THANKS FOR THE MEMORY
JULIE DALZELL DIGS INTO THE ARCHIVES WITH MEMORIES OF FORMER CUISINE CONTRIBUTOR, PETER SINCLAIR.
Diving into our archives, Julie Dalzell revisits Peter Sinclair’s essay on great Kiwi cooking
WHEN WE ASKED the broadcaster, writer and vitality-plus foodie Peter Sinclair to contribute a piece for Cuisine in 1999, with the theme of New Zealand treasures, he sprang to the occasion with “Thanks for the Memory”.
I first met Pete in Christchurch (my old ’hood) in the studio of 3YC, the radio station that we had elected to do a Cuisine subscriber prize draw on air. We pulled the name out of the hat, under police supervision, in case there was any monkey business.
After the “Thanks for the Memory” tale he wrote for us, Peter became a contributor to Cuisine, leading the charge on sharing with our readers the barely known internet and its knowledge base. He was a star with his curiosity and research. He was funny and sage and an editor’s delight as every word, comma and semi-colon was perfect.
Re-reading his story and his hilarious tributes to our writing and broadcasting food icons, I recalled that while travelling in Sri Lanka a couple of my foodie buddies laid some flowers down for Tui Flower who died in 2017, aged 91. We popped them by the grave of a Navy cook. Apt, we thought. Tui would hate the use of the term ‘foodie’. Not sure she was very fond of the upstart called Cuisine, either. We were considered a bit posh then.
But things change for the better, especially with food in New Zealand, as we are very good at inventing, but also, like magpies, stealing a few things from other cultures.
JULIE DALZELL
IN ISSUE 193 PETER SINCLAIR WROTE...
Some time ago TV chef Garth Hokianga (Some Like It Hot) and partner Belinda Todd cooked me a birthday dinner – well, Garth did the cooking while Belinda poured gins big enough to swim in.
Oysters, duck breast in raspberry vinaigrette, tiny individual lemoncurd soufflés which almost drifted upwards from the table… what a long way we’ve come, I thought. I’m old enough to remember a time when haute cuisine meant Wiener Schnitzel.
Before the Dutch arrived, our only contact with any food not in direct line of descent from Mrs Beeton was Cantonese – popularly supposed to contain possum or pets, but did we care? The bland, slightly scorched flavour of rice, egg and MSG has imprinted itself permanently on the taste-buds of New Zealand.
When I was asked to write a New Zealand food retrospective ‘in a chatty style, taking a light and fond approach…’ I thought: whoa! Light, yes; chatty, by all means; but fond?
These were the days of WWII, when Daisy Basham (‘Aunt Daisy’) came to power. Her ingenious substitutions were the inspiration for generations of New Zealand cooks: how to make lamb taste like goose (a vivid imagination was the essential ingredient); how to scramble dehydrated egg (don’t try this at home); and her unlikely triumph, mock whitebait, which I seem to recall was made of turnip (whitebait apparently stop running during world wars).
As a broadcaster, I’ve met most of the culinary icons of the past 40 years, and Aunt Daisy herself was the first. Newly arrived from Sydney, I was being shown round the old Hope Gibbons building in Tory Street, Wellington, where I was introduced to a small, sharp-eyed woman who had just finished her morning broadcast.
“Oh, what a beautiful young man!” she said (I was somewhat younger then), in a tone which made it clear she didn’t entirely approve of such a thing. But she did invite me to have morning tea with her in the caf, and we got on well.
Who else, these days, can claim to have eaten a scone actually baked by the legend herself? They were light as a feather and tasted poisonously of baking powder.
It was hard to believe that such a nice woman, almost alone, was responsible for turning New Zealand into one of the gastronomic ghettos of the world.
By then her time was coming to an end. The Fondue Generation had arrived, and no-one who survived it will ever forget the haute cuisine of the ’50s – those unappetising logs of minced meat, followed by whipped-fluff desserts, which contributed to the death of inhome entertainment. Mexican macaroni or road-kill? You made the call.
