New Zealand

New Zealand one country in the world where the crucial date for its culinary history sticks out a mile. As David Burton (1982) puts it:

On 20 October 1769 the Endeavour anchored at Anaura Bay, south of East Cape. During the crew’s brief spells ashore, wild celery was, on Captain Cook’s orders, regularly collected and boiled with portable soup and oatmeal for the crew’s breakfast. Probably the ship’s cooks did not realise that this first crude marriage of local food and British cookery had laid the foundations for modern New Zealand cooking.