Hiakai, The Cookbook

There is probably a good armload of cookbooks that have had a seismic effect on international cookery. Take celebrated and famously combustible English chef, Marco Pierre White’s White Heat, for example. “I had a copy, back in the day,” says Fiso. Come 1 September, expect a generation of up-and-coming Kiwi chefs to be walking into professional kitchens with a copy of Fiso’s Hiakai cookbook –a Larousse Gastronomique of indigenous New Zealand cuisine.

In the way that book, by French chef Prosper Montagné, helped codify French cooking, Fiso’s cookbook – three long and intense years in the making – seeks to define and explain indigenous New Zealand cuisine.

The book’s journey begins with early methods, such as how Māori captured eels or trapped tītī, then goes into a detailed glossary of indigenous ingredients and how and when they are used – traditionally and in the Hiakai kitchen. Then there’s a chapter of recipes. But kitchen battlers be warned: ”If I’m going to call the book ‘Hiakai’, I didn’t just want it to be for the at-home user.

“There are some user-friendly recipes, but there are some that are much more technical that if you’re willing to push yourself as a home cook, or you’re a chef, these are for you. It takes you through the starting point of tradition and ends with some quite avant-garde recipes.”

The goal, says Fiso, was to create a book that provides enough information about how the ingredients in the glossary work for chefs to do their own testing and create something completely new.