Did you know that Brits don't eat pumpkin? Now you do

The first time I was presented with a bowl of neon orange soup in Australia and told it was pumpkin, I was appalled.

If you are considering serving pumpkin soup to a Brit who has just moved Down Under, you may want to think again. Picture: Getty

The first time I was presented with a bowl of neon orange soup in Australia and told it was pumpkin, I was appalled. Back in Britain, only cows eat pumpkins.

But that was nothing compared to the horror with which my new Australian friends greeted my enthusiasm for a novel vegetable I’d discovered in the greengrocer – cheap, tasty (if cooked right) and abundantly plentiful.

“You eat chokos?” one said, disgust etched clearly on her face. “Oh, yuck. They used to grow wild over dunny doors. You can’t eat them!”

Aussie friends were revolted by the new resident's fondness for Chokos. Picture: Getty

Back then, just a few weeks in the country that was to become my beloved home, my confusion was mounting. What the hell was wrong with them? And, moreover, what were dunny doors?

To a Brit, Australia can look on the surface, and especially in the cities, pretty much like old Blighty. But it really is like looking through a prism. Nothing is quite as it seems.

Sometimes, Australia is more British than the Brits, as with the tide of magazine and newspaper stories about the royals – far more than we ever had in the UK.

But at other times, it’s surprisingly different. Chips back in the old country, for instance, are only chips here if they have the word ‘hot’ in front of them. Chips alone turn out to be what we’d call crisps. Sweets in the UK are lollies here. Sweets here are desserts in the UK.    

And football? Don’t get me started. Even with Aussie Rules, since someone once described it as a prison riot into which a ball has been thrown, I can’t see it any other way.

Footy? Don't even get me started.

But language distinctions aside, there are vast cultural chasms too. When it gets cold in England, you turn on the central heating. When it gets cold in Australia, you hunch in front of a tiny fan heater and shiver in an Oodie. A warm sudsy bath is a great way to relax in the UK. Here, if you don’t have at least two showers a day while making jokes about where Poms hide their money (under the soap) then you’re simply un-Australian.       

Even curiouser, when I first arrived here, I couldn’t find the hot water setting on the washing machine in the friend’s house I was staying in. That turned out to be because there wasn’t one.

Most Australians wash their clothes in cold water, she told me, or sometimes, if they’re particularly dirty, in tepid suds. In Britain, we’d always almost boil them alive before draping them all around the kitchen as you didn’t stand a chance in hell of drying them on the line outside.

But the aversion to heat, I later found, doesn’t extend to everything. Visit nearly any café here and order coffee and a cake and it’s odds on that cake will turn up hot on your plate. Yes, even chocolate cake will be transformed into a tongue-burning melting mess.

Why, oh why? It can’t possibly be because they’re all stale and it’s a ploy to disguise that; not all of them. But it’s an oddity I’ve never encountered anywhere else on the planet.    

Wouldn't put it past an Aussie to try and warm that up. Picture: Getty

Mind you, I’m not really complaining. Not really. There’s so much that is wonderful about Australia, including the quality of the coffee in those aforementioned cafes. Even at remote spots in the outback, you’ll find a good coffee machine. In Birdsville, for instance, the tiny town in the desert a million miles from anywhere, they have no fewer than three.

I always remember one time, returning to London to visit friends, I spotted a big coffee machine in a café and raced in to ask for a coffee. The barista nodded, went out the back and reappeared with a full mug. I was confused.

“But I want it made in the machine,” I said plaintively.

“It was,” she replied. “We make it every morning in the machine and then put it in the urn to keep it hot.”

And you wonder why I live here?

Originally published as Did you know that Brits don't eat pumpkin? Now you do