On Afternoon Light #148 Georgina Downer meets with Tania Cammarano, a food historian, author, and public speaker, to discuss the historical evolution and cultural significance of Italian food in Australia.
Italian food plays an important role in our food culture, not just for its popularity and versatility. Together, Georgina and Tania explore the development of Italian food in Australia, including the import of historic culinary traditions; how restaurants influenced our broader food culture through their creativity and innovation; and the role of glamour in marketing Italian food in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s.
[Music] welcome to afternoon light the podcast of the Robert men’s Institute hosted by Georgina Dano Australia’s food culture has undoubtedly benefited from our Rich migrant story from the ubiquitous Chinese Takeaway in our country towns Italian Coffee Culture and the Aussie barbecue Australia’s food culture is a fascinating reflection of our history of all our imported food Traditions Italian food is arguably the most popular joining me to discuss the history of Italian food in Australia is food historian tya camarano welcome to afternoon light tya thank you Georgina happy to be here oh it’s lovely to have you here you’re not just a food historian you’re also like a Italian food tour guide aren’t you you probably have a better title than but you were just telling me about the wonderful tours you do around Melbourne yes so I’ve basically taken my res SE Arch and I run uh walking tours of the inner city and Carlton mostly where I try to show historical sites that really explain some of the really rich history Italian food and Italian people obviously have had in Australia but in Melbourne specifically and on that tour you know we started the Royal exhibition buildings and I try to extend this idea that or what is actually a myth this myth that Italian food started in the 1950s with the postor war migration cuz it’s it’s much much older than that yes we’ll get on to discussing that I mean we should just note for people who haven’t been to the Robert men’s Institute based here in Parkville which is next to Carlton we’re next to the iconic Italian food Street Ligon Street absolutely and I think Melbourne University students historically have eaten Italian food perhaps before the rest of the population was eating Italian food so I think Melbourne uni is very much part of that story I should have dug out a Robert men’s anecdote from his student days here in the early 1900s maybe he was frequenting Lon street trying some spaghetti who knows but why do you think Italian food has been so popular in Australia I mean is there something about it that makes it attractive to the Australian palet historically or it’s popular all over the world isn’t it absolutely absolutely and it’s popular where there are no Italian migrants as well so that’s worth pointing out I think I think if you ask a historian or an academic they’ll give you a whole range of reasons of factors and I think some of those they’re quite material factors things like immigration obviously industrialization increased Prosperity the media the role of the Australian women’s weekly for example in popularizing foreign Foods in Australia there’s this whole range of concrete or material factors that have gone into the popularity of Italian food in Australia and there’s also the qualities inherent in Italian food itself like it’s pretty easy to prepare it’s very versatile and it’s also delicious right so that helps but in my research what I found in the spread of popularity of Italian food in particular there are also these conceptual factors in play and these are these ideas of Italy that have been in Australia since colonization what Italy has meant imaginings of Italy and how people think about Italy and this has had an effect on food in Australia and these ideas they can be separated into sort of two distinct categories and they go right back to Colonial Australia yeah it’s interesting I’ve lived overseas in Japan and that impression that image of Italy and of France as well in countries that are so completely different culturally it is glamorous it’s luxurious and it’s high status French cuisine Italian cuisine it’s very high stat it’s sort of beautiful beautifully presented and I was there in Japan as an Australian Diplomat trying to sort of sell Australia how to compete with those idealized versions of Italy and France when Australia’s image to the Japanese in this case was quite different yeah I think Italians have had a long time to get that message out there right have yes so I think too that when you think about Italy and Australia and what Italy has meant to Anglo Australians there’s two very distinct periods I think and the first one are these ideas of a Roman antic Italy and these ideas really came to Australia with the English colonists because these ideas were already entrenched in English culture with the ideas of the Renaissance and the romantics and so this kind of idea that the English had of Italy is a land of culture and beauty and art which is why they sent their Descendants on the grand Tours of Europe yes I was going to say they had those experiences in is it 18th century of the Elites in Britain going on their grand tour experiencing Italy going to Rome to Florence all those that amazing culture the art the sculptures obviously the food those experiences are taken back to Britain and then of course some of those Britain end up migrating to Australia with those ideas in place absolutely so there’s a historian Ros pezman who says that these ideas of Italy came to Australia in the cultural baggage of the colonists so that Elite Australia so we are of course talking about a certain level probably not the conv no probably not the convic I don’t think they care too much but this idea that Italian art that Italian sculpture architecture High Italian culture was valuable and valued by the Australian Colonial Elite definitely and I think even though in that period of Australian history there’s obviously it’s not that closely related to food as such but these ideas are there that Italy has positive connotations yeah you know so I think that comes into play in that period And also the actual Italian migrants that were here at that time they were a very small group so by 1901 there’s only about 5,000 