Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
The English and Australian Cookery Book
- Year
- 1864
- Era
- 19th century
- Origin
- Australia · Oceania
- Language
- English
- Category
- Australasia
The English and Australian Cookery Book, compiled by Tasmanian parliamentarian Edward Abbott under the pseudonym "An Australian Aristologist," holds the distinction of being the first cookery book published by an Australian author. Issued in London in 1864, it pairs conventional British receipts with dishes drawn from colonial ingredients, including kangaroo, wattlebird, and emu, offering an early documentary record of settler foodways and the adaptation of European culinary tradition to Antipodean produce.
Cooking from this book
Slippery Bob
Signature dishSlippery Bob is the dish most often invoked when this pioneering colonial volume is discussed. A bush curiosity of kangaroo brains cooked in emu fat, it captures the spirit of Abbott's collection, which blended polite English cookery with the strange new larder of the Australian colonies. For modern readers it has become a kind of emblem of the book's improvisational frontier character and its willingness to record what settlers actually ate.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
