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.
"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.
"I'm not sure why we tend to hold other cuisines in so much more esteem than ours, but that's changing."
There was a time when he would not admit to liking Highlander mayonnaise (made with a can of sweetened condensed milk, vinegar and mustard) which was the standard home-made salad dressing in the 1950s and '60s, but now he no longer feels ashamed to admit enjoying it.
"It's stupid but it's because it was perceived as being unsophisticated.
"It's the same with tomato sauce - I have it in my cupboard and I'm not ashamed of it.
"Yes, it is unsophisticated but it's still something of us.
"It's the same with fish and chips - I have no shame about eating fish and chips," he says.
In the 27 years between the first edition and this updated version of New Zealand Food and Cookery, our ways of eating and approach to food has changed, although most of us still base our main meals on protein (meat or fish), a starch (potatoes, pasta, rice), and a couple of vegetables.
However, our recipe repertoire has expanded to include the large numbers of new ingredients and flavourings, from lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves to couscous and zucchini, now available, not only in specialist food stores but also in supermarkets and in cafe food.
There is also a growing consciousness of healthy eating - less fat and more vegetables and fish, including cooking with olive oil instead of butter or lard or dripping, he says.
"We are never going to go back to how it was from about the 1920s to the '50s, which was probably when `kwisine kiwiana' in its purest form existed.
"At the same time it's nice to have little bits and pieces of the old style of things, and not to have to feel ashamed about them."
A former chef, Burton says he cooks almost every day and has included numerous recipes in this book.
Many are traditional ones reprinted from the earlier edition, which originally came from community cookbooks, but some are newer, like choy sum with mushrooms and oyster sauce, or blue cod with new potatoes and saffron.
These show the inclusion of new ingredients and developments in our eating patterns over the past couple of decades as we adopted food styles we came across in our travels, and of immigrants to our country.
Burton has always been fascinated by the meeting of cultures in the colonial era and how cuisines of both the colonisers and indigenous peoples were adapted into local ways of eating.
He sees it as one of the few happy outcomes of the whole experience.
He has explored the same theme in previous books, notably The Raj at Table: A culinary history of the British in India (1993) about how the British developed a cuisine of their own in India, and French Colonial Cookery: A cook's tour of the French-speaking world (2000) about the influence of French cuisine on its former colonies from Indochina to the Caribbean.
Now he is working on a book about the Portuguese experience.
Colonial goose
Colonial goose is a leg of lamb or mutton with a stuffing usually used for goose.
1 leg lamb, shank on
120g fresh breadcrumbs
60g suet1 large onion, finely diced
1 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 tsp sage
1 tsp thyme
salt and pepper
1 egg, beater
milk
Remove the leg bone by working round it gradually from each end with a thin-bladed knife, taking care not to break the skin.
Mix together breadcrumbs, suet, onion, parsley, sage and thyme.
Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Mix in beaten egg and just enough milk to moisten.
Stuff the leg cavity and sew up with string.
Tie string tightly around the leg to form a goose's head.
Roast at 180degC, allowing 35 minutes for each 500g.
Variations: A shoulder may be substituted for the leg, and variations on the stuffing ingredients are endless.
Half a cup of finely diced bacon or ham makes a tasty addition and the seasonings can be varied by using mixed herbs instead of sage and thyme, or by adding ¼ tsp grated nutmeg and the grated zest of half a lemon.
- from David Burton's New Zealand Food and Cookery (Bateman, 2009).
Ginger crunch
Ginger crunch began life in home kitchens, but has become a cake shop favourite, even though nowadays the base is typically soft and shortbread-like, rather than hard and crunchy as it ought to be.
Base:
225g flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
pinch salt
115g butter
115g sugar
Icing:
50g butter
2 tsp golden syrup
50g icing sugar
2 tsp ground ginger
Sift dry ingredients and chop or rub in butter until mixture has the consistency of breadcrumbs.
Add sugar and mix well.
Press into a flat, buttered tin and bake for 25 minutes at 180degC.
While the base is still warm, pour over the icing made as follows: Melt together butter and golden syrup.
Beat in icing sugar and ginger.
Mix well.
Cut into squares while still warm.
- from David Burton's New Zealand Food and Cookery (Bateman, 2009).
