Nick Ryan: Who would dare criticise SA’s food obsessions: Fruchocs, frog cakes, FUIC and fritz
Fruchocs, frog cakes, Farmers Union Iced Coffee and fritz. They’re the four F’s that any self-respecting South Australian will defend against the doubters, writes Nick Ryan.
Opinion
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What can you read into the mind of someone compelled to leap to the defence of chocolate?
What is it in someone’s upbringing that forges fierce loyalty to flavoured milk?
And what conditions conspire to create a little green cake that requires both its creator and its consumer to be Bob Marley at a Pink Floyd concert level stoned?
The answer is they’re all South Australian.
Regionality is the fundamental shaper of great cuisine and certain places are forever linked with certain foods.
New Yorkers will insist pizza is never better than when doled out in fat, cheese-heavy slices – and the Romans remain adamant the only true spaghetti carbonara comes from the Eternal City. Ducks have never been more delicious than in the old Peking and schnitzel needs no gooey adornment in Vienna.
But what does South Australia contribute to the table? The catering from a kid’s birthday party. Fruchocs, frog cakes, Farmers Union Iced Coffee and fritz. The Four F’s.
The Fruchocs and the frog cakes are unique, the Farmers Union a superior version of a common iced coffee and the fritz is just another example of the frugal butchery tradition of bunging lips and bumholes into sausage skins.
The only thing making fritz uniquely ours is the xenophobic name. But dare criticise any of these comestibles and an army mobilises to bring you down.
A dear friend from Melbourne made that mistake this week as her family enjoyed a week at the beach with mine. She was in raptures over the beaches, cleaned out half the stallholders at the Willunga Farmers Market and consumed so much Clare Valley riesling that she’d ceviched her stomach lining. But when she confessed, in a social media post, she didn’t really understand the whole Fruchocs thing, all hell broke loose.
My friend is a journalist, condemned by her age and work history to have many connections with a media diaspora that spread from SA in the 1990s. So the instant she hacked on the Fruchoc, that diaspora mobilised and arrows started coming in from Jakarta to London, from the burroughs of Brooklyn to the cake-baking communes of Sydney’s inner west.
She could’ve posted a photo of her wearing a Trump 2020 T-shirt under a baby fur seal coat, holding a rifle and resting a foot on the bullet-riddled corpse of Tim Minchin and not copped the criticism she got for suggesting the Fruchoc not only looked like a rabbit turd, but tasted like one too.
The response was as vigorous as it was predictable. The hills on which South Australians choose to die are built from chocolate pebbles, green icing, brown milk and minced offal.
It’s hard to decide what’s weirder, the zealous attachment to snack foods or the snack foods themselves?
That the cult surrounding these four pillars of South Australian gastronomy is driven by a generation who grew up in an Adelaide where growing 10 dope plants in your backyard was decriminalised can’t be a coincidence.
My friend has since returned home, frog marched back over the border, chastened by her excursion into chocolate hate speech and safely soothed by an overly-fetished Fitzroy latte rather than the stuff that comes in a carton. She may be gone for some time.