The Cooking Methods of the Australian Aborigines including Examples

Essay by BZApolloHigh School, 10th gradeA+, April 2004

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Aboriginals used a variety of different cooking methods depending on the suitability for the food being prepared. Their most common cooking methods included cooking in the ashes of their fires, boiling, steaming in a ground oven and roasting on the coals. A process unique to them was used to cook foods such as sharks, rays and turtles.

The fire itself was even adjusted to the food being cooked. Using a variety of timbers, twigs or leaves could change flavours or heat. The aborigines used hot stones to fry Bogong moths, banks of coals to cook marsupial rodents, larger shaped hearths for baking cakes, cooked tubers and leached toxins from various foodstuffs. The kangaroo was often cooked where it was killed on a large temporary fire. They also used heat stones to open hard fruits and explode Acacia seeds.

The aborigines used roasting on hot coals mainly for cooking flesh.

These included most meats, fish and small turtles. Meat is cooked this way when it must be eaten quickly, due to the size of the animal and the hunter's hunger.

To prepare the animal for cooking this way the freshly killed animal is thrown onto the flames of a fast burning fire. The carcass is singed on both sides, and then removed and all the fur is scraped off. After about ten minutes when it is bloated it is removed from the fire and gutted. It is often thrown back on the coals for deep roasting.

Large animals like wallabies and kangaroos are cooked this way and then eaten as a near raw red meat with lots of blood in it. The warm, partly cooked blood is a delicacy drunk by the men. Small turtles, snakes, goannas and fish are also cooked this way and are cooked through quickly and...