Take A Bite Of The World - Recipes

Intermission - Australia

     It's time for a little intermission between our main courses! Before we dive into more, have some appetizers while you wait. Here are some honorable mentions of some different foods from Australia all put together in one place before we move on to other main dishes.

Fairy Bread 

     Dating back to the 1920's, the first recording of children consuming the party food is in The Hobart Mercury. While the origin is unknown, some speculate that this sweet bread came from a poem in 1885 by Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses called "Fairy Bread". In short, Fairy Bread is a slice or more of buttered bread that has been cut in half as a triangle that is then covered with "hundreds and thousands" , or as we know them to be Rainbow Sprinkles. You will find this sweet bread at any child's party, or even at the table of a tired adult!

Chicken Parmigiana (Parmi)

     This dish is a staple in any pub that you go to in Australia. It is basically a chicken schnitzel (breaded chicken patty) that is topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella and served with a beer. While it did originate in Italy, Aussies everywhere adore this dish. It was in the 1950's that this dish was introduced to Aussies in Adelaide. The popularity of the dish spawned a special chicken parmigiana restaurant to open in Melbourne! Typically, a parmi is served with chips (fries), mashed potatoes, or salad. From personal experience, it is a running gag that many pubs sog the chips from placing the hot chicken on top of it.

Vegemite

     The famous Aussie spread! This dark spread is made of yeast extract with various spice and vegetable additives and born in Victoria of 1922. Known to be very bitter but more often than not, people try Vegemite wrong! It goes great over some crispy buttered toast with a thin layer over it. Once had an urban legend around it, with claims of bans of entering the US with Aussies being searched at customs! In personal experience, at a food buffet in Sydney airport you can try this spread by the bread section in abundance!

Golden Gaytime

     Yes. You read that right. In 1959, the Australian confectionery company Streets first released this  ice cream bar. The Golden Gaytime is a chocolate dipped toffee and vanilla ice cream bar on a wooden stick that gets wrapped in honeycomb biscuits. In modern time, GG was able to survive the homophobic connotations. The tagline? "It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own!"