"Food First – all else follows

Tu Tangata, Issue 25, 1 August 1985, Page 62

"Food First - all else follows

by Harry Dansey

Te ringawera

There’s an old Maori proverb or so I take it to be, because it was used every time I met him by an old Maori friend of mine which says: “Food first, all else follows.”

And he would proceed to practice what he preached by pressing on me steaming dishes of whitebait, fried fish fresh taken from the river mouth, soup having in it the goodness and flavour of long-simmered pork bones and the tang of watercress.

Actually, the old-time Maori often kept his guests waiting quite a while for their meal while the long-drawn-out ceremony of greeting proceeded on its leisurely way. Perhaps the meal tasted all the better for the waiting.

The hangi the earth oven cannot be hurried, and delivers its mouthwatering viands only when the stones are super-heated and full time allowed for food to be cooked through and through, for the fragrance of roasted meat to permeate to every hidden cell of sweet potato laid in mounds above the sizzling joints.

The every-day diet of the pre-Euro-pean Maori was not a varied one by our standards. Indeed, we would find the daily menu of our pioneer grandfathers pretty monotonous. But on high days and holidays or their Maori equivalent choice preserved foods would come from the carved storehouses, the seashore and the swamp would yield their tribute, and a feast worthy of great chiefs and mighty warriors would soon be placed in the newly-plaited food baskets of fresh green flax.

As might be expected, the inland tribes had their special foods prepared in their own manner, and the tribes of the coast took pride in the sea foods which shallow shore or deep ocean waters provided. When one visited the other great care was taken to ensure that the guests were given the type of food they would remember, food different from their ordinary fare. The aim then, as now, was to honour the visitors and to gain a reputation for openhanded hospitality.

Going a long, long way back in time, there must have been some wonderful feats in the days when that giant extinct bird, the moa, stalked the land. I have seen the stones on which he was cooked hundreds of years ago and seen too the bones scattered round the ovens by the long-departed feasters. The archaeologist’s trowel has uncovered, too, enough fragments to show that moa

eggs were also a valued item of diet.

A moa-egg omelette weighing a pound or so would have been something to reckon with!

Inland peoples, for instance my own Ngati Tuwharetoa tribesmen of Taupo, specialised in preserving of birds taken by the expert fowlers who set their snares in the deep forests to the north and west of the great lake.

The pigeon was particularly favoured. It was taken when it had fed heartily on berries like the miro in the autumn and was in its full winter fat. The bird would be roasted on a spit in front of a fire, the dripping fat caught in a bark trough and the cooked bird placed in a container into which the fat was then poured. A bird so preserved would last for the best part of the year, if it got the chance.

Many modern Maoris use the same principle today. They can’t use pigeon fat, for the bird has long been completely protected, but they can use lard, which serves very well. Pork is roasted in smallish pieces and stored in tins in the fat which has been rendered from it. Other foods are also preserved in lard.

Crayfish in lard

I remember when serving in Egypt with the Maori Battalion during the Second World War a friend received a soldered tin from home. Opened, it was found to contain crayfish in lard, in perfect condition. We ate every bit and spread the finely-flavoured fat on bread and ate that too. And we blessed the kindly Maori family who had sent it.

Such food is called “huahua”. Thus preserved pigeon is “huahua kereru” and preserved pork “huahua poaka” and preserved crayfish “huahua koura”.

The great inland swamps provided food greatly loved by the Maori. Foremost were eels, not so highly regarded by New Zealanders of European ancestry but an important item of diet in olden days. Traps cunningly constructed from vines were placed in the channels, and spears were used also. Those eels not eaten immediately were sun-dried for the future.

Lakes and rivers were the habitat of the little fish, now rare, called kokopu. Shoals of whitebait ran up the rivers in

season and were netted in their millions. Much of the whitebait catch would be sun-dried to preserve it.

The lagoons in the swamps and the long reaches of rivers were the haunt of water fowl as they are now. Wild duck were snared and preserved as the pigeon was.

There was a variety of vegetable food most of it by our standards not very attractive. The bush berries, for instance, are not very appetising, and some, such as the karaka, contain poison that must be eliminated by a long cooking process. Perhaps the most favoured of the natural products of the forest was the tawhara, the fruit of the kiekie, which is an epithyte, something like a flax bush, which grows on trees.

Fern root was dug, roasted and chewed, the fibre being discarded and the starchy residue eaten. My experience is that it is singularly unpalatable.

The gardens, carefully tended, produced kumara the sweet potato and taro. Sometimes the hue or calabash was grown too. The kumara did not grow well in frosty inland districts and not at all in most South Island districts.

But it was the sea coast which yielded the foods most beloved by the Maori.

Fish of all kinds

Fish of all kinds, of course, caught by hook, net and lure in the deep water, taken by seine in the surf. Many fish not favoured by the pakeha today but good food and in bulk was caught and preserved, fish like shark and stingray.

The sea mammals, when they could be obtained, provided many a feast whales stranded on the beach, seals taken on the off-shore islands.

Of the sea birds the most favoured was the muttonbird, even today a delicacy. A hint of the taste for what seems to us outlandish food is to be found in the name of that early Bay of Island settlement, Kororareka. It means “sweet penguin”.

Even the most casual observer must have seen the heaps of shell that mark the spot of old-time Maori coastal villages and forts. Many feet thick in the favoured bays and along the beaches, they are mute evidence of how shellfish was a staple of diet in other days.

Paua and mussel, pipi and cockle, sea egg and rock oyster were all taken and enjoyed. Today they are just as popular.

With the coming of the white man a change began to take place in Maori diet. Quite early in the story of settlement the Maori obtained and cultivated the potato, pumpkin and Indian corn. He learned to steep corn in running water until it was partly decomposed. From this he made a kind of porridge which many Maoris today still like. It is pleasant to taste but the nose rather than the stomach finds it a trifle on the exotic side. It’s a case of one man’s meat....

In general terms the Maori of old liked his food a little more on the oily side than those with a palate cultivated in the English tradition. In fact the southern Italian taste in many things, including oily food, is not unlike that of the Maori. I have eaten sea eggs on the fishermen’s beach at Bari, in Italy, washed down with rough red wine, and have had at Taranto octopus simmered in milk. The only other people who have offered me such food have been Maoris. It’s a matter of taste, tradition and social patterns.

Like many Mediterranean peoples and like some Asian races such as the Japanese, the Maori also liked fishflavoured food, often fish with too strong a tang to it for the average New Zealander. Your New Zealanders will eat shark if no one tells him what it is. Your true Maori likes shark for itself, and if it is unmistakably so he likes it better.

Thus the Maori of old and many today liked to put a little shark or eel well seasoned by the passage of time if possible in the hangi so that the flavour would be taken up by the potatoes and kumaras.

But preferences change and perhaps New Zealand tastes may change too in these matters. It doesn’t seem long ago when I heard people say that they couldn’t understand how anyone could eat so repulsive looking a shellfish as the paua. But now it is highly regarded and may even now be exported.