Hill Street

Hobart first got its own Slow Food convivium in 1998, when Scott Minervini, of Lebrina restaurant in New Town, convened a group. Early activities included a cherry lunch, including tastings of 17 varieties, a lunch taken from Tasmanian Edward Abbott’s 1864 The English and Australian Cookery Book, a lunch at Tynwald in New Norfolk attempting the tricky match of wines with artichoke and asparagus and another at Lebrina focused entirely on potatoes.

There have been panel discussions on restaurant etiquette and genetically engineered food – always accompanied by something delicious to eat and drink. Even Slow Food Hobart annual general meetings are well attended – not surprising when they come with tastings of local white truffles and Bruny Island Cheese Company offerings at Domaine A, Italian wines and nibbles at Lebrina, and, this July, organic food and wines at Amulet.

The convivium committee, now led by food identity Judith Sweet, has organised two Winter Weekends away to the mid-north coast and the east coast, with visits to producers and meals centred on their products.

Autumn picnics with the food contributed by participants have become a tradition. They have been held at a heritage apple orchard and a hazelnut farm, both in Kettering, and this year, at the Text Kiln at Bushy Park at hop harvest time, with a tour of the working hop kilns and beer tastings.

A pre-Christmas brunch, with a charity auction of food and books, has become another standing feature of the annual program.

Although Slow Food is a worldwide movement, its grassroots are the local convivia, which, as well as promoting Slow Food’s international goals, are rooted in their own place, exploring in the most pleasurable way, the foods, wines and artisans of their own region – no wonder Slow Food in Tasmania is never short of ideas for convivial events.

In 1989 a little snail began a journey from a meeting in Paris that established the international Slow Food movement, an organisation that believes the evils of a fast life can be overcome with “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment” and that this starts at the table.

The snail has moved rather quickly in gathering up adherents all over the world – in places you would expect, such as Italy (where it took its first slither in 1986) and France, to outflung Senegal. Local chapters of the movement are called convivia (from convivial – fond of good company, sociable and lively). In the first three months of this year 53 new convivia were formed, bringing the total to more than 800 in 100 countries. In Australia there are about 25 convivia, two of them in Tasmania, one based in Hobart and another on the Cradle Coast.

Although an organisation devoted to the pleasure of the table, Slow Food is not just another wine and food society. It aims to counteract the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

It has several arms to further these aims. One is the Ark of Taste, which aims to discover, catalogue and safeguard small-quantity food products and defend biodiversity.

Among products taken on board the Ark of Taste is Tasmania’s leatherwood honey, which is under threat because leatherwood trees are being felled. The three other Australian products on the Ark of Taste are another honey, Kangaroo Island Honey from South Australia, which is collected by one of the purest stocks of Italian linguistica bees in the world; bunya nuts and bull boar sausages, produced by Swiss-Italians of the Victorian gold fields since the 1850s.

This October will see the second Slow Food Terra Madre (Mother Earth), which will bring together in Turin representatives of 1500 food communities from five continents – farmers, breeders, fishermen and traditional food producers.

Every second year, Slow Food holds the Salone del Gusto, the world’s largest quality food and wine fair, a biannual Cheese fair, and the annual Slowfish, devoted to sustainable fishing.

The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity organises and funds projects that defend agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.

The emphasis for all this worthy work is that it be done “with pleasure”.

Find out more about Slow Food on www.slowfood.com or inquire about joining a local convivia on slowfoodtas@yahoo.com.au.

While crayfish, oysters, little wraps of prawns and cucumber and pavlova are becoming Australian “traditions” at Christmas, on most tables you still also will find a baked turkey, ham and Christmas pudding with brandy butter sauce.

Although the really traditional Christmas fare is what is available and suitable for a midwinter feast, Christmas in July has not caught on in a big way and we still want to sit down to the same fare, at the same time, as they do in freezing Europe – culture, not climate, rules.

Nigella Lawson in Feast (see book review) says we “need to satisfy the seasonal need for abundance and excess” and for that it’s not enough to just have meat, “even too much of it” on the table; “it has to be a joint, it has to have a commanding presence”. Christmas is no time for casseroles.

The renowned Elizabeth David said if she had her way her Christmas Day lunch would be an omelet and cold ham and nice bottle of wine, but she well knew the woman with a lot of children or a big family had no alternative and “the grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced”.

Elizabeth Luard points out in her book Sacred Food (MQP 2001) that Christmas is the only religious festival devoted to commemorating the birth of a baby, and so holds particular appeal for families.

It wasn’t always so. Christmas has been grafted on to earlier midwinter festivities held at the winter solstice, four days before December 25. December’s Saturnalia in ancient Greece was a time when ordinary rules were turned upside down. More than kissing went on underneath the mistletoe and Luard says even when Christianity took over the feast, the Lord of Misrule was often more in evidence than the Holy Infant. Servants were permitted to become master and disguises were worn; “always a signal that bad behaviour will be tolerated”.

Since Jesuits brought turkey to the Old World from the Americas in the 15th century, its popularity as the Christmas festive bird has become widespread – although in Italy it may be stuffed with chestnuts, veal and fruit, with yoghurt and spices by Christians in Goa, or with smoked oysters, farofa (or cornflakes) apricots and raisins in Latin America.

Ham was always the Christmas meat in Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal because it is storable. In Spain, pork meat also distinguished Christians from Muslims and Jews, who are forbidden to eat it.

Starters, desserts and the trimmings are more likely to be adapted to Christmas in summer than the meat dishes – peas instead of brussels sprouts with pancetta, cherries instead of oranges, summer pudding instead of Christmas pud.

Other countries nationalise their feast too. In Sweden herring prepared as many as 24 different ways will be included in the smorgasbord before the main meal – salted, smoked reindeer tongue too if you were lucky – and cloudberries kept from summer for dessert. Bacalhao, salt cod, is both the national dish and the Christmas eve meal in Portugal. In Germany, carp is a Christmas favourite.

In many countries, Christmas starts earlier – St Nicholas’s Day on December 6 is important in Central Europe, St Lucy’s on December 13 in Sweden, and it can last until Epiphany, or 12th Night on January 6, instead of stopping short on Christmas Day. For these drawn-out celebrations, as well as the day itself, a frenzy of baking occurs.

As well as the English Christmas cake, there is panettone in Italy, stollen in Germany, kransekake, the Christmas wreath cake of almond meringue in Norway, a sponge cake dressed with split almonds to look like a pine cone in Switzerland and in Greece, Christopsomo, a rich, sweet bread flavoured with aniseed, orange, sesame seeds, cloves and cinnamon and marked with the Greek cross of equal sides.

The practice of keeping a huge piece of wood, the Yule log, burning in the fireplace over the 12 days of Christmas, is reflected in the French buche de Noel, a sponge cake decorated with chocolate or coffee buttercream textured to look like bark, complete with sawn-off branches.