New Zealand is, of course, where my culinary journey starts.
I tend to have an image of myself as a contemporary, cross-cultural mix of ancient Scottish whaler (John Stenton Workman, born 1817 in Edinburgh) and a Maori ‘princess’ of Ngati Kahungunu origin (‘Ellen’ Rewhaunga [Kokoroiti], born Te Kopi, 1820) - which is actually the truth. I was born in a seaside river town called Wanganui in 1963. My parents Bruce and Betty (or Timmy as she’s always been known) already had three daughters born within four years, so when I joined the family, creative and inventive food wasn’t something that Mum could focus on. She had to slave over the stove for hours every day just to keep us fed - like many women of her time. Food was very much a practical, must-do task, simply keeping everyone alive and growing. Mum’s style of cuisine in those days would best be described as informal: simple fare, well cooked, using limited ingredients. On the other hand, my paternal grandmother, Molly Gordon, treated dinner time as a formal occasion when Grandpa Will would inform her, and us, when we were staying at their house in Cavendish Square, Wellington, of his day’s comings and goings. Dessert would always be served from a wooden trolley which she’d wheel in after we’d cleared the mains. The same trolley came to represent afternoon tea for me, and my siblings, as Gran would load it with all sorts of seemingly fancy things such as caramel shortbread (made with boiled condensed milk), Vegemite toasts (made from leftover white bread that she’d bake smothered in butter and Vegemite until crunchy), melting moments and yo-yos (typical New Zealand biscuits), oat slices and the like. Gran would also make strange, unfamiliar things such as lemon sago pudding and fly cemetery (cold bread and butter pudding layered with sultanas which represented the departed flies). We ate jellies at almost every meal, jellies that she’d set in her reliable thin metal moulds (one of which I used for my pomegranate panna cotta).