Italian migrants in Australia and there’s this perception that they are an artistic and cultured type and if you look at some of them there’s people like civil engineer Carlo katani there’s a lot of artists there’s surgeon and wine industry Pioneer Thomas fasi there’s a lot of opera singers and artists and those types of people so there’s this perception that Italians and ideas of Italy Italy means good and why did those Italians come to Australia in the 19th century cuz that would have been quite unusual as you say there’s only 5,000 and Australia’s population by 1901 I’m going to scratch my head here I think it’s about 4 million or so so they’re a tiny tiny proportion of population absolutely they must have had a particular reason so many of those types were quite the adventurers or there was reason to come or Klo katani for example I was reading recently he came via New Zealand actually they’ve just had this sense of adventure I think many of them so that’s that small group and there were of course people that came for gold and lower class Italians I suppose that also came in that period but there was this perception that they were this artistic intellectual type of person and that early group of Italian migrants to Australia were they from particular regions of Italy or just anywhere they were more generally from the north I would say and of course it’s very different to the mass migration that happened after the second world war which was very much characterized by Southern European migration yeah so this adventurous possibly artistic group of it Ian coming out in that 19th century period so is that when we first start to see Italian cooking entering into Australian quis because of course as you were saying before the received wisdom is that there are lots of Italians who migrate in the 1950s particularly to Melbourne and some to Adelaide some to to Sydney and quite a few to Brisbane wasn’t it and they brought with them their food culture and the rest is history we Ligon Street kind of infiltrated the rest of Australia but that’s not quite no so that’s kind of narrative is definitely the narrative that we read about all the time in that’s on the back of the Legos package 100% so if I had a dollar every time I heard how the Italians came in the 1950s with their espresso machines and their delicious sauces and Anglo Australians were a bit skeptical but curious but then they tried it and then they were one over and I think there’s this great quote the idop file David Dale who basically says you know these Italians came and changed our culture from Bland and boring and they made the national drink cappuccino and they’ve made our attitude playful I mean that’s lovely but it’s absolutely not true so I think what you have is you have these romantic ideas of Italy you have this perception in this early period that Italians are pretty good they’re a interesting group they’re okay but then what you have in the 1920s and 30s is a big increase in the Italian population and this occurs because basically America shuts its doors to Italian migrants and we start to see kind of manual labor jobs become available and Italian migrants here in Australia and they go to Queensland in the sugarcane fields and Western Australia on the gold mines and then you start to see this attitude start to change towards Italian migrants you start to see things where they start to say well these Italian Mars they’re taking our jobs you also see more Southern immigrants come and they’re seen as dirty and they’re not going to fit in with our way of life but most likely they’re going to steal our jobs and they’re also starting to corrupt this idea of a white Australia so the Italian migrants had this kind of difficult position particularly the southern Italian migrant in that they acceptable as migrants to Australia I mean they’re not like Asian or anything but they’re barely acceptable there’s a quotes coming from I can’t remember who but they’re called the Chinese of Europe so they’re still of Europe oh no not very nice no they’re still of Europe but they’re the Chinese and there’s this great book that was actually published here at University of Melbourne by a guy called Jen Ling in 1927 and it’s called non- britishers in Australia and he goes through all the different migrant groups and points out their good bits and their bad bits and this book and the attitudes in this book sum up I think the Australian experience of Italians in that time and he says that the northern Italians are pretty good but the southern Italians there’s a quote along the lines of their blood has been impoverished by Africa and Asia and they’re not that great and really we just want the Northerners we don’t want the southerners and he then goes on to say that well the northern Italians are okay an average Australian can’t tell a northerner from a a southerner right so according to them an Italian’s going to lower the social tone I see so you start to see this shift in attitudes towards Italian migrants and it’s never universally negative I want to point that out too there’s always more welcoming voices for Italians in Australia but certainly in the 20s and the 30s and then of course you have the war and that’s when attitudes really start to harden towards Italian migrants in Australia were the Italians bringing some of their northerner versus Southerner prejudices with them was that from within the community or was that something that Europeans or I guess British had observed in Italy and made their own judgments and then that was in Italy definitely the southern question is a big deal so it’s always existed in Italy so they would have been exposed to these ideas in Italy itself but I think here this was really just based on looks I mean the northern Italian is stereotypically blonde is tall the Southerner is short is dark so I think it’s really around racism and just what it looked like appear yeah yeah yeah which Anglo Australians had absorbed these attitudes that were prevalent in Italy too it’s not like they weren’t the introduction of pasta into Australia comes really early I mean it’s in the 1800s you’re seeing pasta referred to in cookery books I think you write about Australia’s first ever cookery book by Edward Abbott the English and Australian cookery book and there’s even a reference to Pasta in that there is is that coming from Britain