The foreign cooks’ compact guide to Aussie English
Through the magic of the interwebs, I can share our favourite recipes with you in seconds, wherever you are, as easily as I can with a family member a few roo hops away.
However, one of the first things that stands out on the net “like a Dingos’ balls” (to coin a phrase) is that my English may well not be your English. Here in Melbourne, we use some words differently to how they are used in other parts of Australia, and indeed differently to how you may use them in your part of the world.
Australians are pretty adept at being lexically ambidextrous, thanks to a forced diet of both US and British TV; since you may not get that much Aussie TV (we don’t either, not too much of a loss there) I’ve learned it helps to provide some translations to facilitate clear and successful communication. To help out, please find below “The foreign cooks’ compact guide to Aussie English”:
• Pom - someone from England
• Yank - an American
• Prawn - a Yank might call this a shrimp
• Grill - to put food under a radiant heat source (a griller), typically in or attached to your oven, to brown, crisp or melt said food. Yanks tend to call this broiling. What Yanks call grilling, we either call frying (in a frying pan) or barbecuing.
• Barbecue/Barbie - the largish thing with a cast iron or stainless steel plate and grill (I know, confusing, right), typically gas fired, sitting on the back patio, where Dad goes to incinerate some snags. He might also possibly throw a prawn on it, but would probably get arrested for throwing a shrimp on it. Not the food Texans have inter-family warfare over, but we get what you mean because we all watched Dallas in the 80s, and/or subscribe to the Food Network now.
• Snags - sausages, often incinerated on a barbecue; traditionally plain beef or pork. In recent decades, Australia has chosen to express its multicultural DNA through a staggering array of flavour and format options for the once humble snag. The Australian constitution mandates that plain snags must be supplied for white Australians over the age of 70, as well as on 26 January, which is much like the 4th of July in the US, except with fewer fireworks, fewer barbecue ribs, more snags, and less patriotic flag-waving.
• Shrimp - short person
• Chip - not a French Fry - an entirely different species, and far chunkier; inarguably better. Must be bathed in tomato sauce, or dipped in Mayo or Tartare sauce if feeling fancy. A Pom would tend to agree. Also can refer to what a Pom might call a crisp, because we like our ambiguity here.
• Mayo - mayonnaise. Not a clinic.
• Tomato sauce - not pasta sauce. Similar to ketchup in composition, flavour and function, but slightly less sweet, less tart, and more tomatoey. Do NOT use as pasta sauce. Really. I made that mistake once decades ago, and still shudder at the thought of it.
• Piss - beer, or liquid from a goon sack if you are feeling fancy. Also what everyone else means by piss. Again, ambiguity seems to be our thing; we are an adventurous lot down under. (Trump should come visit, he’d like it here. Believe me).
• Fosters - what you always thought piss meant.
• Pissed - if you are over 25 or live outside a major metropolitan area, this means you’ve imbibed a bit too much piss; If you are a younger urbanite, it indicates that you are angry, thank you America, you cultural imperialist media whores!
• Goon sack - one of Australia’s finest inventions - a wine bladder from a cardboard wine cask. For when only the best will do! Doubles as a pillow or disco toy at an outdoor festival.
• Hamburger - refers to one of the meals Maccas has served billions of, not the meat itself. At its most basic, meat (or vegan equivalent) with a pickle slice, cheese and sauce thrown hap-hazardly between two sides of a hamburger bun by a bored teenager
• Maccas - the mother of all fast food joints, with two Golden Arches out front, once the home of a creepy clown dude. We’re lovin’ this gem from the Aussie vernacular so much that said establishment uses this name in their own advertising down under
• Minced meat - what Americans often call ground or chopped meat, or hamburger. Generically tends to refer to beef, but you can find most other meats in this form.
• Sandwich - gastrolinguistically reserved for putting things between 2 slices of bread. Not buns. Not Rolls. Not pita bread. To suggest that a Maccas hamburger is a sandwich is completely unsettling to an Australian. Non-gastrolinguistically, we are much more open minded on the use of this word.
• Spring Onion - scallion
• Biscuit - a cookie. In Australia, over 25s only have cookies in their web browsers. What a Texan calls a biscuit, we don’t really have an exact equivalent of, but the closest would be a scone. Most English speakers seem to agreed on what a scone is.
• Coriander - cilantro
• Corn flour - Cornstarch
• Roo - kangaroo. Yes, we eat Skippy. Roo meat is lean, and really nice as back-straps or minced. It’s not particularly gamey, and is a good substitute for beef. Aussies find it shrink-wrapped in their supermarket meat cabinet. Overseas, I guess you’d have to take a gun into a local zoo. I guess you might have to go to Texas to do that legally.
• Vegemite - black tarry salt-yeast-extract-slurry that looks like the day after a night of too much Irish piss. Over 25s eat it with butter on toast for breakfast; I told you we were adventurous. Aussie parents pair Vegemite with processed cheese squares in sandwiches supplied for use in the school yard at lunchtime (we don’t do cafeteria lunches). These self-weaponise in the Aussie sun and are usually used to repel bullies and wildlife.
Now that I’ve taken you on a quick tour of some of the unique characteristics of Australian English, I hope that I have armed you with a sufficiently robust armoury of Australianisms, to help you decode the contents of this site.