Is it time to kill the sacred cow of New Zealand baking? Kim Knight takes a close read of the country's most famous cookbook.
If your grandmother ever looked at you sadly and said "it's all turned to custard" then it was probably because she made the salad dressing recipe from the 1952 Edmonds Cookery Book.
Ingredients: Salt. Sugar. Mustard. Milk. Vinegar. Custard powder.
I thought it was a misprint, but the specificity is disturbing: 1.5 teaspoons of banana, lemon or "standard" flavoured custard powder. Mix the dry ingredients in a cup with a little milk. Heat the remainder of the milk and stir in. Add vinegar and stir until thickened. Put away for use.
For use on what? The last vestige of your quivering gastronomic soul?
The Edmonds Cookery Book is an unlikely bestseller. A home economics bible first printed as a giveaway in 1908 by a man who wanted to sell more baking powder. The importance of baking powder to colonial New Zealand cannot be overstated. What is society without a sponge finger? Can you even shear a sheep if there is no sultana cake for smoko?
Once, to make a cake you had to be a chemist. In the extremely olden days, the only rising agent was wild yeast. This sounds vaguely healthy but is akin to going home with whoever else is waiting for an Uber when the bartender calls last drinks. Just because it's available, doesn't mean it's good for you.
Eventually, bakers learned to get a rise from potash. The key to understanding this technique is to really interrogate the language. Loaves literally rose from the ashes. Fear the Walking Bread, etc.
The history of baking powder is detailed in a 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article by Ben (I am not making this up) Panko. He reports that, in 1856, Mr Eben Norton Horsford created and patented the first modern baking powder. He achieved this by (I wish I was making this up) "boiling down animal bones to extract monocalcium phosphate".
There had to be an easier way to make lamingtons and, while there really is not, at least we got baking powder. In New Zealand, Mr T J Edmonds was among the many flogging proprietary mixes of a simple scientific equation: Salt plus acid equals carbon dioxide.
Mr Edmonds dominated the local market but he wasn't the only culinary chemist in town. As a little girl, Mary Hood remembers the salesman at her family's door.
"The story of my mother is that, during the Depression, you had hawkers coming around to sell you anything. This chap was selling baking powder. His trick was that he'd come in and say 'this is the baking powder used by Mrs . . . ah . . . Mrs . . . oh, what's her name? You know, the best baker in the district?'
"Of course, they would come up with a name, and that would be the name he used in his story for the rest of the area. Well, he turned up at Mum's place and said 'this is the baking powder used by Mrs Hood'. That's how good my mother's baking was."
Little Mary Hood became a grown-up Mary Parker - my maternal grandmother. And the Edmonds book with the ruinous salad dressing comes from her collection, gifted from her mother-in-law and my paternal great-grandmother, Ivy Parker. The true magic of most Edmonds Cookery Books is that they are soaked in the kitchen sweat and melted butter of our forebears.
My inherited copy is a seventh edition. It marks the company's Diamond Jubilee and claims to bring to the housewife "the benefit of experience gained over the last 60 years . . . the recipes are up-to-date and reliable, every one having been tested". I read the recipe for boiled asparagus set in lemon jelly and wondered: Tested for what?
In 1952, strawberries, sheep's tongue and children's birthday parties were all set in Edmonds jelly. Consider "Captain and Ship" - a pond of greengage jelly, a boat made of quartered oranges and a small figure consisting of tooth-picked glace cherries overseeing a cargo of chopped nuts, bits of sponge cake, raspberry jam, banana, vanilla custard and dabs of whipped cream. Dessert as neo-Dadaist sculpture.
Two pages over, there's a recipe for "Poached Eggs and Pepper" which "always intrigues small folk". Whip half-set lemon jelly until it turns white, set orange jelly "yolks" in tiny individual butter dishes and collapse into a valium-induced heap until 1961 when the contraceptive pill becomes legal.
Butterfly cakes, mystery moulds and hot chocolate trifles were women's business, but (jelly wrestling aside) kitchen life in 1952 was not that hard. Dinner, for example, was mostly boiled.
Turn to page 47 of your post-war Edmonds for the short horror story titled "To Boil Meat". Consult the vegetable section for the chart that indicates how long your daily harvest should spend in scalding purgatory - 45 to 60 minutes for carrots; a mere 20 to 30 for cauli. Broccoli did not appear to have been invented, but beetroot was vigorously annihilated (one to two hours, unpeeled).
Of course, nobody reads an Edmonds for the savoury marrow entree (1952) or the courgette bake (1988) or even the courgette provencal (1999). You are here for the cake. Throughout its many iterations, the one constant of this cookery book has been its slogan: "Sure to rise."
