“I imagine that for lots of people it’ll be the first time they’ll eat kangaroo,” says Dale Tilbrook, who just ran a packed workshop over the weekend on Australian native foods at the in Turin, Italy. The biennial festival organised by the – which is headquartered nearby, in the northern region of Piedmont – brings together thousands of farmers and foodsmiths from around the world, showcasing their goods at markets, tastings and panel discussions focused on the organisation’s ethos of promoting "good, clean and fair" food.
“I’m Wardandi Bibbulmun, that’s my language group area from the southwest of Western Australia,” Tilbrook explains. The owner of in the Swan Valley, she has long been sharing knowledge of her own Indigenous food culture and local native ingredients through the gallery’s gift shop, selling a number of products she collects locally and transforms into dried herbs and spices, jams and sauces.
The workshop in Italy highlighted products from Tilbrook’s local area as well as Australian native foods from further afield. “It’s introducing the modern aspect of using bush foods, because of course we now have this new gastronomic model in Australia, incorporating native Australian flavours with mainstream flavours,” says Tilbrook. “There’s a big local content in [the dishes], these are fruits that we’ve gathered ourselves and dried ourselves.”
To begin, guests sampled three olive oils all from Western Australia, each infused with a different crushed native lime – the desert wild, sunrise and red centre limes – paired with a dukkah featuring sandalwood and macadamia nuts.
Dale Tilbrook (second from right) addresses the workshop at Terra Madre Salon del Gusto. Source: Alecia Wood
“Traditionally, we would’ve cooked the kangaroo in the ashes of an open fire,” says Tilbrook. For the workshop, she opted to prepare kangaroo two ways: a cooked terrine using lemon, anise and cinnamon myrtles, emu plum, quandong, lillipilli and native lime, and a roasted cut of kangaroo crusted with lemon myrtle, saltbush and pepperberry, sliced very finely and served three ways – plain; with a drizzle of lemon myrtle-infused macadamia oil; and finally, with a desert raisin relish. “The desert raisin is actually a bush tomato, but when it’s dried it takes on complex, caramelised raisiny flavours,” Tilbrook says.
To finish, guests were given two sweet treats. Red quandong jam atop a slice of bread, and a spoonful of white quandong poached in peach schnapps. “White quandongs are very rare, most people don’t even know they exist,” says Tilbrook.
Tilbrook is one of 45 official Slow Food movement representatives from around Australia who are attending the festival, which will wrap up on Monday. For her, forming the of the organisation was an opportunity to galvanise locals around the food issues that they already cared about. Her group has hosted a number of events, including one celebrating dishes from the local Croatian community, as well as a modern Italian evening that incorporated native ingredients, serving the likes of emu ravioli with saltbush butter. “I joined Slow Food because of the compatibility between [the] Aboriginal [way of] living in harmony with the land and the Slow Food ethos of protecting biodiversity and conserving traditional methods,” Tilbrook says. “The two go hand in glove with each other.”
The sweet finish: workshop attendees were given tastes of quandong jam and poached quandong. Source: Alecia Wood
Photographs by Alecia Wood.
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