Feast on David Burton's Definitive Book about Kiwi Cuisine

Kwisine Kiwiana is back! And to celebrate, one of the country’s foremost food writers – David Burton - has written a book about it; New Zealand Food & Cookery will be published in November. Where only a few years ago New Zealanders were congratulating themselves on having thrown over meat and three veg, today there has been a change of heart.

Restaurants have restored whitebait fritters and pavlova to the menu, learned symposiums on New Zealand culinary history are being held at our universities, television programmes celebrate the Kiwi kitchen and our food media is full of baking and reinvented roasts.

David Burton’s New Zealand Food & Cookery is a ground-breaking exploration of New Zealand’s unique foodstuffs and homegrown recipes. It was first published to critical acclaim in 1982, and this entirely revised fourth edition confirms it as the definitive work, the book having doubled in size to 140,000 words.

Aiming both to provide us with a culinary history and to codify every iconic New Zealand recipe, the book begins with comprehensive studies of both Maori and settler food history, leading into detailed notes on the various fish, shellfish, game and wild foods that make New Zealand a unique place in the world to cook and eat. Side-bars delve into Kiwi classics such as tomato sauce and the meat pie, and there are notes on the origins of our iconic dishes, including our many cakes and biscuits, for which David has provided tried and true family recipes.

Besides setting down all the recipes which Kiwis fondly recognise as their own, David Burton has tested and written new recipes – there are more than 100 in all - which celebrate the arrival of Asian immigrants, and with them a host of exotic new vegetables, herbs and aromatics.

Here, too, is the secret to making the best Pavlova in town, how to scoop out kina, which potato to mash and which to fry and why you should give Brawn a second chance.

Jauntily presented with all the wit and verve that makes David Burton one of our leading food writers, New Zealand Food & Cookery captures in print something of ourselves, which until recently has been in danger of becoming lost.

Originally published as 200 Years of New Zealand Food & Cookery, the work won the AW Reed Memorial Book Award in 1981 for the best unpublished Manuscript of that year and was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award in 1982.

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About David Burton:

‘David Burton is the Jeffrey Steingarten of New Zealand . . . he is a true literary food writer, distinguished by his unbelievably rigorous research, love of New Zealand history and beautiful words.’ . . . Peta Mathias

The son of a caterer and himself a former chef, David Burton is Senior Features Writer for Cuisine magazine, and a restaurant critic both for Cuisine and Wellington’s Dominion Post. His unprecedented 27 food writing awards include ten Qantas Media Awards and six book awards.

He is the author of The Raj At Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, which has appeared in British, Indian and Spanish editions.

French Colonial Cookery: A Cook’s Tour of the French Speaking World was subsequently translated into French and won Best Study of French Cuisine In The World at the 2000 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Perigueux.

Earlier books include The New Zealand Cheese Book, Delectable Fruits Cookery for New Zealanders, Savouring The East and Biography of a Local Palate.

David Burton has a Master of Arts degree from Canterbury University and lives in Wellington with his wife and daughter.

David Burton’s New Zealand Food & Cookery is a David Bateman Ltd Hardback book priced at NZ$59.99 and published in November 2009