Penny Oliver: Beach Bach Boat Barbecue

By COLIN MOORE

It is tempting to suggest that the humble, common and garden sausage is the best barbecue food you can find. Certainly, you will rarely go to a barbecue where some snarlers will not be sizzling away.

And while some guests will be accused of taking cheap sausages so they can pinch another person's steak, you can be sure that a few of the steak-takers will help themselves to a well-grilled spicy sausage or two as well.

Even the ubiquitous pre-cooked and flavourless charity sizzler that wafts its distinctive odour around shopping malls at weekends is almost edible when heavily disguised with tomato sauce.

But it is at the beach, lakefront or riverbank where a sausage really comes into its own. A packet of sausages, a few slices of bread, some tomato sauce and a box of matches are about all you need for a picnic on the shorelines - some cold beer not withstanding.

Sausages are just so darn versatile. Sharpen a green stick into a point, pierce your sausage end to end, hold it over the embers of a driftwood fire and you are in the barbecue business. And no matter if your snarler falls off the stick into the ashes. A quick wash in the tide and it will be as good as new.

And if you want to be a bit more sophisticated look for a bit of old fencing wire to fashion into a fork or grill, or take a small wire grill with you, as my family tends to when we cruise off to a deserted bay somewhere for a shoreline picnic.

The key to a good shoreline sausage sizzle is in the driftwood fire. Getting the embers just right for sizzling is an art that my wife has perfected, so we tend to leave it to her.

It doesn't pay to listen to outside influences. One picnic we had bangers and crash after following the dictum of a self-styled barbecue expert and building our fire on a bed of rocks so the heat would radiate more forcefully. It certainly did. The rocks exploded, showering the cooks with shrapnel and sending our sausages flying into the sand.

Of course, the humble sausage isn't the only thing you can cook around a driftwood fire. Potatoes wrapped in tinfoil (pre-cook them slightly before you leave home) and placed in the embers are delicious with a knob of butter.

Sweet corn is simple too. Wrap the cobs in newspaper, soak them in the tide and by the time the newspaper and outer leaves have slowly burned away the corn will be just right to eat.

If the kids catch a fish off the rocks - even a spotty will do - you can use the wet newspaper trick to cook it for them. Gut the fish, put some pebbles in the stomach cavity, wrap in wet newspaper and place on the embers. When it is cooked, peel off the remaining newspaper and skin, let the children pick the flesh from the bones with their fingers and watch their grins. With roasted marshmallows to follow, who needs McDonald's?

If there are shellfish such as pipis, cockles, mussels or tua tua available you can steam them open on the hot rocks around the embers or, better still, on a small piece of corrugated iron. Cunning picnickers hide a piece of iron in the scrub at their favourite wilderness picnic site, ready to steam open fresh kaimoana whenever they visit.

Or you can take an old billy or pot so you can cook shellfish over a driftwood fire. That is particularly useful if you can free dive for crayfish at low tide. Just how rich is this country when it is still possible to cook a freshly harvested crayfish on a open shoreline fire at some deserted cove?

Award-winning food writer Penny Oliver grew up with rich memories of Kiwi summers at the beach and the food that goes with it. The single most important item in her family's summer-camping-holiday luggage was a large, heavy, black iron pot.

"Daily, as the sun lowered, we gathered mussels, lit a fire among the stones on the beach and feasted from the old iron pot," she says. "The sight and aroma of a steaming bowl of mussels still arouses for me nostalgia for childhood holidays."

Oliver has been inspired by those memories to write a recipe book, Beach Bach Boat Barbecue, which I keep spotting on the coffee tables of baches and holiday homes this summer.

Oliver has won the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers "food stylist of the year" award four times, but her childhood memories have left her with a respect for food that is almost as simple as a sausage, although a lot more tasty. "The joy of preparing and eating simple, tasty food remains with me," she writes. "Cooking and eating at the beach, be it nibbles between summer swims, a picnic with friends or an evening around the fire, demands simplicity. After all, being at the beach is all about serious relaxation and good slow eating."

Her recipes are mouth-watering: I was going to give up diving but I think I'll wait another year just so I can barbecue fresh scallops in the shell "a la Oliver" in a sauce of fresh coriander, lime zest and juice, chilli and garlic.

Photographer Ian Batchelor captures a classic New Zealand summer with generous illustrations accompanying Oliver's text. He even has a shot of mussels steaming on a sheet of corrugated iron.

One reviewer has regretted the scenes do not have captions, but I am not convinced that our shores need such identification. Let these unique slices of New Zealand stay hidden for those who cruise to them with their sausages and box of matches.

* Beach Bach Boat Barbecue (New Holland Publishers, $45).

colinmoore@xtra.co.nz