The best part of the kangaroo is its tail. Talk of ox-tail soup, ye metropolitan gourmands! Commend us to the superb kangaroo-tail soup of Australia, made from the tail weighing some 10 or 12 lbs., if a full-grown forester.
The pademelon, a smaller species of kangaroo, weighs about 9 or 10 lbs., and when cooked like a hare, affords a dish with which the most fastidious gourmand might be satisfied.
The following is the native mode of cooking a kangaroo steak:—It is placed in a scooped out stone, which is readily found in the streams, and pressed down by heavy stones on the top of it; the heat is applied beneath and round the first top stone; at the critical moment the stones are quickly removed, and the steak appears in its most savoury state.
The aborigines of Australia always roast their food; they have no means of boiling, except when they procure the service of an old European saucepan or tin pot. ‘It is a very remarkable fact’ (remarks Mr. Moore) ‘in the history of mankind, that a people should be found now to exist, without any means of heating water, or cooking liquid food; or, in short, without any culinary utensil or device of any sort. The only mode of cooking was to put the food into the fire, or roast it in the embers or hot ashes; small fish or frogs being sometimes first wrapped in a piece of paper-tree bark. Such was their state when Europeans first came among them. They are now extremely fond of soup and tea.’
A native will not eat tainted meat, although he cannot be said to be very nice in his food, according to our ideas. Their meat is cooked almost as soon as killed, and eaten immediately.
The parts of the kangaroo most esteemed for eating are the loins and the tail, which abound in gelatine, and furnish an excellent and nourishing soup; the hind legs are coarse, and usually fall to the share of the dogs. The natives (if they can be said to have a choice) give a preference to the head. The flesh of the full-grown animal may be compared to lean beef, and that of the young to veal; they are destitute of fat, if we except a little being occasionally seen between the muscles and integuments of the tail. The colonial dish, called a steamer, consists of the flesh of the animal dressed, with slices of ham. The liver when cooked is crisp and dry, and is considered a substitute for bread; but I cannot coincide in this opinion.
The goto, or long bag of kangaroo skin, about two feet deep, and a foot and a half broad, carried by the native females in Australia, is the common receptacle for every small article which the wife or husband may require or take a fancy to, whatever its nature or condition may be. Fish just caught, or dry bread, frogs, roots, and clay, are all mingled together.
Mr. George Bennett (Wanderings in New South Wales) thus speaks of Australian native cookery:—
‘After wet weather they track game with much facility; and from the late rains the hunting expeditions had been very successful; game was, therefore, very abundant at the camp, which consisted of opossums, flying squirrels, bandicoots, snakes, &c.
‘One of the opossums among the game was a female, which had two large-sized young ones in her pouch; these delicate morsels were at this time broiling, unskinned and undrawn, upon the fire, whilst the old mother was lying yet unflayed in the basket.