Vegetarian recipes from Australia

Meat-free Australian cooking reads first through what grows there and through a history of baking without an oven. damper keeps that trace: flour, water, a little salt, sometimes bicarbonate, a dough worked quickly and cooked in the ashes or in a cast-iron pot, with no yeast and no proving time. Pumpkin, available all year and notably sweet, gives the other vegetable base of the country; pumpkin soup reduces it to its plainest form, flesh roasted or simmered with onion and stock, then blended, with no thickener.

Breakfast and lunch carry more weight than a formal dinner, and that is where meat-free cooking settles best. avocado toast is not cafe decoration: toasted sourdough, avocado crushed with a fork, lemon, salt, cracked pepper, sometimes feta or a poached egg — a counter dish that became ordinary in Melbourne and Sydney through the 1990s. The sweet side belongs to afternoon tea: sponge cake cut into cubes, dipped in chocolate and rolled in desiccated coconut, the lamingtons.