Floater: The Pie That Takes A Bath

There are some Australian meals that need no explanation. Then there is the pie floater.

In Adelaide, the humble meat pie gets dropped into a bowl of thick green pea soup, usually upside down, with the pastry sitting proudly above the surface. Tomato sauce is the classic finishing touch. It is an unlikely combination until you realise that Adelaide has been eating it for generations.

The pie floater became particularly associated with Adelaide’s late-night pie carts, where it was once a familiar meal for people finishing work, leaving the pub or simply looking for something hot after dark. The pie carts have largely disappeared, but the floater remains one of South Australia’s most recognisable food traditions.

And then Aussie English went and borrowed the same word for several things that float, fail to flush, sneak between prison cells or otherwise refuse to behave normally.

Meaning

「floater」にはAussie Englishでいくつもの意味があります。

食べ物としては、肉入りパイを濃いグリーンピースのスープに浮かべた「pie floater」を指します。特にSouth Australia、なかでもAdelaideとの結びつきが強い料理です。ほかにも、刑務所内で違法に保管され、独房から独房へこっそり移動させられる物、特定のgangに所属しない労働者、浮かんで発見された遺体、回らない硬貨、そして流れずにトイレに残る排泄物を指す俗語として記録されています。

As an Aussie English noun, “floater” has several specialised meanings.

Most famously, a pie floater is a meat pie served in thick pea soup, particularly associated with Adelaide and South Australia. The word has also been recorded in prison slang for an illegally kept item passed between cells, in wharfie slang for a worker not attached to a gang, in police slang for a corpse found floating, in two-up slang for a coin that fails to spin, and for an unpleasant bit of excrement that will not flush.

Example

「After the late shift, we stopped for a floater and a couple of coffees.」

「遅番が終わってから、floaterとコーヒーをいくつか買うために立ち寄った。」

ここでのfloaterはAdelaide名物のpie floaterです。夜遅くに食べる、かなり重たい一食という感じが出ています。

“After the late shift, we stopped for a floater and a couple of coffees.”

Here, “floater” means the Adelaide dish. The sentence evokes the traditional late-night role of the pie floater as a substantial meal after work or a night out.

Australia–Japan connection

日本では「スープの中に肉パイを浮かべる」という発想自体がかなり珍しく感じられるでしょう。しかも、見た目はかなり個性的です。Adelaideのpie floaterは、単なる珍しい料理というより、夜の街、pie cart、仕事帰り、フットボールなど、South Australiaの都市文化と結びついた食べ物です。現在では昔のpie cartほど身近ではありませんが、地元の食文化として記憶されています。

For Japanese readers, the unusual part of the pie floater is obvious: putting a meat pie into pea soup is hardly the first combination most people would invent. But the dish makes more sense when seen as part of Adelaide’s street-food history. Pie carts once provided hot late-night meals around the city, and the floater became closely associated with that culture.