Kiwis follow food trends but prefer comfort zone

New Zealanders have a fondness for meat pies and scones, Sarah Hingston says. Photo / Herald on Sunday

In the 1970s, New Zealanders had a thing for fondue. The 1980s brought prawn cocktails and guacamole and the early 1990s sushi and low-carbohydrate diets.

But a soon-to-be released book Afghans, Barbecues and Chocolate Fish shows that despite ever-changing food trends, Kiwis are a nostalgic lot who tend to go back to the foods that have served generations well.

"You kind of have the trends that come and go that are based on diets like the Atkins or whatever and they guide us in a way but they do disappear," said the book's author, Jane Hingston. "What people do keep coming back to is what has been handed down from generation to generation based on that comfort food and that baking tradition."

Ms Hingston is reluctant to call our foods stodgy "because they're not".

"Things like meat pies and scones, ginger crunch or Albert squares ... these are things that don't seem to exist quite in the same way in other places, but New Zealanders have a real fondness for them.

"The Sunday roast and other roast-jointed meats have been around for an awful long time. It's changed over the years from colonial goose, which is not a goose at all but a lamb dressed up to look like a goose."

Ms Hingston said New Zealanders also wanted more servings of local food programmes on television.

"I think people are sick of watching Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay - they're thinking 'that's not our food and that's not what we're about'.

"New Zealanders seem to be crying out for stuff about themselves and I think for so many years people would say there's no such thing as New Zealand food but that's just not true."

The book, which gives some recipes including directions on how to make feijoa jam or Belgian biscuits, reveals that New Zealanders eat on average seven million servings of hot chips each week but just two million Jelly Tips a year.

It also reveals that hokey pokey is the nation's third favourite icecream, and that Jaffas are Australian.

But Ms Hingston said the debate over who can lay claim to the pavlova should be put to rest.

"I think that unless the Australians can come up with proof they're a New Zealand product," she said.

"We have printed recipes from a certain date and unless an Australian can prove an Australian did this then they should just accept it's ours."