Fairy bread is the most Australian thing on the buffet table. White bread, butter, hundreds and thousands. Cut diagonally. Served at every birthday party in every suburb between Cairns and Hobart since the 1950s. We invented it. The Country Women's Association probably invented it. It's in Bluey. It's our thing. No other country knows what fairy bread is, and the ones that find out are mostly horrified.
The phrase 'fairy bread' is in print in 1929 in Hobart's Mercury newspaper, which is fair enough, but the food itself was a Victorian-era English children's thing. There's a recipe in Robert Louis Stevenson's 'A Child's Garden of Verses' from 1885: 'come up here, O dusty feet! Here is fairy bread to eat.' British children's cookbooks from the 1900s describe buttered bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands as a teatime treat. What Australia did was adopt it, scale it, make it the unofficial national food of children's birthday parties between roughly 1950 and now, and forget that anywhere else had ever heard of it. The ingredients are British. The cultural devotion is ours. Both things are true. Australia has done many genuinely original food things (the Pavlova fight with New Zealand, the lamington, ANZAC biscuits, the world's deepest commitment to the meat pie). Fairy bread is not on that list. It's a borrowed dish we love better than the people who made it up.
Reception
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- Is white bread gluten-free? · gluten.refdat.com