ABC Radio Brisbane has just mentioned on Twitter that Poh Ling Yeow, recently famous due to the TV show Masterchef, has offered that salt and pepper calamari is our national dish.

It took my five minutes to calm down enough to be flabbergasted.  I have some strong opinions about national dishes, and I want yours.

My criteria for national dishes are, I think, unsurprising and wholly supportable. I consider a national dish to be something which is;

  • Pervasive:  Strawberry chilli sauce is popular in Tasmania, banana bread is popular in New South Wales.  Neither food is nationally popular enough to be considered a national dish.
  • Substantial:  The sole excluding factor for Vegemite is that it’s not a dish, it’s a foodstuff.
  • Historical:  National food identity is not what we eat a lot of now, there has to be  a sense of nostalgia to this.  You draw a line somewhere of course, Australia has a much longer history of bush tomatoes and lemon myrtle than it does meat pies but I can’t accept something my grandparents never heard of as a national dish.
  • Uniquely identifiable as national:  This is important to me too.  A friend asserts the national dish of the UK is chicken tikka masala.  This is nonsense.  I don’t care that it was invented by an Indian chef in the UK, that makes it Indian, not from the UK.  If a Scot came to Australia and stuffed a stomach full of offal we wouldn’t consider haggis to be Aussie tucker.

So with those criteria asserted, I feel the national dish of Australia cannot possibly be salt and pepper squid because it’s something that is popular in a handful of states, is an Asian-style dish that has tenuous connections to the country’s history,  and we’ve eaten it only over the past few years.  But what IS our national dish?  I have some contenders, what do you think?

If you vote other, please comment underneath what you think is the dish, otherwise only I can see what the “other” is. :)