A new lens on our everyday plates and mugs
On the Māori histories of Crown Lynn, New Zealand's honey problem and a scallop flavoured snack.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Despite the factory closing its doors in the late 80s, you’d be hard pressed to find someone in New Zealand who hasn’t eaten off or drunk out of Crown Lynn – even if they had no idea it was Crown Lynn. It’s a persistent part of our experience of eating in this country.
Over the weekend, I finally sat down and watched the Whakaata Māori documentary Crown Lynn: A Māori Story. It tells the story of the famous West Auckland based factory that opened in 1943 and which for decades was the biggest ceramics producer in the Southern hemisphere. The focus of the documentary though, is the largely unknown stories of generations of Māori who helped create the brand ubiquitous to kitchen benches and dining room tables.
Earlier this year, Stewart Sowman Lund wrote on the rising popularity, and prices of Crown Lynn. “The New Zealand-made homewares brand has gone from being distinctly unfashionable – replaced in households by cheaper imported products – to experiencing a renewed wave of popularity,” he wrote.
Because I’m a nerd, I’ve been collecting Crown Lynn, in a very nonchalant way since high school. It all began with a stack of six matching plates bought from a vintage shop in Raglan. Each has perfectly dusty roses with emerald leaves, atop a grey lightly cross-hatched background. I don’t use those plates often – they’re too precious. But since, I’ve accumulated plates, bowls, egg cups, gravy trains and mugs that I use most days. Without even trying to, I’ve even somehow ended up with a flawless swan vase. I shudder to think how much it would cost now.
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My most recent Crown Lynn buy is a single hand-painted dinner plate from the 1960s Santa Barbara collection designed by Dorothy Thorpe. Collecting it from the cupboard just now, a part of me feels that it’s honestly, quite ugly. At the same time there’s just enough whimsy in the orange, pink and yellow motif that surrounds the plate to make it appealing. Most charming though, is how unmistakably touched by human hands it is, both in the pronounced flicks of the brush from when it was painted and in the crazing and slight staining that would have come from years of eating, stacking and hand washing.
Admittedly, apart from my Grandpa’s Crown Lynn mugs and plates, the aesthetics and collective memories of Crown Lynn have never felt explicitly Māori to me. Instead, Colour Glaze, McAlpine jugs and of course, white swans felt fused to an especially Pākehā orientated collective memory of Aotearoa.
Since watching Crown Lynn: A Māori Story, I’m sort of embarrassed that I held that assumption. There was something profound in revisiting a history that I thought I knew through an entirely different lens. The opening of the factory in Auckland coincided with a migratory shift of Māori into the city after the war. The documentary explores how that context fostered a complex relationship between Crown Lynn and Māori. In instances, Māori who had left their ancestral kāinga for the city found design inspiration in memories from home, and for others the marae that they shifted away from have maintained sets in their whare kai till today. Tangled amongst the story of Crown Lynn were Māori artists who were indispensable in designing, painting and making the pottery: they quite literally shaped the plates I eat off every night.
Often with the best of intentions, we’re quick to dismiss the importance people place on material items. Shrunken dresses, a lost ring or, a broken mug are quickly followed up with the consolation, “it’s just a [insert beloved object here]”. Really though, those items are the result of the people who made and used them before us.
A cup of coffee tastes immensely better in a stackable Colour Glaze mug, as does porridge or congee from a kitschy bowl from the brand. As Montreal restaurateur David McMillan said in the Quebec episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, “eating off vintage tableware is one of the great joys out of life”. I wholeheartedly believe McMillan is correct, and I reckon it’s the human hands those plates, bowls, mugs and more change through that make it so.
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Weekly bites
Despite perpetual food shortages ruling the news this year, somehow New Zealand has too much honey. But it’s not necessarily a good thing. The Guardian reported today that stockpiles of mānuka are exceeding demand this year as “a boom in beekeeping collided with slowing international demand to create towering stockpiles”. While the pandemic helped to push up both demand and prices for mānuka honey, that demand is now slowing and some in the industry are predicting it will mean fewer hives, companies consolidating and an industry exodus.
Berries have been popping up in the news for all the wrong reasons over the last month or so. That’s because twelve cases of hepatitis A have been detected in the community, linked to the consumption of imported frozen berries. In particular, the ministry for primary industries said yesterday that they were specifically looking into frozen Serbian berries and the situation has sparked a recall of some popular products from supermarket brands including Pams. The current outbreak could result in a strengthening of the testing regime for imported frozen berries, according to New Zealand Food Safety. Despite being solely linked to overseas fruit, it’s causing concern among local berry growers who are understandably worried that a hepatitis A scare linked to imported berries could inadvertently put people off locally grown produce.
Karen’s Diner is a 1950s Americana-themed eatery, which revolves around the supposedly entertaining schtick that the service staff are really, really rude to customers – on purpose. It sounds very much like hell. But I won’t lie, as an ex-hospo worker the concept also fascinates me. It launched in Sydney last year, but has recently opened a pop up shop on this side of the ditch. While in theory, being able to throw deserved insults at customers is often considered to be a service worker’s dream, I can’t help but think, being forced to call customers “basic bitch” or “loser” must be uncomfortable and tiresome for everyone involved. Somehow, they still have a suspiciously high number of five star reviews – which led Spinoff writer Chris Shulz to investigate who exactly was leaving those positive reviews.
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The weekly snack
Pretz scallop and soy sauce, $4.19 from Jadan: After feeling slightly burned by my last traumatic snack purchase, I wasn’t exactly eager to get back to taste-testing the unfamiliar. After all, twig-like pretzels pitched as scallop and soy flavoured does sound like it could very quickly go wrong. I took a leap of faith anyhow over the weekend and I can happily report that it paid off. I was startled by how thin these were when I unwrapped them – offering just the slightest of a snap with each bite. And rather than the crunch of rock salt that is usually a commuter aboard the more typical of pretzels, each of these slender batons was coated in a wisp-like dusting of salty savouriness. Texturally, it’s delightful and means that your focus is entirely on the bare-boned crunch of each stick and the salty, umami, mild, sweetness that accompanies that – redolent of the sea, and, of course, soy sauce. 10/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
