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Thursday, September 14, 2000 By Wendy Thomson Warner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It's party time Down Under as Sydney plays host to the 2000 Summer Olympics.
And anyone who saw the spectacular fireworks extravaganza that encompassed most of Sydney's famous harbor on New Year's Eve will acknowledge the city knows how to party.
The Games officially start tomorrow Sydney time, but with the quirk of a 15-hour time difference, the Opening Ceremony starting the Games at 6 p.m. in Australia is taking place at 3 a.m. overnight our time. Confused? Well, we don't have to stay up all night, or even do the math. NBC is making it easy and broadcasting the spectacle at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow.
But the partying outside Olympic Park starts tonight Sydney time and will involve 18 days and nights of free entertainment in several sites around the city. The bash will wind up with a closing concert Oct. 1 at The Domain, a popular spot with weekend soap-box orators, not far from the city's central business district.
Closing ceremonies from Olympic Park at Homebush Bay that night will be broadcast on a slew of gigantic television screens set up in strategic spots around Sydney, as well as in several New South Wales country towns. And, of course, there will be fireworks -- not just one display, reports The Australian newspaper, but five of them.
Several cultural events are running at the same time as the Olympics. They include the Olympics Arts Festival, an extravaganza, already under way, of dance, music and visual arts, and the Manly International Jazz Festival held annually at the beach suburb of Manly, a half-hour ferry ride north of Sydney, fortuitously coinciding with the XXVII Olympiad.
Enjoy these wines with treats from Down Under
And more of the fun can be enjoyed in daylight, as the state of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, switched to daylight-saving time two months early to accommodate it.
But we'll have to content ourselves with network and cable coverage of the Games, which will presumably also include glimpses of a waterfront city of more than 4 million diverse residents, a spectacular harbor, a bustling and cosmopolitan central business district and at least one of the miles and miles of surfing beaches. The beach volleyball competition will be held at Bondi (pronounced Bond-eye) Beach, south of Sydney.
What viewers will not be able to do is sample Australia's eclectic international cuisine.
But, with help from several Australians living in the Pittsburgh area, Post-Gazette readers can try some of the traditional foods that tweak Aussie tastebuds and get expatriates' mouths salivating for the foods we grew up with. If it sounds like I'm salivating, I am... I'm one of them.
At the Sydney Olympic Village, the first one to house all the athletes in one place, a chef is planning a "bush tucker" barbecue during the Games for athletes with a sense of culinary adventure. The Australian reports that it will include such delectables as witchetty grubs, a type of larva eaten by Aborigines in the Outback, kangaroo and emu prosciutto. Tucker is the Australian word for food.
Other bush tucker might include damper, a sconelike mixture of flour, salt and water that is twisted around a stick and held over a fire for an hour or so, and a mug of "billy tea" made in a metal can that looks rather like a paint can with a wire handle. The water is boiled in the can and the tea leaves added when it's removed from the fire. The best billy tea is flavored with a eucalyptus leaf.
So much for the earliest Australian cuisine.
A new Australian cuisine has blossomed in the last 50 years, reflecting the rich contributions to the Australian foodscape of a huge number of immigrants from many parts of the world.
For our purposes, though, we are sticking with more traditional foods found in Australian homes and pubs. They reflect Australia's primarily British beginnings, but are flavored by life in the "sunburnt country."
I've spent the last 34 years in the United States, so I didn't want to rely on my own memory. However, when I asked several other local expatriates, who've lived in America for anywhere from eight to 50 years, what they think of as typical Aussie fare, all were easily able to conjure up a memory menu of the same foods I remember.
The dishes are simple to make and would give a dinkum (authentic) Aussie touch to a Games-watching party. Just add the wine or beer.
First item on just about everyone's list was Pavlova, the quintessential Aussie dessert, named in honor of the great Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova.
It consists of a crisp meringue shell piled high with fresh tropical fruits, whipped cream and, sometimes, ice cream. The Pavlova would be drizzled with passion fruit seeds and pulp -- hard to come by fresh in this area, but I have found it in a thick syrup (Passion Fruit Dessert Sauce) at Williams-Sonoma for $8.
When these expats think about a real Aussie meal, it's likely to be a cookout that includes steak, chops and "snags" or "bangers" (sausages) -- preferably plump beef ones -- and grilled tomatoes. And while Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan's invitation to throw another shrimp on the barbie certainly captures the spirit of entertaining Down Under, in Australia those crustaceans are called prawns, not shrimp. They have a place on a party host's menu, perhaps as prawn cocktail.
