PARALLEL STATE
I’m standing on a rocky spur overlooking the grand expanse of Breakneck Gorge just outside of Hepburn in central Victoria, with local chef, Slow Food Movement advocate and Swiss-Italian descendant Gary Thomas. We’re leaning over the back of his ute and he’s cutting me slices of a food found nowhere else in the world: a crumbly, knobbly sausage known as a bull boar. I take a few discs of sausage, layer them onto a homemade cheese and parsley scone with a little splodge of Gary’s nanna’s tomato sauce and dig in. This is quite the sausage sanger: it’s full of pork and beef (hence the “bull” and the “boar”), and an old-fashioned and oddly comforting spice blend: white pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spice and a tonne of garlic. “It’s been described as a meaty hot cross bun,” Thomas says, which is quite true, though that makes it sound a bit weird and unpalatable and it’s neither of those things.
What it is, though, is a surprising piece of edible Swiss-Italian heritage, a
