Most of these blokes didn’t handle the cooking duties at home. Some of them barely knew how to open a box of cereal. But for some reason it was considered mandatory to hand them the tongs when a cook took place outdoors. Their signature move was to flip the meat incessantly whether it needed flipping or not, until every visible part of it was black.
I reckon they need turning again.Credit: Getty Images
In fairness to the dads, barbecuing technology in those days was deeply primitive. The default barbie setup was a thin steel plate over an open fire. The plates were knee-high, so the barbie had to be tended in a crouch. Naked flames reared up around the hotplate and lashed the meat, sometimes setting it on fire. Neil Perry himself would have struggled to deliver a quality steak under those conditions.
All this was perfectly legal because fire restrictions in those days were hilariously laid-back. Today’s fire-hazard signs start at Moderate and run through Extreme up to Catastrophic. In the old days, Extreme was the highest setting. Moderate was in the middle. Over on the left was a setting that said – believe it or not – Nil.
When the sign said Nil, it was open season for open fires. The kids collected wood, then parents activated the inferno, sometimes with the aid of accelerant. Essentially, the old-school barbecue was a smallish bushfire with a thin metal plate on top of it.
I’m not sure what grade of steel those old barbie plates were made of, but I do recall they tended to warp and buckle after repeated exposure to flame. The hotplate in our backyard had a big hump up the back of it. If you put a snag there, it would roll off into the ashes, with the foil-wrapped potatoes. It would then be hosed off and returned to the grill.
There may not have been a Catastrophic setting on the hazard signs, but those raging barbie fires certainly had catastrophic effects on meat. The sausages suffered rampant mince leakage at either end, so they wound up looking like dumbbells.
Paul Hogan encouraged us to put another shrimp on the barbie.Credit:
The steaks resembled bark chips, in terms of both looks and chewability. If you tried to penetrate them with a plastic knife and fork, the cutlery would explode. If you tried to eat them in a sandwich, the whole steak came away in your teeth, and you were left holding two slices of humid bread. If you wanted your steak to be in any sense moist, you had to reach for the Red Baron sauce.
The salads were better because they were usually prepared by the women, who knew that food should taste of something other than charcoal and ketchup. In the salad space, there was room for vibrancy and innovation. I still remember the barbecue where I clapped eyes on my first tabbouleh.
In retrospect, that was an auspicious day. In Australia’s cities, postwar immigration had been enriching our cuisine since the 1950s. That tabbouleh was the first sign I ever saw that the multicultural food revolution had finally reached the barbecues of suburbia.
By the mid-1980s, local butchers were getting in on the act. It was a game-changer for barbecues when some unsung genius of butchery invented the pepper steak. The pepper crust made the steak taste of something, and provided a vital layer of insulation between the meat and the infernal surface of the grill.
Meanwhile, the sausage scene was transformed by the introduction of the flavoured snag: tomato and onion, lamb and rosemary.
When Paul Hogan did his tourism ads in 1984, urging Americans to come over and throw another shrimp on the barbie, he seemed to be suggesting that barbecuing crustaceans was a long-standing Aussie tradition. It certainly wasn’t where I came from. Maybe I was going to the wrong barbecues. Maybe we lived too far from the coast.
At any rate, the first white meat I ever saw cooked on a barbie was some honey-soy chicken. It didn’t stay white for long, but it tasted sensational. The age of marination had arrived. Even today, with the vast array of rubs and seasonings on the market, the honey-soy combination holds its own.
Don’t get me wrong. When I was young, the great Australian barbecue was already great in many ways. It just took a while for the food to become one of them.
