Maori Food

As soon as the introductions were done, our Maori hosts invited us into their home for lunch. Louise served us a delicious banquet including battered fish, roast chicken with cranberry sauce, potato bake, a green salad and fried bread. It was largely a Western-style meal, but the Maori influence was clear, particularly in the fried bread. These matchbox-sized pieces were still greasy with the oil they’d been cooked in and were tasty cold, though I imagined they would have been much better fresh out of the pan.

Later, when Bob was showing us around his yard, he pointed out the wire frames used to hold hot stones for a hangi — a communal roast cooked for large groups. First they make a fire stacked five logs high and pile on the stones to warm up. Then they dig a trench, choosing the length depending on the number of diners. When the stones are ready, they’re packed into the wire baskets and lowered into the trench. Food is then placed on top with meat closest to the stones and vegetables above that. These days, they use a canvas cover to keep the heat in, but it was probably made from flax in the past. The sheet is held down by dirt around the edges and balloons up with the heat. When the sheet collapses after about three hours, the meal is ready. It’s a lot of work and they don’t bother for less than twenty people (unfortunately for us), but Bob says that it’s not much more effort to cook for three hundred.

Bob picked some feijoa fruit from trees next to the house and some banana passionfruit during our tour, both of which were delicious. The Feijoa tasted like banana (to me) but had a texture more like a kiwi fruit. The seeds of the banana passionfruit were fleshier than their more common cousin, and packed in an elongated banana-like shape. Bob told us that only a lazy man could go hungry in this area. With a beach to fish from and a bountiful forest throughout the peninsula, it was easy to see why.

They said they liked to end the tour by cooking bread in the sand, giving the visitors a chance to take an active part in a Maori activity, but were thwarted during our visit by a total fire ban. No rain had fallen in the area for the previous three months and, unfortunately for us, this was one time they were clearly in agreement with the authorities.

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