do you think so Britains are experiencing pasta in Italy taking it back to to Britain and then bringing it to Australia is that sort of a yes and no so I didn’t say this before but you asked me when Italian cooking kind of starts in Australia we’ve always got Italian ingredients pretty much from the 1830s in Sydney you can buy pasta you can buy olive oil you can buy parmeson cheese Melbourne it’s a little later the 1850s so there ingredients are there and pasta is a good one to think about because pasta’s coming in that English tradition so the colonists bring their Mrs beaten cookbook they’re a Lia actor and if you look in these English books you do see pasta recipes I mean they’re sort of weird pasta recipes there’s things like the macaroni pudding which I don’t know Georgina if you’re familiar with the macaroni not I’m not do tell so this is pasta that it’s cooked in milk generally it is custody thing baked in the oven and then sometimes it’s got jam on it it’s got a bit of nutmeg like a rice pudding but with pasta oh sounds quite nice well I’ve made it with my students before and it’s not as bad as you think it is bit stodgy but that’s all right now this is in Mrs beaten books and this is in the English cookbooks and if I tell an Italian there’s this recipe and it’s got sugar and milk and pasta’s cooked for ages they’re just disgusted but actually if you go back to the Renaissance in Italy pasta was cooked with milk and sugar and this is where that’s gone to England that tradition of cooking pasta in that way so it does come from Italy it’s just that by the 1800s the Italians have moved on they’ve added sauce they’re not cooking pasta in that way anymore but the English are still doing it and then the English bring it here right so macaroni puddings you can see in Australian cookbooks right up until the 1950s and then what happens to them they kind of disappear and people go off some well I think a few things happen in that attitudes towards dessert in Australia change we’ve got Refrigeration we also know more about vitamins and things like that so we start to think well maybe we should be having lighter desserts maybe we should be having more fruit and then of course there is the Italian influence of pasta being cooked in a certain way that has nothing to do with milk and sugar and this kind of thing so a number of things come together so that when you look at because one of the things I have done which was a good fun time let me tell you was I looked at pasta in 100 popular Australian cookbooks from 1864 to 1975 so I ended up with this sample of a thousand and so pasta recipes to look at how pasta was used in Australia and much of the influence was Italian and in the end I sort of concluded that actually in the ‘ 50s and Beyond I mean what I did find was that there are very early Italian pasta recipes in fact you know in 1895 there is a pasta recipe a fresh vermicelli recipe so actually fresh pasta in Mrs rosson’s book of 1895 which most people are quite surprised when I say that these recipes exist and in Mrs rosson’s book does she refer to being Italian or it’s just this is just how you cook this dish made out of whe because she’s actually already reflecting how pasta is used in the English cookbooks so this it’s kind of this more English tradition of cooking pasta but it gradually changes and there are foreign recipes in those books as well so some of the early Italian is recipes in Australian cookbooks I can think of some off the top of my head in 1900 Zara Ronson’s book there’s a recipe for what she calls retti but a really AR Chen there’s risotto m in the cabara cookery book of 1912 and there’s little recipes along the way of course Cuisine absorbs foreign influence all the time so this Italian influence it’s already gone into those English books it’s come over here they’re angl sized versions of Italian recipes or past’s gone in a different direction which it did but in this massive sample of pasta recipes I was talking about there’s pasta recipes in nearly every single one of those books only four didn’t have them but they’re not pasta recipes that you would recognize as Italian generally but there are some and they increase as you can imagine once you get over the 50s you start to see more and more pasta recipes that we would recognize as Italian dishes as such yeah they have more connection to traditional Italian cuisine rather than co-opting the pasta to then fit in with a recipe that potentially is more traditionally British yeah but I think that’s kind of the beautiful thing about food right it can be whatever you need it to be that’s true so we can all be culinary purists like my father and insists that certain things be done certain ways but actually that’s the beauty of food that it changes that it’s versatile that it reflects what’s going on yeah yeah well ultimately the best report card of a dish is did you like it or not I mean if you just because it was traditional and someone cooked it 400 years ago and you’re still cooking it the same way if it’s not very nice why bother change it good point tell me about the Italian restaurants that were around in the it was really the early 20th century wasn’t it you start seeing Italian restaurants here in Melbourne here in Melbourne primarily yeah but they were in other cities as well so I guess if we go back to so this again speaks to how there was Italian food prior to the 1950s I recently found a reference to an Italian restaurant at 130 Spring Street in Melbourne in 1854 oh what’s there now do you know I don’t know what’s there now I don’t know anything about it except it’s called the Italian restaurant and it’s 1854 and that that was incredible by the 1890s there’s a restaurant called faes on Londale Street and that’s a very big prominent restaurant and it really attracted the Bohemian crowds and that was run by a guy called Vincent fol who was Swiss Italian and the Swiss Italians have had actually a lot to do with Italian food because the first pasta maker was Swiss Italian in the 1850s Petro Luchini in the headb bur Springs area but for soles you could get dishes like osuko again I think the rotto Milan madella said to be made from horse meat whether it was or not but there are lots of description of faes that we have so we have some idea of of what went on there and what was the reception to Foles at the time you said it’s