Empire Marketing Board poster mapping mighty New Zealand, from Selling Britishness.
Dear British Housewife…
In March 1935, the Australian Trade Publicity committee ran 52 week-long demonstrations, ranging from large co-operatives in Birmingham to grocery stores in Glasgow and attracting thousands of customers. Sampling in-store meant that housewives could chat with “lady demonstrators”, creating a relationship aimed at closing the gap between empire product and potential purchaser. The direct approach worked: the Birmingham co-operative store, for example, sold an extra 500 pounds of butter.
More elaborate demonstrations – including special empire stores complete with cooking displays and film shows – also boosted sales. Australia’s exhibition store in Glasgow, open during November 1933, distributed more than 35,000 samples to shoppers, part of a larger campaign that gave “excellent results” according to the Australian Minister of Customs. These displays obviously promoted the idea of shopping imperially, but they did so less through education than by promoting a personal connection with the buyers.
As interwar gas appliance retailers found, women demonstrators improved sales because they “established a ‘sympathetic bond’ between the consumer and the company”. Demonstrations also doubled as entertainment, which helped foster goodwill. They became ‘cheap outings for housewives’, and almost any product stood to gain a little extra lustre simply by being a welcome change from the dull round of household duties.
Displays and demonstrations offered a brief escape from the routine domestic grind, but other Dominion strategies carried their message of imperial community right into the heart of British homes. Following a broader advertising trend in the British food trade, all three Dominions [Australia, New Zealand and Canada] created branded recipe books, often given to housewives at demonstrations. In this era, women often amassed large collections of free recipes as a way to add a little variety to the couple of basic cookbooks they used.
At first glance, Dominion giveaways seem to offer a touch of cosmopolitan glamour, but in fact their recipes did not seek to play up the differences between colonial and metropolitan cooks. Instead, they reinforced a shared culinary repertoire. Australia’s Economical Cookery featured “Iced Scottish Cakes” on its front cover, and the excursions of its successor, The Kangaroo Kookery Book, into imported cuisine included an “Australian Cheese Omelette” and “Australian Boiled Eggs”. The New Zealand Meat Producers Board offered recipes for imported lamb, including lamb pie, various ways with lamb necks, and, for the adventurous, a lamb “surprise”.
As these prosaic offerings suggest, novelty tended to be restricted to nomenclature, with most recipes simply being familiar dishes rebranded. Australia’s “Sydney Sultana Sponge Pudding” looked suspiciously similar to spotted dick, while Canada’s Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, first published in 1931, featured a “St Lawrence Tomato Soup” and, in a nod to empire, “Kitchener Kedgeree”. Though not exactly gourmet – the Maple Leaf advised serving Canadian tinned spaghetti “just as it comes from its can” – these publications were still popular. The Kangaroo Kookery Book went through several reprintings between 1932 and 1935, while half a million copies of the Maple Leaf had been distributed by 1933 and it was still being reprinted as late as 1940. Eventually, even Canadians wanted a copy: “requests from home led to the printing of a Canadian edition”.
By offering recipes that emphasised a common heritage, the books gave substance to the sentimental idea of a broader British world of kith and kin. They also reinforced the emotional regime that existed around empire shopping. New Zealand lamb was “produced by Britishers for Britain”, The Kangaroo Kookery Book carried the subtitle “Help Australia to Help You”, and Canada’s high commissioner added a letter to The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book to encourage “more links in the chain of distribution between the Canadian producer and the consumer”.
While it is hard to imagine any consumer feeling especially compelled by these messages, Dominion cookbooks embedded a warmer emotional appeal. Australia aimed to assist its “countless friends amongst the housewives of Great Britain in the still more satisfying use of Australia’s food products”. The Maple Leaf took an even friendlier tone, encouraging its readers to respond to the recipes: “Dear British Housewife,” it began, “It is hoped that this recipe book will help you first of all to rely more upon the Empire, particularly upon Canada, when making out your daily shopping list … Experiment on your own and tell me the result of your experiments. Criticise this little book as freely as you like, for it is only by criticism that we can give you what you want. Whatever you have to say, we shall be interested to listen.”
It would be easy to dismiss The Maple Leaf ‘s amiable entreaty as nothing more than empty advertising rhetoric. Yet its author, journalist Kathleen Bowker, genuinely hoped to create a community around empire shopping. The daughter of Canadian senator John Kirchhoffer, Bowker was a well-connected member of a transatlantic elite, comfortable mingling in the upper echelons of British society and with royalty. After the death of her financier husband, she moved to London, where, like other upper-class women, she found a new career as an expert in imperially inflected domesticity.
Hired in 1930 by Canada’s Department of Trade and Commerce to write The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, Bowker began appearing regularly in the press and on radio with recipes for “Canadian favourites”, extending her empire expertise beyond her homeland to incorporate tips for other Dominion foods, including recommendations for South African oranges and hints for cooking with New Zealand butter.
Edited extract from Selling Britishness: Commodity Culture, the Dominions and Empire, by Felicity Barnes (Auckland University Press, $50).
One for die-hard fans perhaps, Surrender (Hutchinson Heinemann, $55) is Bono’s first attempt to write his autobiography. It seems unlikely to be his last. Each chapter is named for one of U2′s songs, covering Bono’s childhood, early loss of his mother, activism, marriage, Catholic faith and the formation of one of the defining rock bands of our time.
Once a shy child who didn’t dare to ripple the waters, Geena Davis grew into a bold woman who made it to the Olympic trials with her archery skills and created a series of iconic screen roles, among other exploits. In her memoir Dying of Politeness (HarperCollins, $38), Davis explains how she got over her fear of offending people.
