Australia – Taste the Difference!

Here is a list of everyday delicacies to search out on your travels through the land of OZ. I apologize to you waistline in advance.

Light Meals:

Meat pie – self explanatory, but quintessentially Australian.

Pasty – A vegetable [and often meat] filled pastry originally from Cornwall, which you just don’t seem to get in Canada. It is great with ketchup, but you will have to ask for ‘tomato sauce’.

Vegemite sandwich or Vegemite on toast – This one will split the room every time. Like living in an igloo, unless you were born with it, Vegemite is a difficult concept to grasp. This salty black spread is made from used brewers’ yeast extract.

It differs from the UK Marmite which is sweeter. Most Australians love Vegemite and hate Marmite. You may have your own ideas.

Candy:

Fantales – chocolate covered chewy caramels with little write ups on movies and actors on the wrappers.

Jaffas – These are tiny orange-coated balls of chocolate perfect for breaking your fillings or rolling down the aisles in movie theatres to trip up adults in the dark. I was a rotten child.

Darrell Lea Licorice – all the Australian licorice you see in stores now is based on this.

Cherry Ripe – desiccated cherries in a chocolate bar. Better than it sounds.

Freddo Frog – chocolate in the shape of a cartoon frog.

Desserts:

Pavlova – this is a meringue cake named for the famous ballerina after her tour of Australia at the beginning of last century. Most Aussie mum’s do ‘a good pav’.

Lamington – A sponge cake dipped in chocolate and covered in desiccated coconut.

Cookies [ask for biscuits]:

Tim Tams – Chocolate filled and covered chocolate biscuits with a disguised salty hint that makes them irresistible. Most Australian men agree that these are the quickest way back into a woman’s good graces.
Note: If you take a nibble from each end and rapidly suck coffee through the Tim Tam before popping it in your mouth, you have just performed a ‘Tim Tam Slam’.

Anzac Biscuits – ANZAC is an acronym for Australia-New Zealand Army Corp. these were the young men who volunteered for service in 1915 and fought the trial by fire that was the Battle of Gallipoli.

How better to honor our national heroes than with a cookie? The theory is that these rolled oats and desiccated coconut treats were sent over by loving wives because they wouldn’t go bad in transit. Whatever the truth, they are good with a coffee or cup of tea.

By Nick Keukenmeester