Click photo to enlarge
David Burton's book includes several ways to approach the
traditional lamb meal. Photo by Beef + Lamb New Zealand.
Forget the cooking of Italian nonnas and French
grandmères, and come back to nanna's roasts and home baking.
Charmian Smith talks to David Burton about the revival of
traditional Kiwi cuisine.
For a long time we've been listening wistfully to
people from Italy, France and other places showing us how
their mothers and grandmothers cooked, but we've forgotten
how our own ones cooked, David Burton says.
"You feel so envious and bereft, but when you look at it we
are not - we do actually have our own identity and a lot of
that identity comes though in old family recipes," the
Wellington-based culinary historian and food writer says.
He believes we've come to hold our own ancestral food in
contempt because we've fallen under the thrall of
Mediterranean and Asian food over the past 30 years or so.
However, culinary cringe is dissipating, as is obvious from
the flurry of recent books celebrating New Zealand cuisine.
The most recent is Burton's own New Zealand Food and Cookery
(Bateman, hbk, $59.99), an updated and partly rewritten
version of his ground-breaking 1982 Two Hundred Years of New
Zealand Food and Cookery.
Click photo to enlarge
David Burton
When Burton was writing the first edition of his book almost 30
years ago, he faced howls of scepticism and jibes, he says.
"One guy was a farmer and he'd been eating Mum's roasts and
pavlovas all his life and washing down his afternoon teas
with sponges and pikelets and scones and Anzac biscuits and
whatever.
"It seems a little bit ironic that people took all these
things for granted without really thinking about it.
"The fact is that every nation on Earth has a cuisine because
we all have to eat something and it all comes from somewhere.
"Even if it comes from somewhere else it finds a new
permutation and that's because of our indigenous foods and
our contact with Maori.
"The question is whether people actually want to own it.
"I guess the heartening thing for me in the last few years is
that suddenly people decide they do want to own it again."
Much of the food and ways of eating we consider ours had
their origins in Britain, America or perhaps Australia -
bacon and egg pie stems from 18th-century England, pikelets
are Scottish, gems and Spanish cream are probably American,
Burton says.
However, we have adopted and adapted them and developed our
own ways with them so they have become like folk recipes.
For example, pumpkin roasted in its skin along with a joint
of meat is a New Zealand specialty not found elsewhere.
We also consider as ours produce such as kumara, tamarillos,
kiwifruit, and local species of seafood such as paua and
green-lipped mussels.
Whatever their reaction to them, most New Zealanders
recognise traditional recipes such as Highlander mayonnaise,
pavlova, fudge cake, and whitebait patties, he says.
We may think of our ancestors as having really boring food,
but Burton sees many similarities between the Anglo-Celtic
type of food our grandmothers cooked and French peasant food
that has been revered by some writers.
"My grandmother used to boil a leg of hogget and the meat
would be eaten and the stock you got from the cooking would
be boiled up with barley to make a barley broth.
"What really is the fundamental difference between that and
the pot-au-feu?" he asks.
"It's just that we traditionally have never packaged our food
quite so appealingly as the French.
