A taste of Aunt Daisy’s real food
In Aunt Daisy’s day recipes had silly names like Inky Pinky Pie and Stuffed Monkeys, and nobody had heard of processed food.
Aunt Daisy was New Zealand’s first cooking icon, sharing her daily recipes over the radio with the nation’s cooks during the 1940s to 1960s when everything was made from scratch.
In her day, stomachs were stronger, and eating really was ‘‘nose to tail’’. Tripe, brains with bacon, and liver pie were genuine options for dinner. But it was also a time when New Zealand stomachs were flatter and fewer people were obese.
But by the 1970s New Zealand was rushing to ape the eating habits of the Americans, and the rest is waist-bulging, belt-straining history.
I thought it’d be great to connect with the cooking that came just before the great waistline expansion began.
I decided the family would eat as Aunt Daisy would have had us eat.
Cooking Aunt Daisy-style felt like connecting to a different era in New Zealand history, and wasn’t hard.
Books like The Aunt Daisy Cookbook, which I used for my experiment, remain on sale, thanks to a charitable trust that exists to keep her culinary flame alive.
Her recipes are all cook-fromscratch affairs, which require a narrow range of ingredients, reflecting a simpler time, and one where people had less money to fritter on luxury food. Shopping for Aunt Daisy meals involves a lot of meat, fish, butter, flour, potatoes, veges, fruit, and cream.
Almost every ingredient she used is still commonly available, though much as I might like to try my hand at Stewed Pukaki (Pukeko), I wasn’t about to go poaching.
She was a specialist at turning a tin of salmon into a meal (Inky Pinky Pie), or a cheap cut of beef into a feast (Normandy steak).
We tried both, and they were excellent, child-friendly meals, though I cheated on the Inky Pinky Pie, and used smoked hoki in deference to my tinned salmonloathing wife.
The recipes were also easy on the wallet, and reminded me of the food I ate as a child in the 1970s.
Aunt Daisy’s cooking is childfriendly, and three of the recipes we tried (Inky Pinky Pie, Normandy Steak and her Bombay Chicken Pie) are going to become staples for us.
Aunt Daisy was also refreshingly multinational food corporation free, and died before the rise of processed and ultraprocessed food, which is increasingly thought to have an addictive effect on people who consume it. The multinationals rose to dominance by training us to eat processed food with a long enough shelf life to make in highly efficient factories, and ship anywhere in the world, and it has grabbed a huge share of our supermarket trolley space. Multinational-sold convenience, marketed aggressively, enhanced taste with hidden sugar, and ‘‘taught the world to snack’’, as anti-obesity academics Carlos Montero, Fabiop Gomez and Geoffrey Cannon put it.
Cooking Aunt Daisy-style is about many things, but it is not about convenience.
She was no stranger to sugar, as anyone who delves into The Aunt Daisy Baking Book, from which the nut and raisin Stuffed Monkeys came, will discover, but to cook in the Aunt Daisy way requires time in the kitchen. But her devotees had the time, and didn’t really need multi-national food corporations for that much.
They had recipes for everything from sweets ( to booze, to pet foods to sauces and puddings.
As we discovered, good things take time.