Dave Shennen's post got me thinking about how to define Australian food when a huge chunk of the audience is horrified at the prospect of eating an animal that appears on the coat of arms. Bush tucker, animal or vegetable, is not yet widely eaten in Australia. There is the fleeting exception like macadamia nuts, but at best, foods indigenous to the Australian continent get tucked into the novelty aisle in the supermarket.

In part, Australian food hasn't had the time since colonisation to ossify into an accepted set of recipes or ingredients that define a huge chunk of the population. This is a good thing: it is hard to get bored with the variety.

The one place that "national" recipes tend to coalesce is in self-published recipes, those small manifestoes printed by renegade CWA groups, Parents Associations, church fete organisers and sundry food marketing boards; all bound by hand with a simple staple or plastic binding.

I'm addicted to collecting them.

I think that I have at least two cookbooks written with the express purpose of promoting sultana use and multiple cookbooks written by Willow to encourage the spread of their bakeware. Both the Sultana Marketing Board tract and the bakeware manufacturer's collection contain at least four chutney recipes and entire chapters devoted to steamed pudding. I can't think of anything more Anglo-Australian. They're almost worthless as a guide on how to eat in modern times. Nowhere else in the world does copha feature as a popular ingredient.

There is no room within them for glamour.

Over time the thin cardboard covers disintegrate to dusty powder and the photocopied pages offer poor resistance to liquids. They hold conspicuous stains and leftover flour dust in equal quantities. The well-lit macro-shot foodporn that is the staple of post-Millennium cooking tomes is (mercifully) absent and any illustration at all is as rare as any sense of typesetting.

What these small rural tracts lack in glitz, they make up for with an accountability and transparency that doesn't occur in all modern cookbooks. While a few of the top magazines and cookbook publishers have rigorous test kitchens and any chef who still relies on their ability to cook rather than their weight as a celebrity will test their own, most magazines rely upon the good graces of their contributing writers to vet their own material. The self-published recipe book offers a modicum of social insurance. You can look the author in the eye and tell them that their famous chutney recipe is unmitigated crap. At least, I would, which is probably why I'd make for a poor school councillor (as well as not having kids).

As an artform, they're disappearing. There is a clear division in the mid-90s where the home computer became commonplace for two reasons, firstly, the appearance of abysmal clipart and twee font choices; secondly, because self published recipe books became harder to find. With the popularisation of the email (and eventually, blogs), there is less need to print and collate recipes to share them amongst friends. Now this sort of sharing can go on without a physical trace or the need for recipes to be linked to a time or place.

What's your favourite self-published recipe book?