I wonder at the veracity of that statement. The 1988 edition in my home library was gifted to me when I left home for journalism school and lived in a flat in Timaru where, most nights, we did marvellous things with mince. Read the stained Edmonds pages like tea leaves: Tomato chutney from summer garden gluts, chocolate fudge for gifting. The recipe for curry and rice is splattered with my efforts but the baking pages are unscathed. In my experience, you could caulk a boat with the Edmonds banana cake and then sink that boat with a cargo of Edmonds plain scones. I did not inherit my great-grandmother's genes. Perhaps I am not reading the recipes properly.
At this point, I think it's worth noting nobody ever pitched a Meryl Streep movie about a woman who cooked every single thing in the Edmonds. Two reasons: There are not enough glace cherries in the world to achieve this feat; and, more crucially (in my honest opinion), some of the recipes were just not very good.
Have you ever made Princess Fingers? They are textbook 1988 Edmonds. Butter, flour, walnuts, etc. It's all going so well and then - BAM - "cover with meringue". Nothing in the recipe to this point has prepared you for this, but you take a deep breath and start beating egg whites with sugar and then - DOUBLE BAM - "add one cup of Rice Bubbles or Kornies". The road to hell is paved with the perfectly good breakfast cereal you had no idea would be required to make Princess Fingers.
The newer your Edmonds, the more instructive the instructions. My colleague emailed me a photograph from her 2001 edition, in which the methodology for plain scones runs to 75 words; The digitised 1910 edition in the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection contains just 25 words of instruction, including the cryptic directive to "bake as usual, quick oven".
The model housewife knew that a quick oven was a good oven. Our grandmothers consulted the front of their Edmonds to learn that flour could be measured by the "breakfastcup" (six ounces or 170 grams) and that milk could be measured by the "wineglass" (two tablespoons or a travesty). But for the modern reader trawling these family heirlooms, there are more questions than answers.
Why does Sea Pie contain beef and one parsnip but no seafood? How much trauma did Sheep's Tongue Shape inflict? ("Boil tongues gently till tender, then skin and cut into slices"). Why is a three-minute sponge baked for 15-20 minutes? Could the bread roll recipe that calls for 5-7 cups of flour be any less specific? Has anyone in the world ever eaten a Pelorus Cake?
Pelorus Cake is in my 1952 and 1988 edition. It's not there in the library's 1910 copy, or my colleague's 2001 version. Food historian Helen Leach scoured her vast collection of local community recipe books and found just one reference to a Pelorus Cake in a 1990 publication from Craighead Diocesan School, Timaru.
I spent hours searching online newspaper archive PapersPast for a possible origin recipe. The Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate reports that, in May 1900, at the Grand Fancy Fair, the best cake was awarded a pair of prize black Minorca chickens, but it does not specify whether that cake was chocolate, banana or Pelorus.
In 2016, the country's most famous cookery book was overhauled. Author, art curator and historian Alexa Johnston dared to say out loud what many home cooks (read: me) had long-thought - some of the recipes were not fit for purpose. Her 69th edition included around 400 recipes - 60 were new and 66 were rewrites. Soused trout was out, lemon chicken drumsticks were in. A Herald report from the time notes the return of some old baking favourites including Cheese Loaf (1986), Marshmallow Shortcake (1976), Arabian Nut Cake (1952) and Elsie's Fingers (1923).
"You will have a success with these recipes," Johnston promised. "And everybody wants to have a success."
Hers was the last major edit. Two more reprints (in 2018 and another this year) of the classic followed. In 2018, the famous brand (now owned by Goodman Fielder) also released Edmonds Everyday - a collection of "over 300 of your favourite recipes". There is no Pelorus Cake. Elsie's Fingers are, once again, AWOL and Sheep's Tongue Shape did not make the cut.
Post-colonial New Zealand is often depicted as a culinary wasteland. I've always thought this was a lazy joke that wilfully ignores the millions of hours women spent in the kitchen creaming butter and sugar. Homemade jam was the glue that held families and shrewsbury biscuits together, and if there was nothing in the house for dinner, you could always make pikelets. In this environment, the Edmonds is a cultural icon. But it is also a sacred cow and, perhaps, a self-perpetuating myth.
You can't write about the Edmonds book without referencing its "more than three million copies sold" status - no small feat in a country where a standard cookbook might sell 10,000 copies in a year.
Nielsen Bookscan data shows that, in 2016 (when that big rewrite was released), the Edmonds was the 23rd best-selling locally published non-fiction book that year. The following year, it placed 12th. It does not feature on this year's Top 10 list. Heading into Christmas, the 2021 number one New Zealand non-fiction book was Aroha: Maori Wisdom for a Contented Life Lived in Harmony with Our Planet by Hinemoa Elder. There was a cookbook in the number two spot: Chelsea Winter's Supergood - vegetarian, egg-free, dairy-free and largely gluten-free, and written by a reality television show winner. Mrs Parker would turn in her grave.