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Food |
| Bush
Tucker |
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 Restaurants
these days also serve 'bush tucker' dishes, which are essentially native
cuisine using native ingredients such as local fruits and meat prepared
the bush style. Try 'damper', which is a flour and water mixture cooked
in campfire coals to make bread or the billy tea, which is tea boiled
in a billy can. You can also try the new and more innovative dish called
'Anaboroo, Mango and Burrawong Soup', which is a blend of three foods
from the Northern Territory namely water buffalo roasted in an elastic
net to keep the high water-content meat intact, the tropical mango, and
burrawong, a native nut.
Aborigines
have been using the same ingredients for 50,000 years. However, the Europeans
first tasted many Aboriginal recipes only in the earliest colonial days.
Until the early 1990s, the only native food plant harvested commercially
was the macadamia nut. Today it is known that out of Australia's 20,000
plant species, some 20 percent are edible. Additionally, a vast untapped
reserve of native flora has turned up on menus including riberries, bunya
nuts, wild rosellas, Kakadu plums, lilipili, and bush tomatoes. New herbs
include native pepperleaf, aniseed myrtle and wattle seed. The sale of
kangaroo meat was only legalized recently and has become extremely popular
because of it low fat content. Along with crocodile, possum and emu, the
list of new ingredients includes baby eels, freshwater yabbies, and witchetty
grubs.
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