Sep 30, 2024 Food
My grandma had all the hallmarks of a person who could bake a cake sans recipe or whip up some elaborate, intergenerationally handed-down pudding: petite, English, curly grey hair, and, after a certain point, old. In reality, she was an average, if not sometimes terrible, cook. But as a grandma, she was the best.
Perhaps that’s why one afternoon I spent baking with her as a primary-school-aged kid has stuck with me with such vividness. At that point in my life, I was fixated on a book called Sweet Dream Pie, in which a man makes an outrageously enormous pie filled with chocolate, chewing gum, candy canes, gumdrops, liquorice, lollipops and so on. Riffing on that, my grandma had prepared a batch of plain scone dough (a practical concession) and bought tiny plastic bags of different lollies from the supermarket bulk bins. As we worked, flour dusted the kitchen, dishes piled up by the sink, and our creations, dubbed ‘Sweet Dream Scones’, took form on the baking sheet as rather unappetising lolly-flecked blobs.
These Sweet Dream Scones transcended the pre-existing notions I had about food. Food could be more than something you politely ate and that bound you to your seat at the table till you finished it; it could be more than something you prepared neatly and for entirely practical reasons. This was an edible expression of joy, generosity, love, magic and liberation — all things food is capable of evoking but that aren’t always in evidence. The scones were not the most delicious things I’d ever eaten, but they were certainly the sweetest.
This is the beauty, I think, of sweet stuff. More infrequent in our daily lives than ‘serious’ savoury foods, desserts and afternoon teas and sugary pick-me-ups and treats punctuate the humdrum of our everyday schedules with the irrational and the whimsical. They’re the things we look forward to, and the things we look back on in our own individual ways. Sweetness, while often fleeting, adds a sprinkle of magic to the mundane.
Fruit
Nadia Abu-Shanab
Fruit has range. It can be gross. Ordinary. A sublime treat. My fruit continuum goes something like this: at one end of the scale, there’s a shrivelled mandarin glaring back at you after you’ve been directed to the fruit bowl, age seven, because you whined about being hungry, angling for a processed treat. Or the bruised, Marmite-sandwich-infused apple rolling around inside a plastic school lunchbox.
The mid-range is straightforward — the fruit of the everyday. A Goldilocks-zone ripe banana eaten en route to work. Functional. Filling. Flavoursome.
Then, though, comes the transcendent. Mulberries and stone fruits my dad liberated from trees that dripped over strangers’ fences, riding the line of just-ripe tartness. Yum, with a seditious edge. At the height of this fruit continuum, fruit is dessert.
I’m in the Palestinian village where my ancestors have grown almonds, olives and apricots for centuries. I’m full, even hours after being fed to incapacity at an afternoon feast. The evening is balmy. Someone emerges from the kitchen. A decorative plate heaves with orchard gems: green grapes, figs, apricots and nectarines piled high. The fruits are fresh in two, or even three, dimensions — recently picked off nearby branches and vines, glistening from being washed, and (in the case of the grapes) cool from being briefly refrigerated. They quench, refresh and sweeten the night. An auntie holding a knife slices, seemingly into her own hands. She presses half an apricot into my palm like it’s a gold coin.
Perhaps when you cannot return to your homeland, you’re predisposed to get romantic about its produce, but I don’t think I’m idealising too much. I consider all this, while the war on Gaza rages on. I wonder how the oranges of Yāfā will taste to the descendants of people displaced from their port city (known today as Jaffa, Tel Aviv) to Gaza in 1948, now displaced once again to the tents of Rafah, where they are trapped with nowhere to go, surviving on foreign aid. They are 100km away from their ancestral orchards, in the jaws of a man-made famine. How juicy those oranges will taste, when they’re finally free to taste them.
Nadia Abu-Shanab (English/Irish/Palestinian) is a mum, daughter, sister, partner, educator and union organiser based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She is a founding member of human rights organisation Justice for Palestine.
Rice pudding
Lucinda Bennett
Whenever I am sick or fragile in any way, what I want most is always rice pudding. A softly sweet, milky balm of a dish, rice pudding is ancient, global, cosmic. As many versions exist as there are grains of rice in a sack: aromatic kheer, smooth mahalabia scented with rose, a cake of ba bao fan studded with jewel-like fruits, sticky chocolate champorado, risalamande with a pool of dark cherry sauce — every culture has its own spin, its own way of combining rice and milk with heat, spices and something sweet.
We had it often as children, perhaps because it’s the best way of using up a carton of milk approaching its use-by date. My dad — the cook in our house — made it with white sugar, vanilla and an egg or two, just enough to make it custardy, conjuring his own memories of the one his nanny would make for him back in the 60s using rich Jersey milk and grated nutmeg, each bowlful topped with a glistening teaspoonful of strawberry jam. If it wasn’t Dad’s rice pud, I was riding my bike to the local roast chicken shop — a common type of neighbourhood eatery in suburban Sydney — to buy my own tub of homemade rizogalo, the citrus-scented Greek version, sprinkled liberally with sweet cinnamon. While the rest of the neighbourhood kids wolfed down hot chips doused in chicken salt, I shyly counted my coins and asked for a spoon, scraping plastic against plastic to get every last creamy morsel.
