Epicurean escape in Tairua

Home-grown fruit, nuts, honey and preserves from Wanganui

Pages from our grandmother's cookbook

The beach at Tairua, late Friday afternoon

Easterley: once an art gallery, now an elegant holiday home

It takes four of us to produce a spread like our grandmother's

Fleischkäse, Swiss cabbage, potatoes à la normande and a glass of Shiraz

If you believe what you read, we’re all trying to go back to a way of life more in keeping with that of our grandmothers. We’re growing our own organic vegetables and fruit, cooking everything from scratch, steering clear of processed food and churning out home-made cakes and biscuits like 40s housewives.

My grandmother Eva was a 40s housewife. She was 27 when she came to New Zealand from Basle. Over the next 40 or so years she spent many, many hours in her kitchen, cooking whole fillet steaks, veal and chicken casseroles, pork roasts and pot roasts; baking, bottling fruit from her garden, making sauerkraut in a large earthenware crock, and copying down recipes in a black lined exercise book.

Her kitchen was full of wonderful smells: fresh coffee (she ground her own and drank it by the potful), garlicky salami, spicy biscuits and strange-tasting sourdough bread. There were alpine scenes from Swiss calendars on the wall, a little wooden carving of the Lion of Luzerne on the window sill, Swiss biscuit tins and sugared almonds.

I came across her recipe book recently and was surprised at how similar our cooking styles were. What really surprised me, though, were the ingredients that went into her dishes – wine, garlic, lemons and a whole array of exotic spices plus various herbs that she grew herself. She also experimented with things like kohl rabi, risotto and gnocchi, which weren’t regional dishes where she came from or on many New Zealand dining tables at the time. There was lots of offal – liver, kidneys, tripe, brains, giblets – even a calf’s head, cooked in herbs and white sauce. There were also – and this is where my own style of cooking and hers part ways – terrifyingly huge amounts of cream and butter, baked fruit desserts, tarts and pies of all descriptions.

Forty years after she died, my three older sisters and I got together to recreate some of her recipes over a weekend in July. Sister #2 came over from Melbourne, sister #3 from Wanganui. We booked a bach in Tairua on the Coromandel Peninsula, planned a menu and went shopping for ingredients.

The four of us drove down together on a Friday afternoon, set ourselves up in a wonderfully well-appointed kitchen at ‘Easterley’, near the beach in Tairua, and went to work.

In reality it wasn’t quite as straightforward. When I rang sister #1 and broached the idea she was enthusiastic about the food theme but had a few reservations about the logistics. “So, these baches,” she said. “Do they have horrible lumpy beds?”

I also mentioned I’d be bringing my dog.

“YOUR DOG?“ she cried. “WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO TAKE YOUR DOG? WE’RE NOT HAVING DOGS THERE!”

My dog stayed in Auckland. The beds at Easterley were spectacularly comfortable. And over three days we cooked dishes that would have made our grandmother proud.

Sister #1 picked up meat from the excellent Village Butchery in Mangere Bridge – an enormous slab of lean pork, manuka-smoked bacon, topside, continental sausages – and bunches of herbs from her garden. Sister #2 went shopping for shoes, boots, cosmetics and an entire winter wardrobe of new clothes.

Sister # 3 drove up from Wanganui with produce from her own garden: vegetables, lemons and walnuts, home-made pickles and bottled fruit.

I stocked up on wine, coffee, spices, baking ingredients and CDs. If we were going to be really true to our grandmother’s memory, our cooking might have been accompanied by yodelling, alpine horns and cowbells, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

We arrived in Tairua on Friday afternoon, and walked down to the beach, over pink-tinged sand, and up over the hill that looks out to sea. It’s a satisfying scenic walk, through bush, up little flights of wooden steps, and onto lookouts on small platforms at each level – the views of the bay becoming more spectacular as you climb higher. As the sun set over the hills, we made our way back to the bach and started cooking.

On Friday night, we made:

• Swiss cabbage - lightly fried cabbage with caraway and sausage
• Potatoes a la normande – sliced potatoes and onions layered with cream and topped with tomatoes
• Fleischkäse, a meat loaf of minced pork, topside and bacon
• To finish: chocolate and walnuts.

On Saturday we drove to Whitianga, further up the coast. It was a lovely drive, a steep, winding road through misty hills, with glimpses of the sea. By the time we got to Whitianga it was pouring, so we drove down to the harbour to admire the view, had a hearty lunch at Velocity café, picked up some more supplies from New World and headed back to Tairua.

Saturday’s night’s dinner surpassed Friday’s:

• Onion soup – cooked slowly for hours so it was thick and flavoursome
• Pork and apple pie – pork, onion, apple and sage in a short pastry
• Rösti - a Swiss version of hash browns
• A layered salad of lettuce and fresh herbs, with dressing drizzled through each layer
• Dessert was ‘chocolate fluff’, a kind of chocolate mousse topped with cream and walnuts.

At any other time of year we might have eaten dinner on the expansive deck, but the rain persisted through Saturday night, so we settled in and concentrated on the food and wine.

