Cabanossi, Jatz and fairy bread: These are Australia's essential party foods
Parties can be a love or hate affair.
From painful small talk with someone you've forgotten the name of already, to family engagements where you've remembered how much you actually despise children, to your uncle's extraordinarily racist jokes, there's a lot going on that will make you want to leave as soon as there's a pause in conversation.
SEE ALSO: Russell Crowe shows Americans how to eat fairy bread, the Australian party treat of a generation
When you've exhausted your visits to the bathroom to escape from it all, the next best thing is to gorge yourself on party food, laid out in front of you as if you were Jesus Christ at The Last Supper.
Party food in Australia is usually super cheap, easy to produce en masse, and must please a wide range of people. In other words, nothing too out there, which means the blander the better. Enough distraction from the botched party itself.
Australians will know these finger foods off by heart, as they've likely munched these over and over at different parties. For the uninitiated, let us show you the way.
Fairy bread
As made internationally famous by Russell Crowe and Jimmy Fallon recently, fairy bread is the crummy but delicious birthday treat that's an important part of kids' birthday parties Down Under.
Made from the cheapest, crappiest white bread one can buy, margarine or butter is slapped on top then hundreds and thousands (a.k.a. sprinkles) are thrown over it to make a colourful confection.
There isn't much information on the history of the party food, in case you were wondering, but the origin of the word may have been derived from a poem published in 1885 by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson titled A Child’s Garden of Verse. In Australia, the first recorded reference was back in 1929 in The Mercury newspaper, highlighted in an article about a children's party.
Whatever its origins might be, fairy bread will never die.
Cabanossi/kabana, crackers and tasty cheese
As Aussie quintessential party platter is like the fancy-schmancy antipasto plates found in other cultures, except far less exotic.
Feast instead on cabanossi (also known as kabana), a dried, mild pork sausage like salami, "tasty" a.k.a. cheddar cheese cut into a cube and thick, salty crackers such as Jatz or Ritz on the side.
Matched with a cheap white wine, preferably in a box, it's the hallmark of a classy, slurred afternoon in one's backyard or at the races.
Sausage sandwich
No barbecue is complete without this reliable classic. Like its other party food cousins, there are only three ingredients: cheap white bread, slightly burnt beef sausages and tomato or barbecue sauce to smother on the top.
It's like a hot dog, but shoddy and tasty, and you'll find it for sale at almost every charity event and election polling booth. Hell, there's even a website dedicated to finding election "sausage sizzles" so you can be distracted from the mire that is Australian politics.
Mini pies and sausage rolls
Normally found in a monster tower at the centre of a table at a party, you'll be fighting over these even though they don't really taste like anything more than the tomato sauce you dipped it in.
Both these dirty treats are stuffed with the same beef-like mystery meat combination. Shut your eyes, pretend you are eating grain-fed wagyu steak and dig in. It is the only thing that is filling at a party, and therefore your only saviour from the hangover from hell.
Chocolate crackles
If you're horrible at baking, the chocolate crackle is the one item that you could try and pass as a baked good without suffering a few dirty looks.
You can easily throw these together if you have cocoa, rice bubbles, dried coconut and a somewhat disgusting addition called copha, which is made up of 98 percent saturated fat. Yep, pure saturated fat. The mothers might complain as children fall to the ground, but it surely isn't an Australian party without some clogging of your arteries.
Spring Rolls and Dim Sims
If you want to look a little more fancy and cosmopolitan at your party, make sure you serve some moderately Asian-influenced dishes like the spring roll and the dim sim.
Never mind the fact that the latter is an Australian invention. Accompanied with a sugary sweet chilli sauce, it's an ancient culture — deep fried.
