Flavour Country

I held my breath as Alain bit into the meat pie.

The filling was probably offal, but we inspectors have open minds from global experience of culinary practice. Marinated beef heart is a delicacy in Peru. Chopped liver is a traditional Jewish dish. Even Escoffier taught us to simmer bones for beef stock. For us, if it tastes good, the part of the cow does not matter.

Alain’s face scrunched. With a delicacy appropriate for handling dynamite, he placed the remainder of the pie on the plastic table. He gazed at me with eyes as empty as the parched scrubland stretching to the horizon.

It did not taste good.

We anticipated the danger of treacherous canteen eatables during this long drive, and after leaving Adelaide stopped for farm fresh roadside boxes of nectarines, peaches, and cherries. Enough to keep our morale healthy until we returned to civilisation.

The Western Australia customs checkpoint did not share our professional enthusiasm for locally sourced produce. They stripped us of our fruits, and even of the truffles we purchased outside Canberra, insisting that our Perigord blacks could be the forbidden Chinese variety.

Divested of our means of sustenance, desperation forced us to sample the fare of this roadhouse. When you eat as frequently as we do, your body will not let you skip a meal.

As a junior member of the Guide, I’m accustomed to indifferent meals in desolate countryside. One month in Scotland, I discovered the extremities possible only for haggis, and hospitality that would have made the Macbeths blush. And this is my second trip to Australia, so I know what it is to have beetroot ambush you from within a hamburger, or to contend with the haphazard deconstruction of a kebab known variously as an HSP or AB.

Not so Alain, who has spent the last few years covering the Bordeaux region, with its plump foie gras and plush red wine sauce. Not ideal preparation for the ruthless pragmatism of Australian cuisine.

Over the last week, I have been bolstering his palate. The buttery macadamia nut cookie was a success. A bush tucker degustation at this country’s National Museum introduced him to sweet midyim berries and tangy finger lime. In Adelaide, we had a close call with something called a “bung fritz”. However, the Barossa Valley’s wines impressed him, even if their shiraz lacks the elegance of Bordeaux’s terroir.

Only yesterday morning, I felt confident enough to present him with a thin layer of vegemite on toast. Sensing his trepidation at this notorious viand, I framed it as akin to Japan’s pungent tamari soy sauce, bitter but with an undeniable umami punch. He nibbled the toast, and gave the spread cautious approbation, calling it a testament to the celebrated resilience of the Australian character.

In my hubris, I wondered if he might almost be ready to experience fairy bread. But that would mean tasting Australian butter, something perilous for any Frenchman.

Alas, all that progress was undone by one meat pie forged in the microwave of disappointment. After that, Alain would not even touch the local variation on a spring roll I also purchased. That was probably his good fortune, because on tasting it, I knew I had found the fabled mausoleum where cabbages go to die.

The only thing that saved our journey was that after a day on the road it was faster to keep going than to turn around.

As all foodies know, the Guide does not cover Australia, despite its unique native ingredients and brash fusion cuisine. Of course, there is always haggling between the company and the tourism boards of various countries, but we inspectors do not concern ourselves with such bureaucratic minutiae. For us, the food on the plate is everything.

Curiosity, and a smidge of professional ambition at claiming virgin territory, led me to take a working holiday sampling Australian food. Of course, I visited celebrated establishments such as Attica and Ester, and was suitably rewarded. But I needed something more to impress the other inspectors. The unknown, the local, the unique, the special.

So I left the coastal cities, and prowled the inland highways in a rented Toyota Corolla in search of Australia’s gastronomic Arcadia.

On a long road called the Eyre Highway, I found it. An establishment that empitomised Australian dining.

Back in France, I boosted my discoveries enthusiastically, and the management decided to dispatch a senior inspector with an expert palate with me on a return trip to confirm the worthiness of Australian dining.

Alain is an excellent inspector, of course, but he speaks no English, so I had to be his chaperone and cultural liaison. My reputation and career depended on his continued good opinion, or at least his tolerance. I never imagined that my future would depend to such a degree on the fluffiness of lamingtons and pavlova.

Our rapid tour of the eastern cities went well, and we shared hotel rooms with minimal drama, winding down at the end of each day in our matching single beds with subtitled TV movies such as Les Valeurs de la Famille Addams or Le Grande Lebowski.

