Don’t say we don’t have true Kiwi food traditions
What is New Zealand food?
Zest this week looked at a few finalists in the Cuisine Restaurant of the Year awards and concluded that a Kiwi style of cuisine is emerging – a style that revolves around fresh, local ingredients prepared with love and attention.
Gone are the days of being impressed by a tin of pretentious sardines from some far-off locale that’s made its way across the ocean.
No, these days you want your fish to have been happily participating in the eco-system on the previous day when you called to reserve your table for four people at 7pm.
In the article chef Vaughn Mabee of the Amisfield Bisro in Central Otago said he reckons New Zealand cuisine can be whatever you want. He’s all about using Kiwi ingredients to bring alive childhood memories.
The food of my childhood was so removed from what we see today that it feels like we were living on a different planet. I don’t think we even called it cuisine back then. The Rainbow Warrior was fresh in our minds and we were skeptical of anything French that wasn’t French toast or French fries.
New Zealand cuisine at that point was in a sorry state. Mums all over the country tried their best to get a meal on the dining table each night. Occasionally they’d dip into the Edmonds Cookbook and do something exotic like spag bol, but on the whole it was a solid diet of meat, veg and cigarettes for anyone older than puberty.
Then the microwave showed up on the scene and created a whole new shelf in the kitchen.
Alison Holst’s Microwave Cookbook reckoned that in a few years houses wouldn’t even have ovens and you’d be able to microwave a Sunday roast.
I remember my dad returning from the store where he’d bought a microwave. The salesman had told him that you had to keep a cup of water in the thing in case somebody accidentally hit power/9/time/200/start, at which point it could potentially blow itself to smithereens and decapitate a child.
That cup of water must have sat in my parents microwave for near-on a decade.
Caught up the zeal, my mother even tramped off to night classes to learn microwavery.
But it was a different time – a time when parsley was the only garnish and tinned pineapple rings were an exotic ingredient.
And does anyone remember Kim’s restaurant in Colombo St as fondly as I do? Now that’s what Kiwi cuisine used to be.
In the article, chef Alex Davies of Christchurch restaurant Gatherings – which you really must visit if you’re a card-carrying foodie – explained.
‘‘We can be really progressive with our food because we don’t have any traditions that hold us or define us. That makes New Zealand cuisine really exciting.’’
I don’t think this is true. We do have traditions of food buried in a hot hole, or greasies on the beach or an ability to add cheese where cheese oughtn’t be added.
But I get what Alex meant. Perhaps ‘‘fewer traditions’’ might have been more apt. Were he in France or Morocco, he would be limited by history, where as in New Zealand he gets to redefine what local food is.
Let’s just make sure we don’t forget where we came from – a country of good artery-clogging tucker, of lamingtons, custard squares and mince pies; a country where one of the recipes we learned in home economics at school was sugar and cinnamon on toast; a country that sprinkles hundreds and thousands on white bread and calls it kids’ food.
What a place to live.