Bohemian so was it that group of melburnians who were going there and then maybe sort of more conservative types would never go there is that the I that’s the impression that I get that it was writers that it was artist that type of person that they drank red wine and that they have lived this good life so your average Suburban mom and dad is obviously not going there s I know missing out they had to wait a bit to get into the whole Italian restaurant thing but then you have the restaurants in Melbourne that emerge in the 20s and 30s so as more Italian migrants come to Australia you see some of them said mostly in sort of the Theater District of Melbourne and those there’s five big families and those families were later christened the spaghetti Mafia and they’re really interesting group and if you look at them and what came out from them like the waiters and the chefs and whatever their tentacles are spread all over the city and even now if you look at gry Florentino so gry Florentino was originally the Florentino Cafe and that was from Ronaldo masoni who was one of the original spaghetti Mafia guys so you know in the 20s and 30s you have all these restaurants popping up in Melbourne and they were popular again more amongst the politicians and businessmen and high class then they’re opinion leaders right so they’re the people who are being reported on in press on radio when we start to get radio so in actual fat those Impressions would have been permeating Suburban Society even if it wasn’t necessarily where everyday Australians were going yeah that’s right and so even though not everybody was eating in those restaurants but there was a certain awareness at these restaurants at these wine bars that they existed and it kind of filters down right so yeah we didn’t have the internet then so it wasn’t as no but we read we read a lot more we read we read more things yes so what is your sense of the food I guess pre1 1950s or even in 1950s I mean there’s this common idea that Australian food only really improved with multiculturalism in the sort of 60s and 70s and finally we didn’t have the Meat and three veg and very Bland monotonous food that is associated with our history but do you think that’s true or do you think we’re just trying to impose a 2024 pallet on what meal we would have got in 1950 and you’re just a different person then so first of all I don’t think it was as Bland or as boring or as unimaginative as we like to say now and we know that there was lots of foreign influence cuz it was in cookbooks there were these restaurants and of course there were Chinese restaurants there were Greek restaurants there were French restaurants Continental restaurants German restaurants so there was lots of different options even though and I guess I want to stress this they were not everyday they were not common as such they were not most people were eating meat and three veg however if you look at at cookbooks and things like that you can see that actually Australian cooks and this is something that Barbara Santi who I guess is the preeminent food historian culinary history in Australia has pointed out that Australian Cooks were really inventive and creative and yes Australian Cooks did value good plain cooking but there was a lot of creativity in that and she points out the cannon of cakes especially and desserts and that thing that Australian Cooks produced showed that they were creative and even in pasta recipes some of the recipes I came across I was like who would have thought to do that one of them off the top of my head was called macaroni cutlets and they got macaroni and they cooked it till I know I didn’t say it was good they cooked it till it was very soft and then they mashed it up and they put some egg and they put some other things in there and then they crumbed it and then they added an uncooked macaroni and stuck it on the side like the cutlet bone and then they fried it and so that’s pretty creative really isn’t it it is creative I don’t know if it’s that tasty would have been a lot of macaroni but anyway lot of carbs there you go carbon carb action I have noted a lot of that in Old cookbooks so one of the things that is important in the development of Italian food in Australia is this sort of industrialization of food isn’t it and you’ve looked at the example of the perfect Cheese Company what a name the perfect cheese company so the perfect cheese company is a really interesting case study for I think if you go through their history it kind of explains how Australian pallets have changed but also the role of Italian migrants and how that role is not at all passive it is not at all about these Italian migrants came with their food and these Anglo Australians discovered it as such yes there sort of this idea that the camarano moved in next door they had their little garden and tomatoes and basil and the like and we were looking across the fence and smelling their yummy food and then maybe one day we dared to try it and we dared to talk to them and then look oh suddenly now we’re cooking spaghetti bologneses too yeah absolutely I get quite passionate about that whole narrative but I mean yes on a micro level yes those interactions absolutely happen like just thinking about it we made sauce that whole traditional looking for aliand thing of making sauce and we had these Australian neighbors and they had beer bottles and we had this cultural exchange where they gave us the bottles to put the sauce in and then we gave them the sauce so I’m not saying that that didn’t happen but what I do think is that Italian migrants in the food industry and others in the food industry as well that were not Italian migrants not that it was just Italian migrants pushing Italian food they really adapted and changed and pushed their food into the mainstream so to go back to the perfect Cheese Company it was started by Natalia and Maria Italiano in 1930 very close to here what their original Factory in 1935 so they were originally in Peele Street and they made Ricotta and peino in their backyard and sold at the Queen Victoria market and they were really selling A Taste of Home to the Italian migrants but their first factory which still stands but I bet it won’t be there much longer is on the corner of Capel and Queensbury which is a ston throw from here and they made their cheese and they sold it to the