Kangaroo Steamer

 

Front plate of The English and Australia Cookery Book

Here is a great recipe from The English and Australian cookery book : cookery for the many, as well as for the upper ten thousand. Published in 1864 this was Australia's very first cookbook. The author was a Tasmanian man by the name of Edward Abbott, who used the pseudonym of 'The Aristologist". Aristology was a word first coined in London in 1835 to describe the art of fine dining.
In his book, Abbott provided a broad selection of recipes including many for English, French and Jewish dishes. As well, he gave many recipes for Australian wildlife like this one for Kangaroo Steamer. Many food historians consider this dish to be the first truly colonial Australian dish. Part of Abbott's intended readership were those belonging to 'the upper ten thousand' or the colonial gentry. It is interesting to speculate whether these readers would have been as interested in the wildlife recipes given in the book as in the description of the hundred guinea dish presented to Prince Albert or the instructions regarding dress and manners at a dinner party.

                                             Kangaroo Steamer (Authors Recipe)

"This is a simple species of braise, and, as its name imports, the meat is steamed. Cut the meat in pieces of about one quarter of an inch square, and put in a pan with a well covered lid, with a spoonfull of milk, an onion shredded into small pieces, and some pepper and salt to taste. When it has been on the fire a short time add about a tenth of the quantity of salt pork or bacon cut the same size as the kangaroo, with a spoonfull of ketchup. Serve hot"

Kangaroo Stew and Elephant Consommé

On Christmas day 1870 Paris had been under siege by the Prussian army for 99 days. Food shortages led Parisians to expand their usual larder of ingredients and even the inhabitants of Paris zoo were not spared. A Christmas menu from a Paris restaurant included exotic dishes such as Elephant consommé, Bear chops in a pepper sauce and Camel roasted English style. Amongst the dishes served that day by chef Alexandre Étienne Choron was a Kangaroo stew. This was not the first time kangaroo had been served far from Australian shores. In 1862 the Acclimatisation Society of Great Britain held a banquet in London which featured a dish called Kangaroo Steamer.

Kangaroo Steamer had long been a feature of the Australian colonial culinary landscape. In his account of his rambles through the colonies in the late 1840s, the aristocratic military officer Godfrey Mundy devoted considerable space, and a gourmet's eye, to food. Mundy described, amongst other things, a high society dinner party, bush recipes, the dearth of good cooks and the over-abundance of meat. He showed a keen appreciation for kangaroo meat and provided his readers with a glowing report on the various ways of preparing this marsupial, including one for skewered kangaroo ‘kabaubs’ (sic) and for the slow cooked kangaroo 'steamer'. He described the steamer as 'very popular with those who have time and patience ' and pronounced the dish to be very tasty.

A sumptuous repast

Wilhelmina Rawson, Mrs. Lance Rawson’s cookery book and household hints (Rockhampton Qld.: William Hopkins, 1886), v.

Wilhelmina Rawson was an adventurous cook and not at all squeamish about what ended up in her cooking pot. In her cookbooks she called for the Australian housewife living in the bush to make the most of the abundant edible wildlife available to her. Kangaroos, bush turkeys and bandicoots were more than just foods of last resort, they were, according to Rawson a ‘sumptuous repast not far from her kitchen’.