Feeding the archives
On the new project hoping to bring recipes into our museum archives, the origins of Frosty Boy and a dill-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!
Like many objects relating to the lives of women and the domestic sphere, recipe books haven’t formed a significant part of our historical record in Aotearoa. Perhaps unsurprisingly, even though recipes are a ubiquitous component of the every day, they’re difficult to find within our archives and museums.
Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum curator Nina Finigan laments that absence – and she’s beginning a new project which will collect stories about Aucklanders’ family recipes. This week, her essay The secret lives of recipes was published on The Spinoff. In the piece, Finigan describes her own personal relationship with recipes through a handwritten booklet kept within the museum’s manuscript collection and a lack of recipes on one side of her family.
I had a kōrero with Finigan about her vision for the project (on which we’re hoping to collaborate where we can) and why she thinks our recipes are so immensely important.
CML: What sparked your interest in recipes within museum archives?
NF: I found that little recipe book I mentioned in the article really early in my time at the museum. I've been working at the museum for six years or so. I'm not sure why it surfaced in my life, but it did. And then I just became instantly obsessed with it. From there, I started to wonder what else there was relating to this kind of thing? Whether or not we had other recipe books? And I found very little. Then I started to ask, “Why am I so drawn to this? What is it telling me that I feel that isn't represented in the collection already? And how could exploring that open up avenues for other voices to come into the collection?”
Why do you think that little recipe book was such an anomaly within the museum’s collection?
Often these things get incidentally collected. And so we get these little snippets of people's lives and voices and perspectives that we haven't necessarily intentionally collected in the past. One of my interests in the collection I work with is emotion and finding emotion in archival collections. Again, that's something that's been sidelined in museum and archival spaces, which have often been framed as rational, objective, western research-based institutions. You're meant to be objective, but that's impossible. So there's lots that hasn't been collected. And, for me, that's what I always look for.
You’re looking to change that by collecting recipes and stories from Tāmaki Makaurau – what will that look like?
I'm not prescriptive, but I'm really interested in oral recordings. We do write things down, but people carry these things in their heads as well, and they're often something that's transmitted through generations, through being in a kitchen with a grandparent or a parent. But also, because we collect audio recordings and oral histories at the museum, it feels like a way of not taking taonga and precious family material away from people. To me, that's a really valid and lovely way of bringing voices into the collection, quite literally, through interviews and kōrero. A way of adding to that cacophony of voices in the collection, quite literally. In some way, it feels like even though it's a gentle thing to think about collecting recipes, it's also about power imbalances in these contexts in the museum and archives. It's about gently pushing against that power dynamic that has said food history isn't real history, or emotions aren't a legitimate part of research.
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Do you think there’s an opportunity within this project to reframe how we think about our own cuisine?
We have published cookbooks in the collection: community ones, westernised reproductions of ethnic food. And then we have these tiny little precious cookbooks that I love, but that is also often a European perspective. All of that is lovely, but there's so much more. With a project like this, my hope is that we can counterbalance that within the collection. Even with my little story about challah, there's an absence, but that's also really interesting, in terms of why that makes me feel like something might be missing, or that I long for a connection to some kind of food history or culture. In some ways, the project is really personal.
Is there precedent around collecting recipes in museums and archives?
As far as I know, no institution here really focuses on this topic. But there are international examples like the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Unesco has a register called the Memory of the World. A Haitian soup just got added to that register recently – they call it joumou or freedom soup, and it relates to their liberation from French colonial rule. Once the liberation happened, the soup became an emblem of liberation, freedom, resistance, resilience and it's eaten every year by Haitians in Haiti, but also all around the world, as this hugely significant cultural thing. I found it really interesting that it's been recognised in that way and how many other recipes could have a similar kind of resonance. It's a pumpkin soup and it's such a humble thing, but it reveals so much. It's funny that I always refer to cooking as humble. It's part of that diminishing rhetoric. But really food is everything, we wouldn't have history without food.
Do you think there’s anything unique about the way that recipes communicate history?
It’s this intersection of past and present. All history is now but recipes are this really tangible way of making history immediate and experiencing that. It's like that recipe book from the museum, I can go and buy these things and make them and it's almost like a transportation through time.
What do we miss out on if we don’t collect these stories?
