Some time ago I committed to getting my teeth cleaned twice a year; I decided on this preventative maintenance schedule because I didn’t want to go through again what I went through to fix years of teeth neglect and abuse. At my last teeth cleaning I settled into the reclined dental chair, and as I always do gazed up at the ceiling. I was soon mesmerised by the dreamlike sky created on the ceiling by the decorative fluorescent cumulus cloud diffuser panels and my faraway thoughts sent me back to when I first moved to the US; it was then that I decided to save my teeth, to give them a new go at life. I braved jaw bone implants, bridges, caps and root canals, fillings and extractions so I could once again find happiness and joy in chewing.
When I was growing up during the fifties and sixties dental hygiene wasn’t really practised in Australia; at least not in our family. I may have brushed my teeth once a night before going to bed. Mum’s answer to most of our tooth problems was: we can get them fixed, but if they really start hurting, out they’ll come. I did get an occasional filling. I went through childhood and adolescence knowing that my teeth would eventually be coming out. I remember only going to the dentist a couple of times. Mum kept telling us that he was some relative of ours, distant cousin or something as obscure and that he wouldn’t hurt us. He practised in a nondescript double-fronted cream brick veneer building, just down from the corner of Douglas Parade and Ferguson Streets. A waiting room was to the right as you went in, and the surgery was on the left. I vaguely remember sitting in the waiting room, and wondering what the strange smells were.
I don’t remember ever getting a local anaesthetic to numb the part of my mouth where he was going to drill; you always knew just before when it would hurt. You’d watch the chains and pulleys driving the drill slow down, and as he kept pushing the drill into the tooth they’d stop. It seemed as if he’d always hold the drill right in front of you when he pulled it out of the tooth to wait for the chains and pulleys to start back up. As you watched the hurt starting to happen you started to notice the strange smell coming from your mouth. I think we often left the double-fronted cream brick veneer building with tears still in our eyes. We pleaded with mum never to send us back to the dentist who was our relative. I remember going to a dentist just around the corner from where we lived; I don’t remember what he did or why I went. His practice was in a couple of remodelled rooms in a house in North Road; we always wondered if he lived in the rest of the house.
When I thought I was old enough to no longer listen to mum I decided to never go to the dentist again. Fillings fell out, cavities appeared, and I even loosened a front tooth when I fell off my bike and went face-first into the footpath. Over the years my tongue would discover a rough edge on a tooth; another filling starting to go, or a new hole starting to happen. I never really had toothache; it only hurt when I chewed on the cavities. I started to eat a lot of soft foods.

image source:gourmandandgourmet.com.au
Sausages became my go-to food. I’m not talking pork and apple honey, chicken with roasted red capsicum, basil and garlic, chicken and artichoke with kalamata olives, or turkey with broccoli and provolone cheese artisan gourmet sausages, but the true blue butcher shop Aussie sausage; the snag, the banger, the mystery bag. A sanger from a sausage sizzle, meat pies, and sausage rolls, are the first on my list of must-eat foods when I go back to The Land Down Under; some habits just die hard. I’ve always liked sausages; from back when mum used to cook them under the grill on the old kitchen gas stove, to when she would throw a pound of snags into the Sunbeam on the kitchen table. Mum never did bother with the slice of white bread wrapped around a just cooked sausage, but she did bother with two other classic Aussie snag recipes. Whenever the breadcrumbs came out, and the Sunbeam went onto the kitchen table you could bet it was either going to be cutlets or crumbed sausages for tea. The recipe for anything coated in breadcrumbs was the same; roll the thing in flour, dip it in a beaten egg, and coat it with breadcrumbs. Fry in dripping until nicely browned.