Italian migrants very small community at that time in 1930 but very quickly by 1937 they were already making feda and casseri and cheeses so Greek cheeses to the Greek Greek migrants of course natal was from Calabria he was his family were cheese makers but he wouldn’t have known how to make feda so he came here and very quickly he’s decided oh I better make feta for the Greeks they’re there I’ll figure it out right so it’s kind of this entrepreneurial spirit that really you can see in this company and they very quickly grow so in the 30s though nobody cares about their cheese there’s no record of them in the archives in the daring division archives it’s quite possible that they were making cheese illegally because at that time in Australia if you or in Victoria anyway if you were making cheese from milk that was not yours you needed a cheese license and there’s no record of them having a cheese license to be fair to them the archives are incomplete so maybe that piece of paper wasn’t there but so they were in the Italian press and they were very much marketing to migrants but in the 1950s you start to see this change in the way that the perfect cheese company is thought of and you start to see them in the pages of the daring Division and all of a sudden you see that Natalia and Maria are pushing their cheese into the main stream and they’re doing this by having Partnerships with the Australian cheese board by being in trade magazines they produce a silver anniversary booklet in 1956 that is published in both Italian and English so straight away now you’re starting to see that hey we want to go after the mainstream market we want them to know about our cheese they really didn’t know about their cheese though because in the 30s Etc there was only one cheese that mattered in Australia and that was cheddar there was really nothing else the cheese that the italianos made was categorized as fancy cheese right which I love that Monica fancy cheese just one category fancy cheese and in fact if you wanted to enter your cheese of the Royal Melbourne show there was no category up until in 1952 that you could enter it into there was only different types of cheddar categories all right in 1952 they have the first fancy cheese category and the italianos win it with their cheese cuz it’s not really that many others although in the 50s there are a lot of companies fancy cheese was parmesan mozarella feta everything that wasn’t cheddar right okay wow so even Dutch sort of G those yes so this is in Australia yes absolutely and in 1952 and Beyond 1952 you start to see a proliferation of all the different categories in the agriculture shows and that really shows how the cheese world is changing but in the 1950s yeah we start to see this shift in this C that they produce which actually has portraits of Natalia Maria done by helmet Newton the fashion photographer who was in Melbourne at that time I know right it’s crazy wow it’s like wow that’s really weird but you start to see that they’re pushing into the mainstream there is an introduction in this book written by the director of the daring division basically saying natal taliano is amazing and then they have an Italian forward which I just have to mention this they got a parish priest to write that cuz that’s what you do if you’re Italian cuz that’s the person that’s going to say the best things about you but they really start to push their cheese into the mainstream and at that point now when they started there were nearly no Italians at that point in the 50s where they live Fitzroy the factory eventually moves to Fitzroy they really could have just marketed to Italian migrants and had a very successful business but they push into the mainstream and they eventually become the sixth largest cheese manufacturer in Australia and they do heaps of innovative stuff like they’re the first company to actually produce sheep’s milk cheese in Australia and which nobody else had done I mean I know sheep for cheese is different to sheep for agricultural purposes but still they’re the first to do this and they really push themselves out into the mainstream so by the 1970s natal taliano is actually used as a poster Boy by the department of Foreign Affairs to attract migrants to Australia Wow and his cheese which was one fancy cheese and we don’t really care is celebrated and you start to have all these kind of workshops around produced by the government about how do we make more ethnic cheese it’s changed to ethnic cheese by the 70s so everyone’s going to ask what happened to the perfect cheese company was it taken over or does it still yeah it does well perfect Italiano which people that go to the Super Market is perfect cheese well but in 1981 they sold the company to the first of a number of multinationals so was unigate 981 and yeah it’s still perfect Cheese Company till around 96 and this again tells the story of Italian migrants in 96 bonlac another multinational takes it over and they changed the name from perfect cheese company to perfect Italiano Because Why by 1990s it’s pretty cool to be Italian especially connected with food that idea that it’s authentic that it’s real but of course in 1930 why did Nataly call it the perfect Cheese Company why didn’t he give it an Italian name I’d say because in the 30s not a great time to fly your Italian flag no so tell me about that time for Italians you know leading up to World War II and then of course during World War II it’s not a great time to be an Italian in austr no it’s really not so we talked about how earlier those Italian migrants were seen in a positive light then it starts to shift in the 20s and 30s with those more manual labor migrants possibly taking Australian jobs that whole rhetoric in the 30s things get quite bad because obviously the war is coming Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 is seen in a very bad way in Australia and they’re starting to be real suspicions about these Italian migrants and what exactly they’re up to and so of course when the war comes lots of Italians are ined and attitudes towards Italians there is this real fear that there’s a fifth column that they’re spies that they’re enemies of Australia that there a lot of surveillance whatever nothing is ever found that supports any of that but they were real fears definitely so the Italian migrant becomes shunned and one of