Australian Pioneer Cooking

Old Australian cookbooks are on exhibit at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. Some of the recipes are pretty strange from today’s view.

In “The Antipodean Cookery Book”, first published in 1895, Mrs. Lance Rawson has a stew recipe with listed ingredients including a dozen parrots “well-picked and cleaned.”

Even less appetising is a recipe in Australia’s first known cookbook, dating from 1864, for a dish called “slippery bob”, consisting of kangaroo brains mixed with flour and water then fried in emu fat.

The book’s author Edward Abbott described the delicacy as bush fare, admitting it required “a good appetite and excellent digestion” to stomach.

His book also contains recipes for bandicoot, a small marsupial, and black swan, in which he recommends baby cygnets as particularly tender.

Link -via Fark

(image credit: AP)