These days, I use cream, brown butter, coconut milk and cardamom to make all manner of rice puddings, but the simplest recipe I know is to add half a cup of short-grain rice (I like Arborio) to three cups of gently boiling full-cream milk with vanilla and a pinch of salt. Turn the stove down low and stir until the grains are soft, plump and porridgy, about half an hour. Add sugar to taste, any kind, maybe three or four tablespoons, and maybe a little orange blossom water if you have it. I like it warm, eaten in bed with a cup of strong tea, but I also love to sneak cold spoonfuls straight from the fridge so by the time we’re ready for dessert, there’s barely any left.
Lucinda Bennett (@lucindajbennett) is a writer and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Fudge cake
Ashleigh Payne
My whānau doesn’t have any family recipes that we hold close. I didn’t learn to cook at anyone’s elbow in the same way you hear some chefs do, because I didn’t even want to work in a kitchen until I was in my 20s. For the bulk of my life, I wanted to be an Egyptologist.
I don’t remember learning to cook specifically, but I do remember being about eight years old and tagging along to work with my mum — a cook herself. She was in charge of the menu for weekday afternoon tea and dinner at Baradene Convent of the Sacred Heart and during the school holidays, I was in charge of the nuns’ afternoon sweets. I would pore over various ‘kids’ cookbooks’ and bake what I thought had the best pictures. (This is still how I engage with cookbooks — looking at the pictures only.)
One of the afternoon-tea dishes that is prominent in my memory is fudge cake. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it tastes like, what the texture is, how it smells. Not any more — the last time I made it was two decades ago. You’ll need to imagine the most moreish, chocolatey, soft cake you possibly can — think homemade, a little Bruce Bogtrotter-ish; the sponge tinted reddish-brown with cocoa, topped simply with a thin layer of super-sweet water icing, set crisp. That’s what I’m picturing.
Despite all the years that have passed since I last ate this cake, something about the recipe still haunts me — so much so that last year, I hunted down the cookbook it was in: Junior Cook: Book 2, by Mary Pat Fergus, originally published in the late 1970s. The copy I found is a little yellowed, a little tattered, and a little annotated by the previous owner. Well loved and well used. When I found the fudge cake recipe inside, I saw it was a classic oil-based chocolate cake, its moist, tender and fluffy crumb achieved with minimal effort (no melting, no creaming). It’s not part of the recipe, and possibly not endorsed by Metro due to the potential food safety risks of raw egg, but in my opinion these batters are also the best for licking off the spatula. Perfect for a beginner, or a child, or both.
What really makes this fudge cake special to me is nostalgia, its associations with a time when I didn’t have a care in the world. I had only my mum and my cat, and life was simple. We weren’t well off — I went to the convent because we couldn’t afford holiday programmes — but I adored being there. I had free rein of the building, plus an extensive pantry to rummage in.
My mum gave me everything she could from what little there was. The fudge cake was a bit like that, too: greater than the sum of its parts. I say this as someone who learnt regret in their formative years upon trying straight cocoa by the spoon. As it turns out, cocoa on its own is bitter rubbish. But what it can do? That’s magic.
Ashleigh Payne (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a baker at Coffee Pen in Eden Terrace. @tiniestyo
Mangoes
Sita Narsai
If there’s one thing my father is known for — besides his unwavering support for the Warriors, his white taxi van, and his famous BBQ chicken — it’s his love of mangoes. If our family had a crest, the mango would be at its centre. His love is now our love. Once, when I was a kid, our family had visitors over and he was so excited for them to try some fresh new mangoes he exclaimed, “Sita! Get the mangoes!” You can bet I’ve never lived that down. It still ranks in the top three of my family’s in-jokes. Sometimes my cousins will yell, “Sita! Get the mangoes!” just to rile me up —all of 20 years later.
Our family did and still does get excited during mango season, which despite mangoes’ sunny disposition is actually during the winter in New Zealand, due to the mango being a summer fruit in India, where they’re often imported from. Proudly producing an after-dinner treat, Dad would saunter into the sitting room with a platter of mangoes and proceed to slice them up and share them around. We would then offer critiques. Was this one too stringy? Too firm? Too juicy? Was it too ripe — had we left it too long? Or was it — dared we say — perfect? No one actually ever agreed — our tastes all varied. We all just knew we’d need to floss our teeth after.
To me, there’s nothing quite like mangoes. They’re luscious, sweet and tropical, and if you get a good one, firm yet juicy. (As you can tell, I was raised to know what a good mango is.) Mangoes are also decadent and luxurious, one of the ‘expensive fruits’, not a plain Jane apple or a stodgy, healthful banana. In fact, mangoes, being a fruit with a very high sugar content, are actually maybe kind of bad for you. But everything in moderation, yeah?