the interesting things that’s produced in this period is this cookbook that I found that was published in 1937 and obviously listeners can’t see it but I’ve got a copy of it in front of me yeah it does look pretty cool yeah this book is produced by by a group of Italian migrants called Australia’s first Continental cookery book and it’s published in 1937 by a group of Italian migrants who are very strongly linked with fascism and these Italians they initially published a newspaper in Australia called IL jordal Italiano which is seen as a fascist newspaper and in fact it’s when Italy invades Ethiopia that the Australian publisher of that paper doesn’t want to publish it anymore for obvious reasons so this is when they decide to set up their own Publishing Company the Cosmopolitan publishing company which not only publishes the newspaper but starts to publish a whole range of Publications that are really all designed to teach Anglo Australians about the value and worth of Italians and Italian cultural products so there’s books about Italian music books about Italian language and of course this cookbook now Georgina you might notice it never says it’s an Italian cookbook no it’s Continental MH yeah and there’s no Italian author on it there’s no author on it at all so how do I know that it’s an Italian cookbook is I’ll tell you in a second but the reasons for that I think is because it’s 1937 nobody’s going to pick up a book That’s Italian no there’s not really going to fly it’s absolutely subversive and it’s really got this message in this book that Australians eat way too much meat and potatoes they need to eat more fish more vegetables and basically they need to eat like Italians and that’s we still being told that aren’t we we’re still being told terranean darts the way to go so but if I can read like a little bit of the introduction it says it’s time for Australians to realize in fact that what one may call Mediterranean cookery has much to offer them Italian cookery for instance embodies ideas aims and methods that have not only been ripening for literally thousands of years but have been doing so under climatic conditions far more closely resembling those of Australia than do the British then elsewhere it says one Keen ambition of the Continental cookery book is to flash a ray or two of light onto the occasionally somewhat obscure recesses of traditional British cookery Not For a Moment that the ladder has no merits but that so many of its good points are unsuitable or only half suited to Australian conditions also says French cookery is practically an offshoot of the Italian British cookery with all its merits can boast no such illustrious pedigree it is only common sense then for Australians to avade themselves of what in the very nature of things must offer them most valuable and interesting examples of food preparation to ignore such a mind of information is not merely to confess but to cherish one’s own ignorance wow so this book is very much about Australians don’t know how to eat you need to eat like us it’s extraordinary so written by Italian migrants published by The Cosmopolitan Publishing Company I’ve obviously looked into that company and what else they published they work were fascist they were all in turn during the war the company shut down but they really were trying to as they say build a bridge between Australians and Italians and was this book popular did this do well was it look it it’s hard to tell because it’s not like there’s bestseller lists in the 1930s but it was advertised and reviewed in the age in the city Morning Herald and in the Brisbane paper so it was definitely widely available there are that I know of six copies there was also an Italian version published the Italian version there’s only one copy of that that I know of so I think it was sufficiently widespread I think it stood no chance of its message being heed in 1937 but a lot of the things that it said have actually come true we do think like that now and some of the recipes in there you know you’ve got recipes for lasagna you’ve got recipes for pizza you’ve got recipes for a whole range of Italian dishes that in 1937 you wouldn’t think would be in this cookbook torini etc etc except it’s really in that it doesn’t call them those things because of course nobody would have known what they were talking about so I think lasagna recipe is something like genoise ribbon macaroni because it’s a lasagna with pesto and the pizza recipe is just called a Neapolitan recipe right but it’s it’s Pizza yeah so I think this book it’s sort of utopian literature CU these Italian migrants have gone we’re not valued in Australia we’re not understood in Australia this is what we want we want this world where you eat foods from all different countries primarily ity because we have this knowledge and we want to share it with you but it’s lovely too in that it’s still very very positive about Australian produce and the possibilities for Australian Cuisine and it’s written in a really engaging approachable style it sounds very Australian of that era doesn’t it so it’s very different to any other cookbook of that period like if you read those this one’s actually there’s really funny lines in it there’s one about it’s not nice but it’s funny lamb and hurry to start with it must be real lamb not mutton rejuvenated like ambitious ladies on the wrong side of 40 oh dear wow cutting yes so even though I don’t know who wrote it I strongly suspect I know who wrote it and he was a guy who was editor of the newspaper his name was Franco batia and I am hoping very much hoping that I’m going to meet with his son in the near future and see if I can get some more information maybe find something in the paper still work out if it’s him so this cool book I mean fascinating not least for its links to Fascism within Australia but how it’s portraying Italian food and trying to democratize it in a very difficult political climate for Italians but what was really really influential in the 50s of course was the Australian women’s weekly and it’s incredible to read about how the Australian women’s weekly was introducing the Glamorous side of Italy with all this influx of migrants from Italy who were were perhaps perceived less glamorously as you say that tended to be coming from the southern part of Italy tended to be less educated and certainly not