Marmalade for QEII, foraging for Matariki
Denise Irvine considers some culinary inspiration for holiday weekends, and tries to spot the Matariki cluster.
I’d love to be able to report that I’ve had a clear view of the Matariki star cluster from my window this week, but it was well hidden behind leaden skies when I tried to find it a few days ago.
You have to be up early in winter to see Matariki, maybe 5.30am, and one of my best memories of it is more than a decade ago when I was heading to Auckland Airport at an ungodly (and freezing) hour to catch an overseas flight. I was with my husband, who knew his way around the stars, and he pointed out the glittery group in the northeastern sky as we left home.
Back then, we would have called it by its ancient Greek name, Pleiades. I love how that has changed and Matariki, its Mā ori name, has become comfortably embedded in our vocabulary.
Matariki is also a bright spot this month as a new public holiday on Friday (June 24), acknowledging the rise of the star cluster in mid-winter and marking Mā ori New Year. The holiday will move each year in accordance with the Mā ori lunar calendar but this time the miserable month of June, beset with wind and rain, is neatly bookended by Queen’s Birthday and Matariki weekends.
Matariki will grow in stature as the years go on and the two holidays seem a comfortable fit – and a welcome move – in this singular little country where our origins are rooted in many different parts of the world, as well as in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The recent Queen’s Birthday Weekend, of course, had the added lustre of celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, 70 years of QEII’s reign. It is an astonishing run of service and, as fellow columnist Richard Swainson wrote last Saturday, even the most dedicated republican can recognise the work ethic of someone who is still stoically waving at age 96.
The royal wave is my first memory of the Queen, a moment from New Year’s Day, 1954, when she and husband Prince Philip visited our family’s hometown, Cambridge, on their lengthy Coronation Tour. To avoid the crowds in the main street, my father strategically positioned us at a set of crossroads on the rural outskirts where he said the royal cavalcade would need to slow down, and we’d be guaranteed a good view of the Queen.
Others had the same bright idea as Dad, and we joined dozens of families on the roadside on a blisteringly hot day. I would have been barely four years old and I have a freeze-frame memory of a shiny black vehicle with big windows and a whitegloved hand waving from the back seat.
The glamorous young Queen of the 1950s’ tour is now grappling with the vicissitudes of age but she played a blinder during the Platinum Jubilee when she ignored showbiz advice about never working with children and animals to take tea at the palace with Paddington Bear.
It was a brilliant clip, highlighting the Queen’s natural warmth, good humour and acting abilities. I hope that now the jubilee is over and the bunting has been packed away, she is tucked up comfortably at Windsor and enjoying the hefty marmalade sandwiches that she stows in her luxury Launer handbag for culinary emergencies.
Which brings me to the culinary opportunities of the upcoming Matariki Weekend, although maybe not marmalade sandwiches? Matariki, in Mā ori tradition, is a time of unity, remembrance, renewal, celebration and hope, an opportunity to give thanks for the harvest and to draw family and friends to the table for shared food.
For the past six years, local hospitality promotion group Waikato Food Inc embraced these notions with its Matariki Dish Challenge, a unique competition for Waikato chefs to develop dishes that showcased indigenous and local ingredients. Entrants researched the history and purpose of Matariki and created clever plates for their customers and Matariki judges using titi (muttonbird), quail, kū mara, horopito, bull kelp, bone marrow, urenika potatoes, kahawai, piko piko, eel, kawakawa, manuka honey, and more.
One year, just ahead of the competition, I joined some of the entrants on a field trip to Mt Pirongia, where we foraged for bush ingredients under the guidance of Rotorua chef Charles Royal, an expert on plants with unique flavours once known mainly to Mā ori.
Our little party was looking for native mushrooms, the fresh-tasting pikopiko, kawakawa (bush basil), and the tender tips of supplejack vines, which look like asparagus. The supplejack tips were particularly hard to spot; I was standing right next to one and missed it. We later made lunch with our spoils and I came home with a new appreciation of bush ingredients.
Sadly, the excellent Waikato Food Inc folded a couple of months ago due to lack of funding and the regional winter highlight of the Matariki Dish Challenge has gone with it. But its legacy continues in the increased awareness of indigenous ingredients by local chefs. Ironically, the Matariki challenge, born in the Waikato, has been picked up in Tauranga and Rotorua this winter.
If you’re looking for inspiration for your own Matariki dinner on Friday, Waikato Food Inc founding member Vicki RavlichHoran has a rib-sticking recipe for lamb loin with smoked kū mara mash and kawakawa pesto in the latest issue of her hyperlocal Nourish Magazine. It’s perfect for this first celebration of Matariki as a nation.
I’m hoping the exquisite little star cluster will come to the party, and shine its lights in the early morning sky.