This must account for the sudden, enormous success of Graham Kerr, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’. He wasn’t an especially good cook, having picked it up in the British army, but his slap-happy ‘let’s just give it a little slosh of wine!’ appealed enormously to the new wave of ’60s cooks, who felt there must be something beyond chicken-in-a-basket.
I was a guest on one of his shows, and you couldn’t help warming to this culinary do-it-yourselfer, who at his best managed to achieve the haphazard expertise of Julia Child entirely without the support of gin.
He went on to become a uniquely American success story, combining vitamins and God in a bizarre career that continues today.
It was his brief, eccentric appearance on the New Zealand scene which opened up the Great Divide in our cuisine. On the one side stand the Kiwi traditionalists: the inheritors of Aunt Daisy’s grand if stifling legacy
– the Tui Flowers and Alison Holsts, whose success testifies to Kiwi culinary conservatism which still exists here. On the other are Kerr’s successors, the wild and free, responsible for some of the most creative chapters in our food history over the past three decades
– and some of its worst excesses.
The two schools are visceral rather than culinary. Perhaps only Digby Law
Peter Sinclair was a star with his curiosity and research. He was funny and sage and an editor’s delight.
managed to combine them successfully.
Hudson and Halls were perhaps most typical of the second strain, where food becomes primarily or solely a vehicle for the personality of its creator. Being a guest on their show was the gastronomic equivalent of bungyjumping. The last time I appeared I wound up having to eat, and appear to enjoy, a rabbit simultaneously prepared two ways: braised in Pinot Noir, and sautéed with honey and grain mustard. My verdict: calcivirus would have been kinder in either case.
Their cooking may have been… well, idiosyncratic… but at least they kept reminding us of the possibilities of food. Because, in fact, if you overlook their frequent frightfulness
– in their restaurant, they used to offer a ring-moulded salmon with cottage cheese in lime jelly from which even Aunt Daisy would have recoiled – they could actually cook.
I was staying once at a fishing lodge on Lake Tarawera when Peter Hudson arrived in the Daimler, unannounced and alone, having apparently had a more than usually traumatic tiff with David on their Northland farm. He remained in his suite for most of the visit with a gigantic bottle of Polish vodka, but emerged on the third night when the chef walked out – this happened quite often, as the owner had the habit of hiring attractive, young American girls and then failing to reach an emotional understanding with them.
Peter was a difficult man at the best of times, and on this occasion he was in a state of rasping ungraciousness. But it took him only 15 minutes to skin a couple of large, freshly caught salmon, coat them in flakes of oatmeal and a little mustard seed, stuff their bellies with mint and shredded lemon zest, drizzle them with melted butter and shove them in the oven.
“Take them out when they’re nice and brown,” he snarled, and went back to his vodka. They were superb.
After all these years, which of the two schools do I prefer?
As a former luncher of renown, I can be as nouvelle as anyone. I love the radical flavours, the panache, of global cuisine. Yet as I grow older the tastes of my childhood return, and I find myself thinking nostalgically of those wonderful English breakfasts we used to have on the sheep-station before muesli had engulfed the world – the fresh kidneys and mustard butter; shirred eggs with ham shaved from the bone and grilled; kedgeree, the glory of the Raj…
For when it comes to comfort food – the sensible, the solid, the satisfying – you can’t really beat the Kiwi pragmatism of the Aunt Daisy loyalists.
I remember a nuggetty old lady
I used to know when I lived at Muriwai Beach. Each year during the season she produced great bowlfuls of marvellous toheroa soup, richly green, spiked with a touch of cayenne, a little mace. She always refused to give me the recipe, it was her secret.
But in the end she shared the secret with me. “Actually, I just heat up a tin, dear,” she whispered, “and add a pinch of sand to make it taste real.”
Aunt Daisy lives!
AND NEXT?
So that was the past, told in some tales of legendary Kiwi food influencers. The future? Well, don’t ask me. I said to my departing colleague in the ’80s, “You are starting a microwave shop ???? Will never take off.” Also had the notion that My Food Bag would not attract many customers. I do know, however, that people like to buy, cook and eat good Kiwi tucker. I cannot see that changing. JD Thank you to Peter Sinclair’s estate for permission to reproduce his article.