Put another fakelore on the barbie

It's nearly Summer, and the prawns ("shrimps", our American cousins call them) are cheap in the shops this week.

They're not as cheap as they used to be, because they've been fished out, so $13 a kilo for poor-quality prawns, $22 for top-qual is cheap these days. In my youth they were so cheap that they were the preferred food of the street drunk, and a "derro" usually had a bottle of plonk in one overcoat pocket and a newspaper-wrap of prawns in the other.

It never fails to amuse me that Madison Avenue created a bit of modern folklore -- or fakelore -- in the USA twenty or so years ago with a Paul Hogan TV commercial (for Australian tourism) in which he said "Put another shrimp on the barbie".

I think most Australians, when they saw the commercial reported in the press here, thought that barbecuing prawns/shrimps must be an American culinary custom, because it never was here. In my short life of 52 years, I have seen prawns cooked on a barbecue only once, and that was in about 1997, by Brazilians. They tasted great (the prawns, not the Brazilians -- at least, most of the Brazilians), so perhaps we should indeed take it up as an Australian custom. I'd never heard the word "barbie" till that American-made ad, either, though we Aussies like to shorten words, tis tru.

Hey, you know the London pigs shot that poor Brazilian guy and tried to make it look like he was a terrorist? I wasn't fooled, bacause I know the difference between a Brazilian and a terrorist. You can negotiate with a terrorist.

By the way, to any Australian about 40 years and older, a barbecue means a cooking fire in some rural place ('the bush') or bushy setting ... something like a steel plate or one of the steel shelves from a fridge balanced on some rocks around a eucalyptus fire on the ground. In other words, a makeshift cooking platform over a campfire.

I've noticed in recent times that to younger souls (a generation that on the whole struggles far less valiantly than we did against brainwashing by consumerism and TV), a barbecue is a shop-bought device with a gas inlet. Everything must be made by others and puchased in a shop. If it ain't bought, it ain't good, sieg heil!

Sad, huh?

Interestingly, the barbecue is an American custom, picked up by Australians from US soldiers when they were here in WWII. Australians have always cooked in the bush, but the use of the word 'barbecue' is a recent addition to our vocabulary. People used to "go on a picnic". The shop-bought, gas-jet thing is even newer -- I first heard it about 10 or 15 years ago and nearly biffed the bloke. If he'd spelled it with a "q" (barbeque) or worse, "BBQ", the man would be dead now. What's even more appalling is that I, too, now use the term in its commercial sense. Dear dear.

I was married to a Brazilian once.

Tagged: folklore, australia, usa, america, american