bringing that Gucci you know milany Florentine impression with them but Australian women’s weekly does quite an amazing job of glamorizing Italy and Italians presumably in an effort to help introduce all these new migrants new Australians to the Australian population m I don’t know if that’s the reason yeah I do think the Australian women’s weekly was very influential and I do think that they traded on these ideas of glamorous Italy so remember I talked about the Romantic ity Period so once we get to the 50s you start to see these ideas it’s so we’ve gotten through the horrible War years for Italian migrants in Australia now we’re in the sort of post-war period and Italian food is definitely becoming more popular now because of things like the weekly as well and I think it’s more related to these ideas of glamorous Italy than it is related to the fact that there are more Italian migrants here but do you think there’s not a curiosity within the Australian public Australian Housewives reading the Australian women’s weekly that they want to understand who these people are and then you have the women’s weekly saying look we’re going to have an Italian fashion parade and we’re going to bring them around the country I mean it was amazing reading this isn’t the women’s weekly but reading about David Jones Italian Festival in 1966 so a bit later which featured a 161 ton plaster replica of Michelangelo’s day they had to pull apart the Sydney building to get it in there I think what the weekly well the weekly was very much involved with so in the 1950s you’ve got these ideas of glamorous Italy start to kind of permeate and they’re really spread by whereas romantic Italy is spread by high Italian culture and literature Etc glamorous Italy is really spread by popular culture that emerges in Italy and Italian cultural products so an Italian design becomes this kind of embodiment of Glamour really and it’s reflected in Italian movies made in Italy Hollywood movies made in Italy so three coins in the fountain and Roman Holiday and all that American stars going to Italy living in Rome AA Gardner and Liz Taylor wearing Italian fashion and all of this is written about in places like the Weekley so Italy becomes like this source of Glamour and what the weekly does is they use that glamour to market italian food as such and also more generally just this idea that Italy is a glamorous thing and Australian Housewives should be sophisticated ated and they do bring out these Italian fashion models in 1955 and they’re these four Italian models they come to Australia with the weekly partners with the different department stores in each City David Jones and Meer in Melbourne David Jones in Sydney but they go everywhere they even go to I think they go to wag waga from memory I don’t know why that stood out to me but anyway and the Press lose their mind over these women they’re on the front of the weekly they got their elegant jackets they got their gloves and there’s lots of talk about them and they have these fashion parades and at these fashion parades they are served Italian food they have Italian music they’re designed in like they have sets that resemble Florence’s pity Palace where fashion parades is shown like they sound amazing and the weekly reports on it all the newspapers report on it and they even include recipes from the Italian models who they talk about as this epitome of Glamour and sophistication Australian women could really learn from us this whole thing that goes on and Italian food is very much part of that idea of Glamour and fashion and what’s interesting to me is how this is the period in which more and more Italian migrants are coming and they are divorced from that yeah so and how can that be I mean it just seems so hypocritical yeah right it’s like the Paradox at the heart of everything I research is how can Italian food be seen as glamorous and sophisticated while these Italian migrants are coming and they’re really seen in a very poor light there’s this amazing article that was published just a year before the fashion parades in 1954 it’s got a really stark contrast between the way those models were treated and the way these Italian women potential migrants so I think it’s in the Sun Herald and a journalist is on some boat that’s coming over to Australia and he talks about the female migrants in particular the female Italians on this ship and he says they are inappropriately passionate they had to be ordered to wash at night we can’t assimilate these kind of people we need to be careful and there’s this really strong contrast between ideas of Italy as epitomized by those glamorous models and actual Italian migrants themselves and I think Italian food in that period is very much attached to the ideas of Glamour because you’ve got those fashion parades you’ve got David Jones doing these food festivals and then you’ve got companies like Legos for example which Legos not Italian at all started so this is I mean you talk about cultural appropriation so this is incredible story and I just don’t think people would have any idea I mean I think of Legos Doo authentico yes authentico yeah tell us about yes so Legos is not Italian at all it was started by a Cornish migrant Henry madin Lego in the 1890s in Bendigo they made tomato kind of preserves and sauces jams all a whole range of different products in Bendigo and in the early period there’s a couple of Legos cookbooks out there and they’re about fruit and being healthy and very much talked about their local Bendigo tomatoes and nothing to do with Italy then all of a sudden in the 50s you start to see that they are producing the tomato paste and the can has Italian language on it and it’s all seems to be very Italian and you’re like who what’s going on here and there is this shift they make a conscious shift to present themselves as Italian but they’re never Italian and they start to associate marketing opport marketing opportunity yes so they see two things so they see that they’re a increasing Italian market for a start so Italian Housewives themselves will need tomato paste but they also see that Italian food is becoming popular and we can Market this to Anglo Australian Housewives and we’ll do it by seeming to be Italian and they just get more and more Italian by the minute they do so 1975 they produced an Italian cookbook where if you looked at