Learning to love beige food: 'Australian cuisine isn’t just fairy bread and meat pies'

I hate salad sandwiches.

These are the words I scrawled angrily on every single page of my diary from 2006. I was 14, in the Victorian high country on a year-long school camp, forced to eat school camp food for 200 days. I felt like I was in one of the lesser-known circles of hell, where you’re presented with pre-shredded lettuce, machine-cut carrot, canned beetroot, bread and salad cream (not even mayo!) for eternity (daily) and forced to enjoy it. “Lunch,” they called it. I called it torture, and refused to eat it. Once I’d finished being dramatic, I’d eat instant noodles from a secret stash I kept in a hole in the ceiling. This went on for the entire year.

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I’m not a picky eater, and my lunchtime protests had nothing to do with entitlement or a distaste for sandwiches. Had I grown up in Australia, I probably would have approached bread-in-salad-in-bread with the same gusto as my fellow classmates. I was born in Singapore, so my idea of lunch was something very different.

My world before Australia was a riot of colour, and all of my childhood memories are tied to food. I remember the little bags of fried anchovies doused in curry sauce from my primary school canteen, the curry puffs from the ‘green shop’ around the corner from our home with a perfectly halved boiled egg in the centre. I remember the tiny, crispy baby squid from the beachside seafood restaurants, and the fruit tiles on the walls of the Nyonya restaurant we used to go to with my grandparents. I remember the condensation running down the sides of mugs full of icy lime juice, in the sweltering heat of the banana leaf restaurant. Twenty-one years later, my memories are as clear as day.

Apparently I am known as a ‘third culture kid’, a term given to people who’ve grown up away from their parents’ culture. The origins of my family span a beautiful tapestry of ethnicities, languages and customs. My mum’s cooking hints at my grandmother’s Eurasian background through colourful Peranakan dishes. My dad’s cooking tells stories of his childhood in Kashmir. Through food, his tales of bitterly cold winters and fresh morels, of gunny sacks filled with saffron flowers on his doorstep, of tiny apples and giant walnuts, connect me to a time and place that I otherwise could not comprehend. His food tells stories of our culture and religion that could not be put into words.

My time spent overseas gave me rigorous sensitivity training in table manners. I know which hand is the correct one to eat with, how to use a full set of formal silverware with correct etiquette, where to place my chopsticks once I’ve finished eating, and how to save a seat in a hawker centre using a pack of tissues. I can sit comfortably at most dinner tables in the world, even without speaking the language. Wherever I am in the world, I can eat like a local, or at the very least know how not to offend.

When we moved to Australia, I remember being so utterly confused when I was presented with Assorted Creams biscuits and cordial for morning tea (what was morning tea?!). Compared to the bright colours and flavours of my childhood, I had entered a world where the food was curiously beige. Breakfast cereals baked in little cupcake cases were a treat for birthdays and special occasions, and hot chips were the epitome of culinary excellence. I found the breakfast offerings so unappealing that my mother had to coerce me with profiteroles in the morning. There was no culture attached to this food, no ceremony in eating it. I was devastated.

As years passed and I spent more time in Australia, this beige food began to take on some meaning. I was pleasantly surprised to find that hot chips were delicious with soy sauce. While I still carried an aversion to cold lunches – ham, cheese and tomato toasties were a revelation. It turned out that sandwiches were okay when they were hot. When my sister and I started attending Chinese school on Saturdays (I learned nothing), the highlight of my day was the dim sim I bought at lunch before getting into punch-ons with other kids. I tried XO pipis for the first time at a Cantonese restaurant near our house and we became regulars at our local La Porchetta eatery, where I discovered how much I love ‘dodgy’ carbonara. Slowly but surely, we began to find food we could relate to and I began to enjoy eating beige food. Or so I thought.

In 2006, a year in the Victorian alps drove me into a sandwich-induced teenage rage. The food that I had finally made a connection with was gone, left behind in Melbourne, and this time there was no Saturday morning dim sim to ease the pain. If I couldn’t connect with the food, I couldn’t connect with my surroundings, which was something I’d always been able to do. But like with most teenage angst, my anger started to dwindle, and coincidentally so did my stash of instant noodles. After months of indignation, I was surprised to find myself looking forward to chicken parma night, and conceded that Milo sprinkled over a vanilla Dixie Cup ice-cream makes a pretty lovely dessert.

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I’ve now spent more of my life in Melbourne than I have anywhere else. I’ve learned the nuances of western cuisine, cooking professionally in both British and Australian kitchens. I’ve seen the way the city has changed with each wave of immigration, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Australian cuisine isn’t just fairy bread and meat pies. Ours is one that is driven by the hundreds of cultures that call Australia home, by our rich history and our spectacular produce. I say ‘ours’ because I am Australian, too.

As I stood in the vegan deli I’m currently working at, munching on a magnificently crafted salad sandwich, I realised that my hatred all those years ago had nothing to do with salad sandwiches. Rather, it had everything to do with the culture that I could not see.

• This is an extract from New Voices in Food, available now through Somekind Press