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If you are pining for the latest double-door fridge or pyrolitic wall-oven, spare a thought for our ancestors and the mountain of work they had to do just to get kai on the table.
The challenges of their daily cooking chores are scrutinised in historian Katie Cooper’s engaging and rewarding new book, Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: The rural kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800-1940.
Cooper selected this time frame because it marked “profound and traumatic change” in the newly colonised country. She chose “rural” (a concept foreign to Māori) because this was when the new settlers’ primary focus was on establishing English-style farms across the land, replacing swathes of native forests with individually owned properties. The men did the farming; the women looked after the home, including the cooking, not always happily.
Cooper takes the rural kitchen as “the perfect vantage point to view aspects of everyday life”, including the horrendous notion of eating mutton three times a day, and some unexpected poetry gems.
She opens with two emblematic photos: Preparing dinner, Hastings, 1913, which shows Pākehā woman Maud Atkin sitting at a table peeling vegetables, very much alone. The second photo, An outdoor kitchen, Kaikohe, 1911, portrays a relaxed cluster of Māori men and women cooking as a communal group outside, “suggesting a scene animated by chatter and laughter”.
In contrast, a watercolour dated about 1855 shows a scene where there may have been some shrieking. It portrays a pioneer woman outside a wooden “settler” cottage, hands on hips as her husband stands on the canvas roof trying to put out a chimney fire, which were common before the advent of bricks and iron-range cookers. Not only were dinners often burnt to a crisp but houses were as well.
As some families acquired immense wealth during the 1860s, they commissioned extravagant “big houses”. Grand places like Longbeach Station in Canterbury (which burnt down in the 1930s) couldn’t run without domestic staff, replicating the hierarchy from ye olde England.
A cook from one such house is recorded as lamenting her days of “severe work”; “the yeast making and the baking, preserves, bacon cured ... daily duties of scrubbing and cleaning, cooking at all hours”.
These big houses had to feed large numbers of seasonal shearers and “swaggers”, leading to the one-table vs two-table conundrum. Should the lady hostesses share their tables with the rude workers or make them eat in separate quarters?
Sarah Courage, who lived in Waipara Station in the 1860s, did not like to share and was appalled to find one of her neighbours did. Forced one day to sit next to “the creature”, Mrs Courage lacked the conviction of her name and refused to make eye contact with “the boor”.
Not quite a century later, the Poff family were more egalitarian, eating happily with the workers on their Canterbury farm in the 1940s. Teenager Basil Poff recalls their worker Bob’s admiration for the pretty glass cruet set on the table which contained all the sauces. No one ever said a word as Bob reached out each day and slugged Worcester sauce straight from the bottle.
The spirit of generosity may have eluded some Pākehā but not Māori, who lived by the governing principle of manaakitanga, or hospitality, which Cooper writes about in great detail. As the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge noted in 1845, “the hospitality shown by Māori communities was something Pākehā ‘should do well to imitate.’”
Cooper pays tribute to the hāngī's vital role in Māori communities, a shared cooking and social activity that has survived and thrived. Māori regarded fish and seafood as major food sources when “the sea was a garden”. The new settlers favoured mutton and “underground mutton” (rabbits) which quickly started to over-run farms.
Māori were forced to make “some painful accommodations ... on account of colonisation”, writes Cooper, citing the example of Mihipeka Edwards who lived with her grandparents when she was a child in Manakau, near Ōtaki, in the 1920s. On her first day at school, when she unwrapped the lunch carefully prepared by her kuia – rēwena bread with slices of pork and a piece of eel – then looked at her classmates’ fare of thin white sandwiches, she felt nothing but shame. Her beloved kuia understood and learned to make “Pākehā kai”.
As the decades passed, housing standards improved. And yet, as Cooper points out, “A Farmer’s Wife” wrote to the Auckland Star in 1938 lamenting 30 years of trailing along with her itinerant farm-worker husband struggling with conditions at odds with “the sleek washers, water heaters and gas cookers advertised in the same newspaper”.
Some husbands were reluctant to spend money on new appliances for their wives, who were fed up with ranges that needed non-stop wood fuel and weekly cleaning. But there were ways to get around them.
The Dairy Exporter magazine printed a letter in 1938 by an ingenious housewife who served a raw Sunday roast meal as a signal that the wood bins needed refilling. “He bought me an electric stove.”
Despite modern technology, many rural women emphatically rejected the spin that they didn’t need to work so hard any more.The Dairy Exporter ran a poem called A Brand New House in 1937 which included the lines: “We still must eat, you know, thrice daily/ And even though the house is new/ The pies won’t bake, the peas won’t shell/ The mint won’t chop, the jam won’t jell/ The cakes won’t mix, the lamb won’t fry/ Unless, of course, I’m standing by.”
Perhaps the poem was written by Maurice Gee’s mother. Cooper refers to Gee’s childhood memoir, Creeks and Kitchens, about growing up in Henderson in the 1930s and 40s. Sometimes at night he’d creep down to the kitchen – his “safe place” - where his mother Lyndahl used to sit “with her feet in the oven to get the last warmth of the oven, writing a poem or story in an exercise book”.
It’s details like this that make Rēwena and Rabbit Stew so delicious, reminding us that we need to think about the people who cooked food for whanau and friends long before we started to dream about self-cleaning ovens.