Last up was breakfast on Sunday:

• Poor Knights - our grandmother’s version of French toast: bread soaked in egg and milk, fried in butter, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon and a squeeze of lemon.

Four cooks need a reasonably sized space in which to cook (Easterley’s was ideal) but we managed to pick dishes that didn’t require all of us to be in the kitchen at the same time. Being away from our own kitchens also meant no one needed to feel territorial or take charge, and because the four of us grew up with our mother’s mantra “CLEAN UP AS YOU GO” ringing in our ears, there weren’t masses of dirty dishes to wash at the end of the night.

The meals were fantastic – fresh ingredients, exciting flavours and some well-chosen wines all made sure of that. But the best thing about the weekend was spending time with sisters who live a long way from each other. And, of course, our grandmother’s cookbook.

Easterley

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Recipes



Onion soup

Onion soup

• 4 onions
• 1 litre chicken stock or water
• 4 flat tablespoons butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• salt and pepper to taste

Melt butter. Partly cook finely shredded onion. Blend in flour and add water or stock (hot), stirring all the time. Flavour with salt and pepper and cook for an hour. Serve with toast and grilled cheese.





Potatoes à la normande

• 6 cups sliced potatoes
• 3 medium onions, finely sliced
• 2 cups tomatoes
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons cream

Parboil potatoes for several minutes. Put a layer in buttered oven dish, add some of the sliced onions. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, a little flour and cream. Repeat process.

Lastly, cover with tomatoes, put lid on and bake for 1 hour in a medium oven. Take off lid for the last 20 minutes to cook the tomatoes through.






Fleischkase

Fleishkäse (meat loaf)

• 280 grammes topside
• 200g lean pork
• 40g bacon
• salt, pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon fresh marjoram or ¼ teaspoon curry powder
• 1 teaspoon chicken stock cube dissolved in water or 1 teaspoon soya sauce
• 1 finely grated garlic clove
• 110gm flour
• 1 egg yolk

Put meat twice through a mincer using finest grinder last time (this can also be done in a food processor). Add 400ml milk and mix until the meat has absorbed all the milk. Add seasoning and garlic. Add egg yolk and flour and mix well. Bake in a well-greased loaf tine in centre of hot oven, covering the top of the loaf with greaseproof paper if it seems to get too dry or brown. Serve hot or cold.



Swiss cabbage

Swiss cabbage

• 1 Savoy cabbage, sliced roughly
• 2 tbsp diced bacon
• ½ small onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tbsp caraway seeds
• 2 continental sausages, cooked and cut into slices
• 1 tbsp fat or oil

Heat fat or oil in large sauté pan and cook cabbage lightly with bacon, onion, garlic and caraway. Serve with sausage.






Pork and apple pie

Pork and apple pie

• 1.5kg lean pork
• 250g short crust pastry
• 2 large apples
• 1 small onion
• salt and pepper
• small handful fresh sage leaves

Cut the pork into bite sized pieces and put in saucepan. Slice onion and add to pork. Season, half cover with water or stock and stew gently for half an hour. Add sage and sliced apples. Cool and put into pie dish, covering with shortcrust pastry. Cook in hot oven 20 minutes. Reduce heat and cook for further 20 minutes.

Rösti

• 1 onion chopped
• 500g potatoes, peeled
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 25g butter
• salt & pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes for 5 minutes, leave to cool, then grate and add seasoning. Heat butter and oil in the pan and fry the onion until soft. Mix onion and potato and press firmly into pan. Fry slowly until golden on underside. Turn and cook the other side till golden. You can also add bacon, herbs and cheese to make it tastier.



Lettuce and herb salad

Salad

Rub inside of a salad bowl with garlic and pour in half a cap of French dressing or oil. Cover the bottom of the bowl with lettuce leaves, finely cut onion, cucumber and fresh herbs and sprinkle with lemon juice and salt.

Add more lettuce and other salad vegetables or herbs, sprinkling each layer with lemon juice. Top with tomato and decorate with slices of radish, parsley and mint. Slice hard boiled eggs over the top.






Chocolate fluff

Chocolate fluff

• 250g dark chocolate
• 50g butter
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup cream
• 50g sugar
• 1 cup cream
• 10g fresh ginger, grated, or walnut pieces

Break chocolate into pieces and melt in double boiler (or in microwave – heating for 1 minute at a time. Stop microwaving once it’s soft and lumpy). Cream butter and sugar. Add yolks one by one and beat. Beat egg whites separately till stiff. Stir melted chocolate into butter mixture and fold in the egg whites. Put in glass dishes and chill. When cold, top with whipped cream and grated ginger or chopped walnuts.






Poor Knights

Poor Knights

• 4 slices bread
• 2-3 eggs
• 2tbsp butter
• brown sugar
• cinnamon
• cream

Heat butter in frying pan. Beat eggs, soak bread slice by slice in egg and cook quickly in butter. Serve sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon, and a little whipped cream.