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First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking

Veart, David

First catch your weka, explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage and onion and roast it on a stick. So began a great tradition of New Zealand cooking. Veart tells the story of what New Zealanders have cooked by analysing the crusty deposits and grubby thumb prints on a century and a half of cook books. Contents: 1. Cookbooks Brought from Home; 2. Food of the First Necessity, Our Daily Bread; 3. The Cookbooks of Empire, The Later 19th Century; 4. Bottling; 5. Cooking for Ourselves, 1900-1920; 6. Sweet Teeth; 7. The Electrified Cult of Domesticity, The 1920s; 8. Handy Hints for the Household Manager; 9. Hard Times Meet Hollywood and Health Food, The 1930s; 10. The Cookbook goes to War, 1939-45; 11. Dining with the Women's Institute; 12. Beaming Housewives and the Meals Men Prefer, The 1940s and 1950s; 13. History in the Baking: Commemorative Cookery; 14. Flash and Foreign and The Arrival of the TV Cook, The 1960s;15. Festival Food; 16. Test Kitchens and Gin Soaked Salads, The 1970s.

Finalist in the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, History category and New Zealand Society of Authors Best First Book Award, non-fiction.

Many New Zealanders have enjoyed boiled calf's head, Bill Rowling cake, Irish famine soup, and tinned kidneys with mushrooms.

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