Musk sticks are, I think, a peculiarly Australian sweet.
Actually, I think the whole “musk” flavour may only exist here.
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I used to love musk sticks when I was a kid.
(I’ll spare you the tediously wholesome story about carefully buying lollies with my pocket money on the holidays and making them last as long as I could and the milkman’s cheery whistle and so on.)
So I bought some, the other day. Every Australian supermarket has them.
It turns out that I still like musk sticks. But because the sticks I ate when I was a kid had been sitting, unwrapped, in the shop for some time, I prefer them a bit dried out and crusty. The second comment on this post about musk sticks at Candy Blog indicates that I am not alone in this preference.
(I found that putting the sticks in a colander on top of a heating vent for a couple of hours dried ’em out nicely.)
That Candy Blog post, though, and the previous one about musk Life Savers, alerted me to the strangeness of these sweets.
Here in Australia, there are musk sticks, and musk Life Savers, and little hard musk pellets too. They’re all pink, and they all taste the same, and I cannot for the life of me tell you what they taste of.
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“Musk”, here, does not indicate some flavour that started out being squeezed from some animal’s glands. Well, not unless that animal had a sort of… flowery… smell, anyway.
I haven’t actually smelled any natural musk, so perhaps it’s amazingly similar to the candy smell. People grasping for words to describe lolly-musk often say it’s “perfume-y”, after all, and natural musk was used as a perfume component.
But since natural musk is alleged to smell “animalic, earthy and woody”, I don’t think it can really be much like the lolly musk.
I agree with the memorable observation that musk lollies smell a bit like an old lady’s handbag.
But that doesn’t really get it right, either.
Musk sticks actually smell, and taste… like musk sticks.
If pressed, I might venture the opinion that they taste pink.
It’s sort of like that weird “bubble-gum flavour” that emerged as an entity unto itself at some point.
If you’ve never tasted “musk” and get the opportunity – without having to pay $25 for an air-mailed bag of the things, of course – I highly recommend it. You probably won’t be crazy about the taste, but this is not one of those confrontational “local delicacies” like salted liquorice. (Which is, of course, not salted with mere sodium chloride – it’s got ammonium chloride in it!)
The taste of a musk stick will hang around in your mouth for rather a while, but you probably won’t be unhappy about that. It’s pretty inoffensive.
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This all reminded me that here in Australia, we really don’t have any big guns in the “local delicacy” wars.
No hákarl…
…no lutefisk, no hundred-year-old eggs or casu marzu or balut.
OK, there are witchetty grubs, but it’s not as if most of the Australian population have ever even seen one of those. And in any case, I’m told that witchetty grubs are actually quite delicious, if you can get over your irrational fear of eating an arthropod that doesn’t happen to live in the sea.
Vegemite is the ISO Standard Weird Australian Food, but I’m here to tell you that it’s really not that peculiar. Wipe a smear of Vegemite on a cracker and bite into it and you’ll be experiencing an odd savory foodstuff, not some incredible brain-flipping toxic creation.
I was born and raised on Vegemite and so spread it on my bread like mortar on a brick, but in more moderate amounts, Vegemite is really not that big of a deal.
And I think that’s pretty much it for weird Aussie food. I mean, what else is there for even the least adventurous tourist to get bothered about? Meat pies? Pie floaters? Sausage rolls?
Heck, even Chiko Rolls aren’t that bad if, as with the witchetty grubs, you don’t think too hard about what you’re eating.
And not a lot of people find themselves retching after being cruelly forced to eat a lamington or pavlova, or even a Moreton Bay bug.
Am I forgetting anything? Has Australia actually managed to come up with any truly confronting food?
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