it you think they were Italian and then in 78 talk about Glamour and Italian food they have Gina laa Bria come out and the ads she’s in this gold sequence dress and honestly she looks like she’s never been let alone in a kitchen in Australia and there’s a can that’s superimposed so it’s not holding the can or anything and these ads run in the weekly and in newspapers and she says you know when I’m in Australia I always use Lego’s tomato paste and so there’s this real association with Glamour and Italian food and we see that too with other Italian personal especially safia Loren is another one I mean if you Google Saia Loren and food you’ll be inundated and she’s written two cook books she famously said although she’s later said she didn’t say that everything you see here she owes the spaghetti and she even made 1971 film called la madella which is about an Italian woman who smuggles in madella to New York for her American lover and the poster though the poster it’s renamed Lady Liberty in Australia I haven’t seen this movie I’ve been trying to see in this movie the poster is sopia L Ren dressed as a Statue of Liberty and she’s got spaghetti for her torch and she’s got an armful of small goods and it’s like of course Italian food is going to absorb this sort of glamorous connotation so T tell me how do we get to the stage I mean clearly we are today I mean Italian migrants in Australia wouldn’t even blink twice our prime minister is the son of Italian migrant you don’t think that albanesi is particularly an Italian name it’s just a name you’re last name is a name totally and utterly accepted part of Australian Society how do we go from having this disconnect where we saw Italian culture and food as glamorous and high value but Italian people in Australia migrants Australia as disassociated from that and actually somewhat Outcast to today how does that trajectory connect or does it never connect no it connects I think I think what happens is Australia starts to change I mean I think that the end of the white Australia policy I mean and even before the end of the white Australia policy you start to see initially there are these attitudes that Italians should assimilate and nowhere is that better summed up in the 1957 book They’re a weird mob by Nino kot is actually James o Grady that basically says become like an Australian and you will be happy and just be like them and you’ll be great and everything will be bonsa I shouldn’t say bonsa but anyway so you have these ideas of assimilation but even as Australia’s Multicultural makeup starts to change there’s this idea perhaps that we shouldn’t actually erase our cultural heritage we should start to embrace people from elsewhere and let them Express their culture however they need to express their culture and I think for the Italian what happened was a few things the upward Mobility the success of Italians in Australia absolutely the upward mobility of the next Generations of Italians but I think too it went once you get to the end of the white Australia policy and you start to see other migrants come in who are more culturally distant than Italians were you see Italians start to be embraced as the focus moves towards well we shouldn’t have Asians or we shouldn’t have Africans or we shouldn’t have these other culture groups so Italians move I mean it sounds horrible but they kind of move up that pole to the point where they are described as the Exemplar minority community in terms of food and how Italian migrants and Italian food kind of come together we talked about this glamorous ity where Italian migrants are quite separate as we move along so in the 70s you start to see cookbooks from Australian women’s weekly and Margaret Fulton that fully Embrace Italian food in the 70s in the ‘ 80s you start to get a lot of Italian migrant chefs mostly ‘ 80s and ’90s where Italian chefs are producing all this sort of food but there’s this change in Attitude around what food should be and i’ like to call Next Period this idea of authentic Italy where food practices by Italian migrants start to be seen as actually really good things to do to be close to your food to know where your food comes from to make tomato Source from scratch like these become valued and Italian migrants become bearers of this so there’s this real coming together of ideas of Italy where now authentic Italy is a good thing also bound up with ideas of slow food which is an Italian invented thing I guess that’s it’s good to be slow around your food and eat in a certain way and so Italian migrants become very associated with being authentic bearers of food and you can see this in Italian cookbooks there’s a few that a migrant produce that like one off the top of my head that I think of his mja mja which is written by Italian migrants was a big publishing success or the children of Italian migrants and really celebrates that cultural connection to food that kind of I guess peasant connection to food so I think they all sort of come together yeah so Italian migrants become more acceptable but also the way they are with food becomes Zeitgeist it becomes how we all want to be with food and that expectation in the 50s that migrants assimilate into Australian Society there was also the Converse that Australians were getting to know and assimilating to a more Multicultural Society so Australians were changing as much as the migrants that they welcomed were changing and as you say as we got more used to Italians and newer migrants came in the Italians became actually that we know them they’re unremarkable the new ones will we’ll worry about them we worry about them so I think that’s what happened yeah oh Tanya this has been an absolutely delightful conversation and clearly I need to book in one of your walking tours around Melbourne and particularly one that involves an eating aspect as well they all involve eating aspects definitely well we’ll make sure we put the link to that in our show notes so that others can also find you and enjoy that experience but thank you so much for talking to us today about the history of Italian food in Australia thank you it was lovely thank you that’s it for this week’s episode of afternoon light the podcast of the Robert mensies Institute please make sure to subscribe and catch up on our latest online content on our website or on Twitter LinkedIn or Facebook [Music]