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NLA News - home June 2006 Volume XVI Number 9

A Penchant for Parrot Pie

click to enlarge
John Hunter (1737–1821)
Eastern Rosella (Platycercus eximius)  [between 1788 and 1790]
watercolour; 22.6 x 18.3 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an3149498
click to enlarge
Edward Roper (c.1830–1904)
Christmas in the Colonies, a Christmas Dinner at the Diggings  1860s
chromolithograph print;
15.0 x 10.4 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an9098982

Penny Olsen’s search for a recipe in the National Library’s Collection broke the crust on an all but extinct culinary interest

Australians have a long history of parrot eating—not well-recognised, but hardly surprising in this ‘land of parrots.’ Certain Aboriginal tribes regularly caught (and roasted) parrots—with boomerangs, spears, sticks or nets—and harvested their eggs and nestlings. Some of the more traditionally living groups may still do so.

The Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Mitchell, for example, once observed that ‘The native of the Darling … knows well “the alleys green” through which at twilight, the thirsty pigeons and parrots rush towards the water; and there, with a smaller net hung up, he sits down, and makes a fire ready to roast the birds, which may fall into his snare …’

Hungry for fresh food on discovery of Botany Bay in April 1770, Captain James Cook partook of parrot pie. It may not even have been a curiosity to him, as Europeans had occasionally eaten parrots from the time they were imported from India centuries before. The ancient Romans considered them a delicacy.

Nonetheless, parrot was obviously a new taste for Sydney Parkinson, employed by Cook to draw natural history specimens. Parkinson commented on the culinary attractions of the ‘great number of birds of beautiful plumage; among which there were two sorts of parroquets, and a beautiful loriquet; we shot a few of them, which we made into a pie and they ate very well. We also met with a black bird, very much like our crow, and shot some of them too, which also tasted agreeably.’ Many of the birds shot on that voyage of discovery were for the table, in the cause of survival, though often drawn and described first, in the cause of science. Naturalist Joseph Banks ate crow, and probably shared the pie. He noted in his journal, ‘a hawk or a crow was to us as delicate and perhaps a better relished meal than a partridge or Pheasant to those who have plenty of dainties …’

Charting Australia’s coast in 1801, Lieutenant John Grant put in at Jervis Bay, where he too discovered a penchant for parrot:

Mr Caley shot a king parrot … Several other birds were killed, the flesh of which we afterwards found very good eating; nor is that of the parrot disagreeable, having very much the same taste as our pigeon … [but] in my opinion far preferable for flavour.

The better-fed ‘father of Australian ornithology’, John Gould, positively drooled over the yellow-bellied parrakeet (green rosella): ‘When I visited Tasmania [in 1838] it was commonly eaten by the settlers, and it was not long after my arrival before I tasted its goodness, when I found it so excellent that I partook of it whenever an opportunity for doing so presented itself.’

About the same time, another parrot pie enthusiast, Sydney settler Sarah Brunskill, reassured her mother in England: ‘Parrots, lauries and magpies abound, kangaroo is very scarce, I have not seen any, but those who have tasted it pronounce it delicious. Parrot pie is very good, very like pigeon.’ Parrots had been available by the dozen in Sydney markets for some time, taken from nests or trapped—king parrots, crimson rosellas and rainbow lorikeets as they raided orchards in the fruit season, and galahs and sulphur-crested cockatoos when seed crops matured. ‘They are often made into pies, and I have heard of them selling at a shilling a dozen for this purpose,’ surgeon superintendent of convict ships and two-year resident in the mid-1820s, Peter Cunningham, recorded in his memoirs.

Squatters and residents of fledgling cities alike varied their usual fare of mutton and salt beef, damper and tea, with psittacines. A pioneer recalled of the earliest days in Glenelg in the new colony of South Australia: ‘We were never short of food—such as it was—and we had a little variety in the shape of parrots, cockatoos, and occasionally wallaby. The breast of a cockatoo was thought very good, and parrots were very good in a pudding or pie.’ Kangaroo Island colonist Mrs Robert Thomas’ memories of Christmas that same year, 1836, were that:

click to enlarge
Samuel Thomas (S.T.) Gill (1818–1880)
Interior of Settler’s Hut  1845
wash drawing; 11.2 x 19.7 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an2377115

We kept up the old custom of Christmas as far as having plum pudding for dinner was concerned, likewise a ham and parrot pie, but one of our neighbours, as we afterwards found, had a large piece of beef, though we were not aware at the time that any fresh meat was to be had in the colony.

(She later discovered that an unfortunate, newly arrived cow, with calf at foot, had fallen down a bank, injuring herself so badly that she had to be put down. Mrs Thomas’ prandial preference was obvious, but such luxuries were introduced gradually as livestock herds built up.)

