Mike Butler I remember tasting a Spanish sheep's cheese. It had the smell of a freshly cracked sewer, which wasn't unpleasant. It's a smell that you get with a good Pinot noir.
Ahana Dutt So many people who came, they're like, ‘What do you mean? You're an Indian restaurant? Why don't you have butter chicken?’ And we would be like, ‘You're eating it. It's on the table.’
Donato Toce How cool would it be to have our own dairy and milk the cows and make the gelato with our milk? And then we realised that there's actually no romance to it. It's just a lot of hard work.
LTL Australia's dairy industry didn't start with reindeers, whales or donkeys, even though all those animals can produce milk. It began with a few cows on the First Fleet in 1788. These sneaky animals escaped soon after arrival, fleeing 90 kilometres west of Sydney, where they were depicted in cave drawings by the Dharawal people. The cows were found several years later and today a multicultural society, ever changing diets and a hunger for sustainability has led to us scooping out coconut lychee gelato, slicing up vegan cheese and reaching for ghee seasoned with native ingredients.
MB G'day, my name is Mike Butler. I'm an Aboriginal Irish Queenslander. For the past 25 years I've been professionally involved with food: tasting it and prodding it and writing about it and reviewing it. I've been a cheese and dairy judge since around 2005.
Dairy Board Australia advertisement (1960) [Sung] ... cheese, every day for breakfast ...
MB So I grew up in the 70s. You only had two types of cheese. One was vintage cheddar and the other one was plain cheddar.
Dairy Board Australia advertisement (1960) There are so many ways to enjoy cheese and so many kinds to enjoy. Try versatile cheddar. Delicious to eat, perfect for cooking. [Sung] Make the most of cheese.
MB It was a very monocultural cuisine landscape. I was a kid in country Queensland. Country Queensland has got a lot of German immigrants. Grandma would go into town, she'd get cheese from the German providores, and it was completely different. It was mild and it was nutty, like a Swiss sort of cheese. It was so different from cheddar cheese. To me as a little kid, that was exotic.
LTL Heading to the shops for your dairy fix is kind of a new thing. Historian Mark Kurlansky writes [in Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas, Bloomsbury, 2018] that ‘from London to Havana until the 20th century, milk deliveries were sometimes made by leading a cow from door to door’. Ahana Dutt has experienced something similar to this. The chef, who has worked at acclaimed Sydney restaurants Firedoor and Raja, is originally from Kolkata, India, where summers were savoured with the cool yoghurt tang of lassi.
AD When I was growing up there used to be this guy who used to go from house to house with his goat and milk the goat, and you get fresh milk like that. I remember the smell of it. It was very potent, that savoury almost pungent kind of barnyard-y smell.
LTL An animal being milked right on your doorstep is a pretty direct way to get your dairy dose, but here's someone whose access to milk was even closer.
DT Hi, my name is Donato Toce, I am the head cow milker and sugar hauler at Gelato Messina. I was born in Italy on a sheep farm. It's a region called Basilicata. We grew up with a lot of products made with sheep's milk and goat's milk. I was four when I came to Australia. Every time I've gone over, one of the best food memories I have is eating fresh ricotta that's still warm from the cheesemaker in the town, and they give it to you in a wicker basket that they use to set it. It's not the plastic baskets that we get here. And you buy it in that basket, then you return that basket.