Joanna Gaines is an interior designer with five children, a hit television show, a quarterly magazine, and a clutch of covetable refurbished properties in Waco, Texas. She has written about all of it in The Stories We Tell (HarperCollins, $37). The twist is that she hopes to inspire her readers to tell their own life stories after finishing hers.
The Unfolding
by A.M. Homes
(Granta, $37)
Reviewed by Kelly Ana Morey
The state-of-the-nation novel is almost a rite of passage for the serious American novelist and, as a result, there’s a fine and long tradition of weighty, often award-winning novels of this nature in the American literary canon. And many of them, like A.M. Homes’ latest novel, The Unfolding, are satire because politics and satire go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The Unfolding begins on the final day of voting in the 2008 US presidential elections. Barack Obama is just hours away from being declared the next POTUS, which will rock the Republican stalwarts who populate the novel, bringing them together to plot and collude to, pretty much, make America great again. What the perceived threat is and why America will no longer be great with a black - gasp! - Democrat about to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is never clearly articulated by the cabal who spout endless non-specific rhetoric as they start the job of getting their man back in the White House.
And that, I suspect, is precisely Homes’ point. That there is no reason to think that a Democrat will be any better or worse than a Republican. He’s simply not, for the characters in The Unfolding, their man in the top job, looking out for them and their all-important bottom line. The needs of the other 98 per cent of the population aren’t even factored into consideration.
Told almost entirely in dialogue, The Unfolding is in effect 400 pages of men (because there are apparently no women powerful/useful enough to be in the cabal) with money and political power talking a lot yet saying very little. There’s an element of genius in that even though these men are talking from a place of passion, it’s all somehow completely enervating for the reader.
Running in tandem with the male/political storyline is a much slimmer feminine/domestic thread that revolves around the unnamed male main character’s disintegrating marriage to Charlotte, who drinks because that’s what unhappy women do, and their daughter Meghan, who has just voted for the first time, naturally for her father’s man, McCain.
Where the masculine side of the novel is written in a way that reflects the amount of testosterone fuelling that narrative of men talking about important manly things, the feminine side of the novel is similarly parodic in style. There are secrets, including a big one that Homes has lifted from her own life, the drinking, a lesbian sub-plot, a dropping off at Betty Ford that feels like a committal, a young woman’s coming-of-age story, and an encounter with a deer that must be a metaphor for something. The kind of subjects beloved by lady novelists, according to serious (male) literature anyway.
And this, too, must be deliberate. Homes is such a smart writer, of course the satire is working on every level to the point where I suspect she’s satirising not just the state-of-the-nation novel, but fiction itself.
The RNZ Cookbook
edited by David Cohen and Kathy Paterson
(Massey University Press, $65)
Reviewed by David Herkt
Selling more than three million copies since 1908, The Edmond’s Cookbook has been the mainstay of New Zealand domestic cookery, adapting to food trends while still providing basic recipes for home cooks. Radio New Zealand has now released The RNZ Cookbook, with more than 180 recipes “trialled and tested” from chefs and food writers who have appeared on RNZ programmes in the 21st century.
Edited by David Cohen, the well-known writer and producer of RNZ’s Morning Report, along with the food journalist Kathy Paterson, The RNZ Cookbook provides a flash-freeze on what New Zealanders have on the tips of their forks. At times it is aspirational, with recipes to achieve, while elsewhere it provides a fresh version of a firm favourite. In an era where cookbooks are generally regarded as inferior to a Google search, The RNZ Cookbook aims to demonstrate the value of a publication that can be relied upon.
Firstly, the all-important Home Test Kitchen. Cooking from a recipe book is the only hard proof of its quality. Marlborough Paella was advanced in 2014 as a “new Kiwi classic” by Chris Fortune, who had worked alongside chef Peter Gordon at London’s Sugar Club. It is a variation on a theme – no saffron, for example – so perhaps “paella-lite” is a better description. It was a very flavoursome, summery dish, distinctly helped by the fact that the mussels used in its making were incredibly fresh. The recipe was simple to follow. Good paella rice is a necessity. The result was a hit.
Beatrice Ojakangas’s Norwegian Apple Cake was shared on RNZ Afternoons in 2008 and was the surprise winner of the Home Test Kitchen. With apples, chopped almonds, vanilla, and ground cinnamon, it produced a cake that was more of a flan than an airy confection, but eaten alone, it was tasty and very moreish. Slightly warmed with a small spoonful of icecream, it would be an ideal crowd-pleasing dessert. It would serve well in a cafe.
The RNZ Cookbook contains recipes that have been through an intense filter – recipes were selected by chefs and writers to present to a radio audience to promote themselves or their business. There are no duds. It is a book where everything conspires to the user’s advantage.
The recipes are also a snapshot of contemporary New Zealand tastes, changed through immigration and adventure. There is a Gujarati Fish Curry with Chapatti, Asian Prawn Salad, and Rib-Eye Roast with Moroccan Flavours. The book does not neglect firm favourites like Banana Cake with tips on how to make the best version – a low temperature, a long bake-time, and a good-quality flour. Alexa Johnson’s Cheese Scones provides a use for slightly sour full-cream, which she claims is a key to good scone-making.
Cohen’s personal introduction is an insight into RNZ’s history of engagement with food, from Aunt Daisy to the rise of the celebrity chef, as well as his own individual relationship to global trends in cuisine. It is an intelligent and enjoyable entree for the full feast that follows, though whether the volume needed a long uninspired foreword by the seemingly inescapable Jesse Mulligan is arguable.
Surprisingly, the divisions of the book are in accord with RNZ programming – sections titled Morning Report, Nine-to-Noon, etc – work well in line with their contents. If cooking is one of humankind’s true joys, then The RNZ Cookbook is a joy indeed.
Polyfest organisers are blaming the government for not fronting up more cash.