Members of the Leichhardt Expedition also celebrated Christmas with parrot. Like other explorers, the party often extended their supplies with fresh rosellas, ducks and pigeons (as well as collecting some to send back to Gould in England to draw and describe for his monumental work The Birds of Australia, 1840–1848). As Leichhardt recorded in his journal, their 1844 Christmas dinner, Gilbert’s last before he was fatally speared by Aboriginal people, was ‘suet pudding and stewed cockatoo’.

The first immigrants often found wildlife abundant, and many were better off than they had been in their home countries. In the 1850s Jacob Baker wrote to his family in Hobson, UK, to encourage them (successfully) to follow him in his free passage to South Australia: ‘This is the contrey, my boys. I have borte a dog for shuting [shooting]. Tim and me can take our guns and dog, and go out and shut all we can without licences; we have plenty of buteful parets [beautiful parrots] and wil tuckes [wild turkeys] and ducks and other birds. Poor pipel in Hodson do not know what good living is. We have got a goint of fresh meat on our table every day …’

For nascent middle-upper-class hostesses who could afford a cookbook, that old standby Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book (1892) placed parrots in a pie, as did Margaret Pearson’s Cooking Recipes for the People (2nd edn, 1889) before her:

8 parroquets, 4 eggs (boiled until hard and then put in cold water). Teaspoon of lemon juice, ½ lb bacon or ham, Little good gravy or stock, 1 lb fillet of beef cut into thin slices, Rough puff paste.

Cut the birds into two, and rub well with butter, place the slices of beef in a pie dish and place on them birds and slices of ham, cut in neat pieces the boiled eggs and add, then pour in a cup of well-seasoned stock: cover over with rough puff paste, decorate with cut leaves, etc., from the paste, stick the legs and feet well cleaned and blanched into the centre.

The display of legs and feet might have added a whiff of the exotic to the dish at the tables of those who could afford to buy meat, or have hinted at the time or the servants needed to pluck and prepare the eight unfortunate owners of the limbs.

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Unknown photographer
Portrait of Emma Easdown with cockatoo called Kate  1896
b&w photograph on cabinet card; 16.4 x 10.5 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3292516

Mrs Lance (Mina) Rawson, on the other hand, preferred her parrots unsullied by other meats: ‘One dozen parrots … well-picked and cleaned’ stewed, ‘closely covered until tender’, in a white sauce seasoned with nutmeg and parsley.

As the 1900s progressed, Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery (c.1920–1939) began referring potential parrot poachers to the pigeon recipes, but as late as the 1950s a 12-parrot pie for a dozen people could still be found in Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery, billed as having ‘nearly 3,000 practical recipes’. Nevertheless, at classy establishments the carte du jour, inevitably presented in French, rarely, if ever, featured parrot. Quite possibly, the colonial cringe and pride in being a healthy nation of meat-eaters (i.e., mutton and beef) ensured that Parroquet à l’Anglaise with Salade Française or Petit Pois was never going to be popular fare.

Not everyone had such choice, nor may they have wished it. Growing up in an Indigenous family at Yantabula, in north-west New South Wales in the 1930s, Evelyn Crawford learnt to make feather belts:

‘There were always lots of galah feathers because we lived on them as meat,’ she recounted. ‘Livin’ just down below us were two Irishmen … The oldest feller … give us Irish stew and it was beautiful. We were there a long time before we found out the meat in it was galahs! We were knockin’ galahs down ourselves with sticks and stewin’ and curryin’ them.’

An old, oft-adapted yarn, sometimes attributed to a convict, has it that to cook a galah one must first pluck the bird and put it in boiling water with a stone, brick, axe-head or boot. When the stone is soft, the cooking is done. Throw away the galah and eat the stone. Perhaps the author of another early recipe had that bush classic in mind:

Dress parrots allowing at least 2 per person. Place in a saucepan, barely cover with water and simmer for 4 hours. This time is necessary as some parrots are a great age and tough.

On the plains of the Namoi, Gould observed that galahs were ‘tame as the ordinary denizens of the farm-yard … coming around the door to receive food in the company of pigeons and poultry, amongst which it mingled on terms of intimate friendship’. They were also mingled in pies. But, by then (1839–1840) the parrots were worth more as commerce. The Nundewar Range supplied ‘an abundant supply of young ones for the draymen and stock-keepers to transport to Sydney, where they were sold for a considerable sum to be shipped to England’ as live specimens or pets.

This burgeoning market for parrots, which continues unabated today, and the introduction of laws in the 1970s preventing the taking of native species, eventually helped to remove parrot from the menu. Much better to show the world that you can afford to feed a parrot than to down it yourself. And, after all, one can hardly fricassee the family pet, particularly if it talks back.

PENNY OLSEN is a Petherick Reader at the National Library, and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. An ornithologist, she edits the Birds Australia magazine, Wingspan

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