ABSTRACT
The recorded sighting of the Devil at work in Australia was June 1829 in the modest dining room of Government House in Hobart, the capital of Van Diemen's Land. Yet when the writer among the party afterward reported on this event he imputed the evil one had influenced the output of the gubernatorial kitchen by declaring the dinner was good of its kind, but though Heaven sends meat, the Devil sends cooks. This rough old adage – about the Devil and cooks – was regularly restated in newspapers and other serial publications across the Australian colonies, claiming Beelzebub as a key influence on local cookery. Colonial literature was written by men and focused on tales of derring-do and 'civilizing' the wilderness. If male authors wrote about cooking it was of the pioneering campfire kind. A cook working in the kitchen is rarely seen until women writers begin to publish in the late 1830s and take readers into the domestic sphere.