Also high on the culinary list are roast leg of lamb with vegetables roasted in the pan with the meat; shepherd's pie that uses up the roast lamb leftovers; sausage rolls (lean sausage wrapped in puff pastry); meat pies (beef or steak and kidney) -- the ultimate portable entree; and perhaps pasties, though they are not nearly as popular as meat pies. For salad, a fresh fruit salad or a garden salad that may well include pineapple and sliced beets.
All would be accompanied by wine, perhaps a good Shiraz -- or as Phillip Hartley Smith of Fox Chapel puts it in the Australian vernacular, "a good plonk" -- and, of course, Australian beer.
Smith, retired chairman, president and CEO of Copperweld, and wife Martha have lived in the United States for 50 years. But memories of traditional Aussie tucker have a long life.
He remembers, as I do, the incomparable taste of potatoes cooked by placing them whole and unwrapped right in the coals, and when they're cooked, splitting them open, adding a dollop of butter and eating the whole thing, charred skin and all.
An increasing appreciation for the wines that have put Australia on the oenological map was one of the changes Joan Urban of Allison Park noticed during a trip back last year.
Urban, who has lived in the United States with husband Ernie for 35 years, found that along with the international flavor of today's Australian cuisine, Australians are paying more attention to the homegrown wines that have won such acclaim overseas. She found more Australians are keeping wines in temperature-controlled conditions in their homes.
But when asked for suggestions for an Australian menu, her memories, too, started off with Pavlova, added Angels on Horseback (prunes wrapped in bacon); "bangers"; Australian Meat Pies; light-as-air Sponge Cake topped with passion fruit; and Lamingtons. Lamingtons are squares made from day-old cake dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut, and they turn up at most festive gatherings.
On the dessert front, Urban brings her own special touch to a fresh fruit salad -- a splash of apricot brandy. "It adds a little depth of flavor," she says. The fruit salad might include pineapple, apple, orange, mango, peaches and -- added right before serving -- strawberries and bananas dipped in a little lemon juice.
She found a new item on the menu at an upscale restaurant she visited in Adelaide -- kangaroo steak. It was listed alongside a traditional Australian delicacy, Carpetbag Steak (steak stuffed with oysters) and a host of international dishes. But the dessert menu featured a traditional Pavlova with wattle seeds and passion fruit sauce.
Kangaroo is a fairly recent addition to restaurant fare. I found it on the menu for the first time in the Outback during a trip to Darwin, Alice Springs and Ayres Rock in 1993. It was served very spicy and appeared to have been marinated and cooked for a long time, so I was intrigued to hear that it was now being served as steaks, which generally require little cooking.
Kirsten St. George, of Squirrel Hill, arrived in 1992 for a three-year stint. Eight years later, she and husband Ian are still here.
St. George, a medical scientist at UPMC, spent the seven years before coming to America in the Australian state of Tasmania, so her food memories include that island's fresh seafood, wonderful cheeses and thick, rich cream; smoked salmon, oysters and abalone, along with the standard ones.
The seafood she thinks of includes a couple of varieties of crustaceans, Moreton Bay bugs and yabbies. The "bugs" are "like little tiny lobsters" and the yabbies are freshwater crayfish about 6 inches long with black shells.
Then her thoughts turned to the universal Australian meal of roast lamb and vegetables, all cooked together in the same pan. St. George serves the rosemary-flavored lamb and vegetables that may include potatoes, carrots, onions and pumpkin, along with peas and gravy and mint sauce. Australian lamb is almost always served with the sweet-sour sauce that bears no relationship to the mint jelly served here. A recipe for St. George's mint sauce is included here, along with recipes for Pavlova, Lamingtons, Joan Urban's wonderful Sponge Cake and Meat Pie.
I've also included a recipe for Kangaroo Steak just for fun. It has not been tested, as I don't know where to find kangaroo around here.
Wendy Thomson Warner is a Post-Gazette page designer and copy editor. She first sailed from her hometown of Sydney in 1966, planning eventually to return. But 34 years later, happily ensconced in Pittsburgh, she will become one of us tomorrow when she takes the naturalization oath to become a U.S. citizen.
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