After Adelaide, it was time to show him my hidden gem, and prove the value of both Australian food and my ongoing service to the Guide. This would require 8 hours on the road together, but we are both accustomed to long road trips from our routine as inspectors. Annoyingly, they drive on the wrong side of the road in Australia. I had more experience of this from time in the UK, so I agreed to take the wheel.

A few hours into the trip, the trees wandered off, and the drive became an endless scroll of sky and unmotivated shrubbery. Wind farms became windmills, and then we were lucky to even see a post with a windsock. Even the radio became an unreliable companion, and we lost our chance to guess a sound for prize money in the static haze. We both agreed that the excerpt we heard was chicken sautéing, although our perceptions might have been biased by our vocation.

At one point, we saw a crossing sign that cautioned drivers against wandering camels, but none of these animals interfered with our progress.

We stopped at the Big Galah, a suitably large pink and grey reproduction of one of these unusual Australian birds. I suppose we French had our Elephant of the Bastille, so we should not judge the aesthetic merits of giant animal monuments. Feeling the heat, we bought these hats called ‘akubras’ from the gift shop, and the act of donning them was enough to make us feel like heroic stockmen.

A little after that, we noticed an improbably placed golf hole next to a motel, and stopped for a round. On artificial grass, in the middle of nowhere, brandishing rented clubs, we putted our way to glory, until a snake emerged from the brush, and we were forced to flee the course. Returning to the motel, we panicked at the sight of another snake on the bitumen, but this turned out to only be an unspooled firehose.

After these adventures, customs seizing our food was a cruel blow to our flagging bodies, and the subsequent affliction of a meat pie served in a plastic bag crippled our resolve. I envisioned my punitive banishment to inspection of German restaurants, where I would languish under a daily diet of kransky and spaetzle.

But our destination was only an hour away now.

Alain did not speak for the next part of the journey. The dashes on the unbending road were as unchanging as the empty scenery, and time itself seemed to slow, as though its gait was wearied by the harsh outback sun.

We reached our goal, a weathered food caravan just off the highway. For seating, it offered some stools, with tin drums for tables. Next to the caravan was a self-service petrol pump, no doubt the main attraction for anyone who stops here.

I asked the chef in the caravan window if he remembered me. He looked at us with a blank expression, and gave an indifferent shrug.

I ordered us the kangaroo steak with sweet potato mash.

Alain was hesitant after the meat pie fiasco, but I had staked my reputation on this meal. Taking mismatched and bent cutlery in hand, he sliced off a sliver of meat, and placed it in his mouth.

Alain had been with the Guide for five years, and experienced gourmet masterpieces from the world’s most brilliant and motivated chefs, specialities from Peking duck to bouillabaisse to dulce de leche. His standards are the highest.

But on Alain’s face, I could see only rapture.

How to describe this steak to someone who is not a professional food inspector… Well, kangaroo is a game meat, which means it can have an overwhelming pungency, but this was mellow, without losing its distinctive flavour. Toughness can also be an issue for this meat, especially if overcooked, but this steak melted in the mouth like chocolate. It was also bursting with flavour, which I would normally associate with a prime cut aged for at least 28 days to boost umami. The sweet potato mash was an excellent addition, adding a saccharine hint but without detracting from the savoury kangaroo. As a final touch, the meal was topped with a few small, red, tart fruits I did not then recognise, each with a nutty kernel. I now know these were quandong. Adroit pairing of local ingredients. A metropolitan chef would no doubt add bombastic filigrees to enhance the dish’s presentation, but the restraint fit the locale, and showed confidence in the food - a simple meal for a spartan landscape, hearty enough to sustain the dusty traveler.

True, the venue was lacking in service and comfort, so it could not receive our highest recommendation. But for us the quality of the food is always most important, and a meal this extraordinary would certainly merit the establishment’s inclusion in any future guide to Australian dining. I could imagine a parade of curious future connoisseurs following our footsteps, perhaps even having their own impromptu hole of golf interrupted by snakes.

I left Alain to gobble the rest of his meal, and asked the chef how he prepared such wonderful food, especially in such a remote location. He pointed towards the road.

I followed his finger, and saw a dead kangaroo on the cusp of the road, baking in the sun.

I decided not to tell Alain. Why blemish a successful food tour?

Anyway, he still had to try fairy bread.