I'm really interested in the voices behind these things. The recipes are a vehicle for telling us so much about culture, history and community, but it's the people or the community behind this thing that give it meaning. We miss out if we don't collect in this way, where we centre the voices of people or communities who relate to it, because it becomes disconnected from history. That narrative that we don't have a food history in New Zealand. Firstly, I don't think that's true. And I think if we don't turn our attention in a purposeful way towards looking at what our food culture, history or cultures might be, then that will just continue to be the narrative. It’s an impoverished way of looking at history and it's a part of a much bigger forced historical amnesia. Recipes are such a good way in. I like these bits of history and culture where everyone can talk about it and relate to it. It's not exclusive, it’s just everyday stories that are so revealing.
You can email me (charlotte@thespinoff.co.nz) or Nina (nfinigan@aucklandmuseum.com) if you’d like to find out more about the project.
As technologies and tastes evolve, innovation has become in many ways a prerequisite for success in the food industry.But what that innovation looks like – and what drives it – is a broad and very conditional question.Join us for the next instalment of Boring Breakfast where host Sophie Gilmour and guests Angus Brown (Ārepa) and Te Puoho Kātene (Te Pūtea Whakatupu Trust) will discuss how New Zealand food businesses are innovating now, how the shape of local innovation has changed over time, and where the sector could be headed.
RSVP to commercial@thespinoff.co.nz.
Weekly bites
Red T-shirt, blue pants, a whoosh of blond hair and carrying an ice cream, Frosty Boy has established himself as one of the most recognisable figures of Kiwiana. “We’re so fond of Frosty Boy,” writes Tara Ward in The Spinoff, “that Team New Zealand put him on their boat for the 2013 America’s Cup, and one brave soul even got a tattoo of the wee fellow in this touching tribute to New Zealand. Heck, Frosty Boy even made number 16 on The Spinoff’s ranking of iconic New Zealand logos, jammed between fellow culinary titans L&P and Jimmy’s Pies”. But is Frosty Boy really from here? Tara Ward investigates.
“It can be discouraging and demoralising to walk around a supermarket, looking at food prices, knowing that you do not have enough money to buy the things you would like”: this might sound like a relatable reflection on everyday life in 2023, but it’s actually from the introduction of a 1995 budget cookbook by one of the godmothers of New Zealand cooking, Alison Holst. As we all know, kai is extraordinarily expensive at the moment so this week I wondered whether this cookbook, called Dollars and Sense and filled to the brim with “low-cost” recipes, would offer any cost-cutting wisdom for today – and whether these budget recipes of the 1990s would still be considered “budget”.
Before Peter Gordon – “pioneer of fusion cooking” – moved back to Aotearoa three years ago, he’d been living in the UK for 31 years. Now, with his bustling Tāmaki Makaurau food hub and restaurant Homeland a regular on local best restaurant lists and his presence as a judge on The Great Kiwi Bake Off television show, it sometimes feels as if he’d never left. I adored this conversation on RNZ’s Sunday Morning with Gordon as he reflects on the local restaurant industry, plant-based foods and the handmade cookbooks of his childhood with his recognisably open-minded approach. It’s well worth a listen – even if just for the Turkish egg recipe shared at the end.
I’m seldom on TikTok, so for the most part, the waves of food trends that wash across the platform go unnoticed by me. Somehow, though, I came across an especially niche corner of content this week: #watertok. These quick recipe videos most often involve a woman filling an immense Stanley cup with ice and water. All well and good – we all have to drink water, right? Then the fun begins. A lineup of sugar-free syrups and zero-calorie powders transform the dullness of water into alluring recipes like “pink wedding cake water” or “unicorn cotton candy water”. I won’t lie, as a huge fan of Raro, this h2O mixology has me intrigued – and the concoctions are so chaotic that I can barely imagine what they taste like. But, as this article points out, the proliferation of these videos is perhaps just another worrying instance of diet culture fads going mainstream.
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The snack of the week
Estrella dill potato chips, $8.99 from Safka: I have a confession to make. I bought this bag of chips almost a year and a half ago. It seems that my prejudice against chips from abroad quelled my initial excitement over these: after all, most of us would associate Scandinavia with foods like rye, cloudberries and pickled fish – all about as far as you can get from the vibe of a good bag of chips. The longer they sat in my cupboard languishing, the more I dreaded the thought of trying them. When I pulled them out of the pantry yesterday, I quietly prepared myself. Surely they would be moth-riddled, stale, or at the very least, not tasty. I took a leap into the bag and was rewarded by a perfectly crisp, crinkly chip with a bright herbal flavour. You could liken these to a typical sour cream and chives. But you also perhaps shouldn’t because they’re so much better, the seasoning more intriguing and the saltiness less sharp. In short, you could eat a whole bag without burning the first layer of your mouth off. One of the great joys in life, especially when it comes to food, is being proved wrong. It may have taken 16 months, but these did just that. 10/10.
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
