And with over 1000 varieties of eucalyptus they don’t know many of those

(And, with over 1,000 varieties of eucalyptus, they don’t know many of those.)

When the Dutch and Portuguese exploited the Spice Islands in the 16th century, they overlooked the largest one: Australia This is not surprising. Until a few years ago, most Australians didn’t realise that they had any native spices and herbs. In fact, the average suburban Australian still can’t name anything much that grows wild, unless it’s a gum tree. (And, with over 1,000 varieties of eucalyptus, they don’t know many of those.)
A rare exception is the scientist and botanist Vic Cherikoff, who flew into the International Food Exhibition in London last month to promote his Rare Spices Company ­ which is to say, Australian rare spices and herbs. These are not your traditional spices, such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, but, rather, native varieties: mountain pepperleaf and pungent forestberry herb; perfumed aniseed myrtle and sharp lemon myrtle ­ all of which have been enthusiastically embraced by chefs in new wave Australian restaurants.Not, as Cherikoff points out, that there’s really anything new wave about them. Many have been in use among aborigine tribes for 16,000 years, valued for their medicinal properties as much as their flavour. From the hundreds that he has researched, Cherikoff has built up a core of about three dozen, some of which he supplies to the food industry, others to pharmaceutical companies.Probably the best-known of these products is wattleseed, which tastes like a cross between coffee, chocolate and hazelnut.

Cherikoff roasts and grinds these seeds so that they can be brewed as a hot beverage He has patented this as “Wattlecino”. Wattleseed concentrate has become popular with Australian chefs, who use it to flavour desserts, including sorbets and ice-creams.Since there are about 800 different kinds of wattle tree in Australia (wattle is of the genus Acacia, of which mimosa is a famous example), Cherikoff’s genius has been to isolate the appropriate edible ones. Gathering the seeds can be as hazardous as foraging for fungi, and the aborigines consider that only about 15 wattles provide seeds suitable for eating.Cherikoff’s forebears are Polish/Russian, and he inherited a love of food from an aunt. Like most white Australians, he initially recoiled from the idea of “bush tucker”, the aborigine food which includes grubs and insects. But after he left Sydney University, where he read biochemistry and microbiology, he was invited to take part in a government research project analysing the nutritional composition of aboriginal foods.”The government discovered that aborigines were getting western diseases such as diabetes.

This was due to a diet high in fat and sugar and low in fibre. They wanted to know if there were native Bush foods which could replace those in their unhealthy modern diet,” he explains. His research took him into the arid central Red Desert, and there he worked for months with an interpreter, exploring the aboriginal food base: small birds and animals, snakes and lizards, insects, fruits, berries, leaves, seeds and roots.In total, he collected and analysed 600 such ingredients. He learnt the hard way not to eat the Snakeskin Lily: the merest taste of it paralysed his gastric organs for three days. And he supplemented his own rations, dining on cassowary and emu, grilled bird spider (tasting like crab), turtle eggs, honey and bush tomatoes.