Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Lucio's Collection, Sydney

LITERATURE
Lucio Galletto and Timothy Fisher, The Art of Food at Lucio's, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1999, p. 11 (illus.)

You learn to eat by cooking. You learn to cook by eating. It is an immemorial cycle, transmitted down by the generations. My friend John Olsen, who eats at Lucio's all the time, gave him a drawing that exactly expresses this: it shows Lucio's imagined parents in a flurry of preparation in the kitchen, the table and the very air filled with a wild but purposeful tangle of movement and ingredients, while two small children - Lucio and Marino - stare in round-eyed fascination at the wonders that are going on, like infants who find themselves in an alchemist's study, absorbing everything not by precept but by example. Its caption is How they made great chefs in Italy.

My childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, wasn't like that. Not a bit. The food was still largely regarded by Australians as fuel; lumpy, charred, and undistinguished - in some, colonial English 'gourmet' food (that disastrous word) was a Steak Diane, flamed in brandy to the imminent peril of your girlfriend's beehive. 'Italian food', as I remember it, was rather watery ravioli serve in a now long-defunct coffee shop called Lorenzini's. But then, things began to take off. This we owed to immigration. Foes of multiculturalism should remember what Australian food was like in the days of mono-culture, and thank their Protestant gods for the change. Mestizaje es grandeza; mixture is greatness. 'A new dish', wrote that garrulous 18th century gourmet Anthelme de Brillat-Savarin, 'gives more pleasure to mankind than the discovery of a new star'.

This is still true, and 35 years ago practically all dishes were new to Australians, so that they slid easily into a culture which, in other areas, was fiercely dedicated to the pleasures of the body. The evolution of Australian food into one of the great eclectic cuisines of the world parallels the astounding rise in quality and variety of Australian wines. All of this has happened- though its foundations were laid earlier, of course - in the years that I have been living out of Australia, so that every year, when I come back, I find myself surprised and enchanted all over again.

Australia may first have been settled by hard men (and women too) but it was civilised by gentle, imaginative and skilled ones, people like Lucio Galletto. Salute, e tanti auguri, Maestro.

Robert Hughes, 1999
The Art of Food at Lucio's