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Acquired Tastes:
Celebrating Australia's Culinary History

Compiled and edited by Paul Cliff, text by Colin Bannerman, with Jackie French, Marion Halligan, Eric Rolls and Gay Bilson

Acquired Tastes is a celebration of Australia's culinary history. Colin Bannerman is joined by feature writers Marion Halligan, Jackie French, Eric Rolls and Gay Bilson to bring together an array of material from the National Library of Australia's collections, including its extensive holding of cookery books, pictorial items, magazines, diaries and oral history recordings.

This vividly illustrated, full-colour book presents a broad sweep through the history of Australian cooking from its origins in eighteenth-century English kitchens and sailing ships to the 'fusion' cuisine of the 1990s restaurants, providing sample period recipes along the way. It shows the salt beef, damper and billy tea of pioneering days gradually refined by industry, technology and education and enriched by migration and the discovery of bush tucker.

Finally, it looks at food and eating as two of the most powerful symbols of popular culture, and at how they help to define the way we live, work, enjoy our leisure, and celebrate.

Reviews:

Acquired Tastes is infotainment with a flourish.

Overland, 1999, No 155

Among lively anecdotes and touching personal memories on the role of food in family and community life, Bannerman examines the impact of ethnic influences and new cooking techniques and innovations.

Canberra Times, Wednesday 5 May 1999

Information on authors:

Colin Bannerman is a food historian living in Canberra. He is author of A Friend in the Kitchen: Old Australian Cookery Books (1996) examining Federation cookery, and The Upside-Down Pudding: A Small Book of Christmas Feasts (1999) published by the National Library of Australia. He is currently completing a doctorate on the impact of print media in the development of Australian food culture and eating, c.1850–1920.

Gay Bilson, restaurateur and cook, is perhaps most widely associated with Berowra Waters Inn. She intermittently writes about food and culture in newspapers and journals.

Jackie French, in addition to producing her fiction for adults and children, writes widely in the area of food and cooking, gardening and animals—most recently in Seasons of Content (1998), evoking her home region of Araluen, NSW.

Marion Halligan lives in Canberra and, as well as publishing her novels and short stories such as Out of the Picture (1996) also published by the National Library, has written on food and food culture in her books Eat My Words (1990) and Cockles of the Heart (1996). She has won several major literary prizes, including the Steele Rudd Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.

Eric Rolls has written poetry, autobiography and historical works and has published the three-part gastronomical study A Celebration of Food and Wine (1997).

ISBN 0 642 10693 2
1998, pb, A4, 96 pp, colour and b&w illus.

link to NLA home page

Last updated 11 September 2000