What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing.

God Bless New Zealand for maintaining the time-honoured traditions we’re less attached to in Australia! James Barr’s answer to What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing. details the venerable Dead Horse.

James Barr doesn’t call it that: rhyming slang is another, time-honoured tradition from London which Australians have now largely abandoned. Rhyme for “pie and sauce”.

There are pies to be had still in Australia, but they don’t have the hegemony they once did. (And even back in the day, say the 60s, they shared space with Cornish pasties.)

What has taken their place? The burger, certainly. McDonalds and Burger King (here branded as Hungry Jacks) had the hegemony beforehand; but the old fashioned fish & chip shop burger was their background:

And the gourmet burger chains like Grill’d Healthy Burgers are doing very well now:

—to the extent that McDonalds is having to make their own to-order gourmet burgers, to stay competitive: CYT Homepage | McDonald’s Australia

The Steak Sandwich is the other venerable legacy of the fish & chip shop, although it’s not as big now as it used to be:

Of course, we now have burritos, and souvlakis (very very different from souvlakis in Greece), and pork rolls, and sushi.