I have just read a question asking what "Vegemite" is?
As I have also been asked this question perhaps it is time to explain.
You know what bread is of course - and butter?
Well, Vegemite is the third essential sandwich ingredient in a Downunder school lunchbox.
It is actually a by product of beer manufacture - the left over brewer's yeast. Things get added to that and it ends up as a very thick, almost black (actually very, very dark brown in sunlight) and salty paste.
It is spread - sparingly please! - on bread and toast and (at least when I was a child) on breakfast biscuits (Weetabix in Upover). It is a very common sandwich filling. It can be dissolved in hot water and used as a drink or for soup stock. Almost fat and carbohydrate free it is also a good source of Vitamin B. The only thing against it perhaps is that it is too salty to be consumed as often as most Downunderites would wish.
Almost certainly though you need to have grown up with it to fully appreciate the glories of Vegemite.
I went to school most days with a Vegemite sandwich. Vegemite was cheap. It is still cheap because you only need the smallest quantity. Sometimes my mother might add tomato if there were any to spare from the garden. I never got cheese and Vegemite although I know some children did.
If we were hungry after school - and what child isn't? - we were often given a "weetbix" with Vegemite on it. It was a fast, cheap snack. Some children probably had butter as well on their weetbix but my mother couldn't afford that so we just had a smidgeon of Vegemite.
The other common sandwich filling was "peanut paste". Of course it is now called "peanut butter". That only came in the "smooth" form. Now it comes in "crunchy" and even "extra crunchy". (And no, nobody worried about the possibility that another child might be allergic to peanuts.) Some children had something called "fritz" on occasions. It was a pale pinkish "German sausage". My mother refused to buy it and, on the one occasion I tasted it, I was glad she probably couldn't afford it. You never put Vegemite with that.
I suppose there must have been other things. I have vague memories of being given a sandwich with left over lamb from a Sunday roast a couple of times. Sometimes we went home to lunch or, in my case, I went to my paternal grandmother's home and had lunch in the peace and quiet of her kitchen. I loved doing that.
When we moved back to the bush the school house was next door to the school. We went home and made our own lunch but it was often bread and Vegemite.
There is still Vegemite in the house. The Senior Cat has it on toast. I have it on toast. We spread it even more sparingly now because we are more conscious of the salt content. If I take a sandwich somewhere it won't be Vegemite but I have, in emergencies, been known to take that other staple of a Downunder childhood the savoury biscuit and Vegemite. For me it wasn't the "Sao" or the "Salada" but "Ryvita" or "Vitawheat".
A dietician once told me that Vegemite should be banned - even though the salt content is less than it once was. She just didn't understand the importance of Vegemite in the diet of young kittens in Downunder. We thrived on it - and I suspect that most of them still do.
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3 comments:
I had banana sandwiches for lunch (four slices of white bread, butter, banana) for lunch from five to twenty five or thirty, along with a piece of home-made cake or sweet slice, and an apple or orange. I now wonder about those meals. (I still occasionally have banana on toast.)
We probably thrived because our other meals were better balanced, we played outside, and no one worried about calories and nutrition so long as we had food in our tummies. (A hang-over from the Depression, I suspect.)
LMcC
Am not fond of bananas - although I jokingly tell people my tricycle runs on them. It reminded me of the other sandwich filling we were never allowed to have - jam. There was usually someone who had a raspberry jam sandwich - the pips in the jam were supposed to be made from wood. But, most of us had Vegemite or peanut butter or that processed cheese. Your lunch was probably the envy of your class mates!
I wonder if "fritz" or "German sausage" is what we call Vienna sausage UpOver. They are cocktail size, pale pink and made strictly of meat by-products. My mother kept them in the cabinet as a very infrequent lunch meal for my brother and me.
We had sliced bananas as an occasional treat on our peanut butter sandwiches.
My favorite lunch sandwich was a sun-warm tomato, washed and sliced between two pieces of bread. The tomato came straight out of a garden. We only had these in the summer when we were out of school. Too messy to eat inside, so we ate them outside at the picnic table. Every great once in a while, if there was leftover breakfast bacon, we had a slice of that too on our sandwich.
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