Show Tails

As the Show Insider, I’ve been watching with anticipation over the past weeks as the many food vendor stores are set up around the Show grounds.

My old favourites are back once again. Dagwood dogs, fairy floss, snow cones. And I’ve added some new intriguing show treats to my list. How could I not try ‘Chip on a stick’? Of course there’s a tonne of gourmet and healthy options at the Show too, but it seems we all head for anything on a stick, sweet or salty…after all, it’s only for a day or two of the year.

It got me thinking about the tradition and spectacle of tucking into Show food. I stumbled across this recent article about dagwood dogs in RAS Times, by food author John Newtown, which summed up this perfectly. It’s not just about the taste; it’s about the sights, smells and memories that Show food evokes.

I can’t write this food memory without writing about my father. It’s not that I ever remember my father eating a Dagwood Dog, or that I can even remember eating one while I was with him, although I must have because there is only one place I have ever eaten or ever eat a Dagwood Dog, and that is the Sydney Royal Easter Show.

Every year, I would make a pilgrimage with my father, a bushman exiled to the city, to the Show. For Dad, it was his one chance a year to inspect the cattle and sheep, see the camp-drafting and review the state of the agricultural nation. For me, it was sideshows. And a delicious Dagwood Dog, delicious in the way food with not a single redeeming feature except memory often is.

You buy it from a tall cart on wheels parked inside the showground, from a woman called, most likely, Mavis, who would swear blind that her batter recipe was the best in the whole country.

You reach up to grasp the dog as it is handed down to you, by Mavis, a paper napkin wrapped around the surprisingly sturdy thick wooden stick on which the saveloy is impaled.

For one unaccustomed to eating a Dagwood Dog, the first bite could be an alarming experience. The cold, viscous, salty sweet tomato sauce, the hopefully thin crunchy outer layer of hot golden batter which gives way to a doughy, inner consistency and is followed by the teeth resistant rubbery texture of the red dyed casing of the saveloy. All  this texture gives way to taste: salty, sweet, spicy, and, above all, fatty. Now the memories come flooding back.

There is more mystery to this food than speculation as to what the saveloy contains. Firstly, it has two names. Sometimes Dagwood Dog, and at others, Pluto Pup. The origin of the name Dagwood is relatively straightforward. Cartoon character Dagwood Bumstead, the archetypical 1950s American buffoon husband, lauded over and tricked by Blondie, his beautiful, conniving wife. He raided the refrigerator in the middle of the night to make gigantic sandwiches, symbols of American post war excessive consumption, which came to be known as – Dagwoods.

Pluto is not so obvious, although also a cartoon character, Mickey Mouse’s dog. But why did Disney name a cute puppy character after a dark and distant planet, or the king of the underworld – Pluto, from Plutus, ‘wealthy’ a pseudonym for Hades?

And try as I may, I can find no sure reason for the two names. From an ABC Radio National essay on the Dagwood Dog, we learn, from food retailer Bob Cooper that the Pluto Pup was first introduced into Sydney by one Russell Kennedy. He gives no date, but we have to assume it was in that post war period when all things American were enthusiastically adopted.

Once, in Melbourne, I happened on a fair on the banks of the Yarra where I found, within spitting distance of one another, one stall selling Pluto Pups, another Dagwood Dogs. Why the two names I asked? “Dunno mate” were the answers. I didn’t eat either one. Well, it wasn’t the Sydney Royal Easter Show, was it? 

What’s your favourite Show food?  You can check out the carnival of cuisines on offer at this year’s Show at www.eastershow.com.au/food.

John Newton eats, writes about where his food came from, why it came, how it was made or grown and how it tasted. The above excerpt is taken from his latest book Grazing: the ramblings and recipes of a man who gets paid to eat.