image source:eazypeazymealz.com
No Aussie kitchen would be complete without a tin of Keen’s curry powder. For as long as I can remember, anything that was called curry in The Land Down Under was made with Keens; and for a while, curried sausages were all the go at our house. Mum would whip out the Sunbeam, and fry some snags with sliced onions until they were just cooked. She would take the snags out of the Sunbeam and slice them, then add water, flour, and Keens’s curry to the Sunbeam. After simmering the slurry until it became a thick sauce mum would throw some peas and the cut-up snags into the sauce; we ate mum’s curried sausages with boiled rice or mashed potatoes.
Keen’s Curry powder is about as Aussie as you can get; it’s rivalled only by Vegemite. In 1841 a British chap named Joseph Keen sailed out to the new colony. He established a bakery in the small town of Kingston in Van Diemen’s Land and dabbled in creating and selling sauces, and other condiments; he created what would become Keen’s curry powder in the 1860s. The curry powder became known throughout the mainland. Joseph was awarded a medal for his spice mix at the 1866 Melbourne Inter-Colonial Exhibition and received an honourable mention at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. In 1905 after Joseph and his wife went to the big spice rack in the sky their sixth daughter Louisa, and her hubby Horace took over the family’s curry powder business. Horace bought some land in the foothills of Mount Wellington overlooking Hobart, and turned it into a giant advertising sign; he used white painted stones to spell out Keens Curry in forty-foot high letters. The white stones are still there today, but somewhat obscured by the houses of South Hobart.
About the same time, Joseph started creating his sauces and condiments, scallops were discovered and harvested from the cold waters of the Derwent River near Hobart town. The scallops soon became a local delicacy, and it wasn’t long before someone added Keen’s fantastic curry powder to the scallops when they were being cooked. Some say the quaint tradition of putting scallops into a pie began on the Hobart wharves in the early 19th Century, but the origin of the curried scallop pie is a little vague. Regardless of their history, the golden parcels of curried gelatinous joy have become Tasmania’s national dish; the curried scallop pie is the jewel in Tassie’s culinary crown.
I’m the third great great grandson of the transported convict Thomas Raines. In 1842, 44-year-old Thomas was convicted of stealing sheep from Henry Hilton of Salridge and sentenced to 15 years transportation. There is no record of him being sent to Port Arthur so he was probably assigned to various Van Diemen’s Land farmers. Convict records at the State Library of Tasmania suggest that he spent some time in and around Richmond Town before being issued his Certificate of Freedom. Richmond Town was established as a military staging post, and convict station linking Hobart with Port Arthur. Today, Richmond is a quaint little town with its main street still lined with beautiful heritage buildings. Australia’s oldest bridge, a sandstone arched bridge built by convicts in the 1820’s, is just off the main street.
The Richmond Bakery is just a stone’s throw away from Australia’s oldest gaol. I think many a convict would have longed for a Bakery pie or pastry; just biting into one of their sensational curried scallop pies would cause, if only for a brief moment, one to escape from the hardships and brutality of convict life in early Van Diemen’s Land. On a sunny October afternoon, I bit into a Richmond Bakery curried scallop pie. Scallops encased in flaky pastry, swimming in a creamy curry sauce that has been spiced up with a dash of Keen’s; their scallop pies are up there with the best. A quality curried scallop pie should have
|
I could’ve had three of those tasty little bottler’s but restrained myself to only one; I’ve never thought it was rude to lick your plate in public. And there’s nothing like a flat white, and vanilla slice to finish off a winner of a meal.
You never need to wonder why Keen’s Curry Powder is a household name across Australia, and why over the last 150 plus years Tassie’s own curry powder has been a staple of Aussie kitchens. A dash of Keen’s Curry Powder can do wonders to an egg sandwich, and make a ripper curried seafood supreme. I think the ultimate in deliciousness would be to combine the curried scallop pie with the sausage; imagine if those golden parcels of curried gelatinous joy were made into bangers. There’s no telling what would happen if you chucked a few curried scallop pie snags on the barbie at a sausage sizzle. You could throw any leftovers in the Sunbeam the next morning and heat them up for breakfast; yum, what a great way to start the day.