Do you like to entertain your friends in “an easy and casual manner”? Do you have a taste for the “exotic”? Then Auckland comedian and writer Te Radar has just the recipe for you. In fact, he’s collected quite a few of them.
Stuffed Trout - a recipe from David Burton's Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Food and Cookery. Photo: Supplied
“I’ve always been interested in food, but I started getting weirdly obsessed with vintage cookbooks," he says.
"It’s fascinating to see how they have changed over time, from being really practical books that included recipes and health remedies to books where you could see that we were really developing our own sense of cuisine. That took quite a while though… there were a lot of ways of disguising mutton. And the food photography was so bonkers.”
Comedian Te Radar Photo: Supplied
This week Radar (aka Andrew Lumsden) brings recipes like these to life in Crumbed Tongues & Tall Tales, a four-night show that mixes more than 100 years’ worth of New Zealand food history with modern culinary stylings at Wellington restaurant The Salty Pidgin.
The show’s title was inspired by a recipe in Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Food and Cookery, a 1982 book by Wellington food writer David Burton. In the recipe, sheep’s tongues are boiled and skinned before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried in butter. Mercifully, there is no photo.
Radar has fond memories of eating tongue growing up – “given there is only one per animal I was quite happy that only my mother and I liked it.
“I often say it has a wonderful mouthfeel when eating.”
Curry Crayfish, from David Burton's Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Food and Cookery Photo: Supplied
This trawl back through menus past shows how the way we interact with food has changed over time, Radar says. Ingredients that we now consider expensive and exotic, such as crayfish and oysters, seemed to figure frequently, and our cooking methods are vastly different.
“They boiled everything, for ages. I’ve found recipes that tell you to boil asparagus for 25 minutes and to boil carrots for an hour. I mean, did water boil at a lower temperature back then? Were vegetables tougher? We can’t figure it out.”
‘Recipes With Canned Foods Are Interesting’, a 1950s collection by Hilda Phillips, has been another rich source for Radar’s research. Phillips left no tin unopened in her quest to introduce skeptical New Zealand households to the joys of tinned beans and other newfangled inventions.
“Hilda had recipes for things like a bean burger, where you basically heat up some baked beans and pour them on a burger bun. Her book is so ridiculously cross-indexed that if you were looking for a recipe that used a can of baked beans and a can of asparagus, Hilda would probably have it. I’ve got a feeling she was probably responsible for the fetishisation of putting spaghetti and pineapple on a pizza.
Bachelor's Casserole recipe from Canned Foods Are Interesting by Hilda Phillips Photo: Supplied
“We can laugh now, but it is a great example of providing information for people because there weren’t other sources for them to learn from. In the 1970s and 1980s there were lots of books about how to freeze food without it getting freezer burn, or how to use a food processor or a microwave. A lot of this stuff seems self-evident now if we don’t think about the concurrent technological changes.”
While Radar and wife Ruth Spencer have bravely made (and tasted) some of the dishes to be discussed in the show – including ‘Lime Salad (a moulded savory jelly involving lime jelly, mayonnaise, onion, carrot, cabbage and condensed milk) and ‘Banana Mayonnaise’ (banana, but no actual mayonnaise required) – they’re not recreating them in the show.
Lime Salad - lime jelly, condensed milk, mayonnaise, cabbage, carrot and onion. Bon appetit! Photo: Andrew Lumsden
Instead, chefs at The Salty Pidgin are re-imagining more palatable dishes that pay homage to Radar's finds. There will be tongue on the menu (served with tomato sauce, naturally) and a seafood canape inspired by Jan Bilton's kiwifruit delights. A dessert of 'Flaming Kumara' is inspired by Hudson and Halls' predeliction for dousing food in alcohol and setting it alight during their popular 1980s cooking show.
Crumbed Tongues and Tall Tales isn’t Radar’s first foray into the world of food. In the early 2010s, his history show (and later TV series) Eating The Dog, looked at how early colonial settlers survived in New Zealand. The title for that show came from the unfortunate experience of surveyor Thomas Brunner, who had to eat his dog to survive during a long expedition on the West Coast in the mid-1800s.
“We forget the importance of food,” he says. “When I think about history, I’m always interested in what people did to survive, what they ate.
“Food is one of the oldest human rituals.”
‘Kiwifruit and Caviar’ - a recipe from Jan Bilton’s New Zealand Kiwifruit Cookbook. Photo: Supplied
While there’s obvious comedy factor in looking back at recipes like ‘Curry Crayfish’ or ‘Kiwifruit and Caviar’, Radar also wants to pay homage to Aotearoa’s first celebrity chefs and recognise the role they’ve played in New Zealand’s culinary evolution.
“People like Graham Kerr and Alison Holst were trying to make food that was more accessible and affordable to people. It’s hard for a younger generation to understand how important these people were. Now there’s a multitude of ways to learn how to cook, but back then, unless you could learn from your mother or grandmother, there was very little. We forget how trusted these people were.”