Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, January 16, 2025
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
drink. 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.
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.
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 that 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 the wood, then the parents
activated the inferno, sometimes with the aid of an 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 that 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 up 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.
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 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 tabouleh.
In retrospect, that was an
auspicious day. In Australia’s cities, post-war immigration had been enriching our
cuisine since the 1950s. That tabouleh 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 a shrimp on the
barbie, he seemed to be suggesting that the barbecuing of 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 can still hold 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.
