VEGEMITE IF VIOLET CRUMBLES

REMEMBRANCE OF AUSSIE CUISINE PAST

           Some friends from Australia visited this week and brought me a little bit of my childhood. Vegemite is the one Australian foodstuff of which people in other countries may have heard. I've found it as far afield as Los Angeles, where every table at a restaurant named Wallaby Darned, claiming to offer "Australian cuisine,"featured sachets of the black goo. I never saw anyone try it, but have watched enough people do so to anticipate their reaction - something like Tom Hanks' disgust in Big at his first taste of caviare, when he spits it out and looks for something to kill the taste.

           Vegemite is salty and bitter, and smells something like soy sauce, with which I shares an origin in fermented vegetation; the jar lists the ingredients, baldly, as "Wheat. Gluten." Spread on buttered toast, it goes well with a boiled egg, and a spoonful dissolved in hot water makes a kind of bouillon, but, in a way, to consume Vegemite is to miss its point. Like grits in the American south and warm beer in Britain, it's emblematic of certain shared values, and never to be discussed; just accepted as a fact of life.

           My childhood memories of Australian cuisine are full of products similar to Vegemite: a fizzy, sweet and colourless soda, marketed as Lemonade, without the look, taste or odour of lemons; a frozen dessert coloured white, pink and brown, purporting to be vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream, which was mostly air, and tasted, if it had a taste, most like the waxed cardboard container in which it was sold.

           Very occasionally, a manufacturer created something sui generis.  Hoadley's Violet Crumble Bar, a genuinely local invention, was a slab of synthetic honeycomb thinly covered in milk chocolate. The chocolate melted the instant one stripped off the flimsy wrapper with its mirror-effect interior, and the yellow-orange honeycomb, the moment one bit it, shattered into brittle shards, an effect Clive James described as like eating a Ming vase. It was awful, in the best tradition of mushy corn meal and lukewarm ale, but it was our awful, which I suppose was the point.

           Anyway, I tried some Vegemite this morning on my toast. It was no madeleine, but tasted OK.

           I'll let you know about the Violet Crumble Bar.