A Topp passion:
As the Topp twins return for another season of Topp Country, Lynda Topp tells Sarah Nealon what viewers can expect.
old skills. Topp Twins rediscover
Lynda Topp has a new passion thanks to Topp Country, the food and travel series she presents with her twin sister Jools.
It’s nothing too outrageous and, if anything, it’s an old-fashioned practice that harks back to her childhood. Her passion is preserving.
“It’s something that I do all the time now,” she says.
“I’ve got a cupboard full of preserves. I do chutneys and jams and bottled fruit, and I think there was a generation who missed out on that. That’s our generation. We stopped bottling.
“At our house there was a cupboard halfway down the hallway and it had about eight shelves in it and it was full of peaches and apples and pears and plums.
“Dad used to help do the bottling. I remember he was very big on feijoas. We lost that a little bit with our generation.”
In Topp Country, the twins travel around New Zealand meeting food producers and home cooks, among others. While gallivanting around the country for the series, Lynda, 59, met people with an interest in preserving, which sparked her own love of it.
For the latest season of Topp Country, Lynda and Jools visited Hawke’s Bay and Nelson.
“We upped the stakes a little bit and did some more exciting things – not just making stuff on a plate,” says Lynda. “We did fermentations and salamis and all sorts of crazy things.”
By making Topp Country, Lynda says she and Jools have learnt a lot about Kiwis and their attitude to food and how to make it.
“There is a real history of food in New Zealand about it being pretty plain and pretty simple,” says Lynda. “We don’t have the history of the Italians or the Greeks.
“We’re keen to have a go at anything though. People are keen to learn how to make cheese or figure out how to preserve their meats and make salamis and all that sort of stuff. New Zealanders will have a go at anything.
“When we first started the idea of Topp Country, we went and saw our mum and she gave us three pieces of advice which we stayed with through the whole programme.
“She said, ‘The first thing is when I sit down to watch it, it’s got to be fun and entertaining. And at the end of it, I’d like to be able to make what they were making. And the other one is, nobody should be voted off. I’ve watched some of those programmes and the people are just flat out cooking and, right at the end, they vote them off and it’s terrible. They’ve tried so hard’.
“Mum’s 88 and she still bakes every Wednesday. She’s still out there in the kitchen baking cookies and cake.
“She makes the best peanut brownies and gingernuts in New Zealand.”
The twins are close to their parents and Lynda, who lives on an Ashburton farm, reckons they inherited their sense of humour from their father.
“Our dad’s 90 this year and every now and then and he’ll be thinking away and then he’ll come out with a clanger,” says Lynda.
The twins, who were raised in the Waikato with their older brother, have decades of experience under their belts as entertainers. They have a knack for country music, storytelling, yodelling, and making people laugh.
They were the subject of a 2011 documentary called Untouchable Girls and last year they won the Best Presenter: Entertainment category at the New Zealand Television Awards for the second season of Topp Country.
This year the twins are visiting London and Australia to perform their music and they are also busy writing a film script. Jools and Lynda are often referred to as ‘national treasures’ or ‘Kiwi icons’ something which Lynda is quietly chuffed about.
“We’re very humbled and proud because we’re just like anybody else,” she says.
“We’re just a couple of farm girls who picked up a guitar when we were young and sang a few songs.
“We did music and we wrote our own songs and then we started doing characters and making people laugh. We’ve had a pretty good run.”
“I do chutneys and jams and bottled fruit, and I think there was a generation who missed out on that. That’s our generation. We stopped bottling.” – Lynda Topp