Sita Narsai is a graphic designer who was born, raised and educated in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her family emigrated to Aotearoa from Gujarat, India. @si.ta
Gingernuts
Emily Shih
I’m a biscuit baker. Or at least, that’s what I do when I’m not at the rat race. I dream, imagine, bake, taste, bake again — refining biscuit recipes until the results are ready to hold their own beside a cuppa. I’ve been a baker for more than a decade, and it seems the longer I do this, the more my obsessions narrow towards this one, very simple category.
My earliest memories of biscuits are associated with my grandparents’ annual visits — they always brought a box. On the lid of the Akai Bohshi-branded tin was the iconic image of the ‘girl in a red hat’. In my childhood closet, you can still find one of these retro tins, filled with cards, letters, notes passed around class, postcards… A biscuit tin of nostalgia.
The first box of biscuits I ever made was inspired by a coast-to-coast road trip across Canada, traversed in a tiny Ford hatchback, with ‘camping’ stops mostly in Walmart parking lots. Instead of souvenirs, I collected grains, nuts, condiments, jams, praliné and chocolate as I hopped from city to city. When I finally made it back home (Vancouver at the time), I turned the ingredients I’d squirrelled away into an assortment of biscuits to share my adventures. The project eventually turned into my first (now-closed) baking business.
Fast forward a couple years and I was on to my next adventure, a roadie through the Land of the Long White Cloud. Here I met my greatest biscuit nemesis of all time: the gingernut. I was fascinated by the sound of its candy-like snap — I had to figure it out. I spent two weeks diving into various types of sugar molecules, their differing properties, and how they affect the texture and appearance of a biscuit. (Fun fact: there exist multiple research papers examining how well cookies snap depending on their tensile strength. One study found that the optimal snap was achieved 64 hours after the biscuits left the oven.) It took me, I’m embarrassed to say, nearly 40 attempts before I nailed the iconic snap. I still get cold sweats thinking about it. New Zealand, you got me real good with your gingernuts!
Ginger biscuits come in many flavours and varieties, but here’s a Northern European-style recipe, technically for gingersnaps. They are filled with spice, rolled thin, cut into shapes, and are not without a magnificent snap!
This recipe makes 150 gingersnaps cut into circles 7cm in diameter. To achieve a great snap, follow the exact metric weights given. You can scale down the recipe, but this makes measuring the temperature of the bubbling golden syrup a little tricky.
INGREDIENTS
17g (3½ tsp) baking soda
7.5g (1.25 tsp) salt
27g (5 Tbsp) ground ginger
13g (2 Tbsp) cinnamon powder
11g (2 Tbsp) allspice powder
9g (1.5 Tbsp) ground cloves
454g (1⅓ cups) golden syrup
488g (2½ cups) brown sugar
500g butter
50g (1 large) egg
1.09kg (8¾ cups) all-purpose flour
Measure and cut 12 pieces of baking paper to 30cm by 40cm, and find some space in your chiller to fit a tray of about the same size. Measure all ingredients before you begin. The baking soda, salt and spices can be measured together in a bowl.
Boil the golden syrup in a large pot to 127°C — this step is crucial for a snappy texture. Take off the heat, add the brown sugar and butter and stir together with a spatula.
Add the salt, baking soda and spices and stir together.
When the mixture is no longer hot (warm is good), add the egg and stir until well mixed in.
Add the flour one cup at a time and stir together. Near the end, it helps to turn out the entire mix on to a benchtop surface to mix well with both hands. Keep mixing until you end up with a smooth, glossy dough.
Divide the dough into six pieces of 440g each.
Between two sheets of parchment paper, roll each ball of dough until it nearly covers the entire surface area. I find this job easier on the hands when the dough is warm.
Refrigerate the resulting six sheets until completely firm — two hours minimum or overnight. (The sheets can also be frozen at this stage.)
Cut into shapes of your heart’s desire, then bake until golden, crisp and snappy once cooled. In a commercial convection oven I bake for 11 minutes at 170°C (335°F); different home ovens will have a slightly different bake time.
Store in an airtight container. The gingersnaps will last more than a month if you keep the humidity at bay.
Emily Shih runs the biscuit business OffonWednesdays. She bakes biscuits every week for Miller’s Coffee and makes biscuit boxes for markets and pop-ups. @offonwednesdays
Anpan
Yuko Segawa
Anpan is a sweet roll (pan) filled with anko, a sweet red-bean paste. A staple of Japanese sweets, anko has been with us for centuries. To make it, azuki beans are boiled until soft, then seasoned with sugar and a little salt. It’s as simple as that.
There are two types of anko: a chunky version with the beans left unmashed (tsubu-an) and a smooth anko, which is mashed and sieved to remove the bean skins (koshi-an). It’s not uncommon to see people on the street in Japan talking about which anko they prefer — like saying how you like your eggs done. You see how close this food is to us.
Although the recipe for anko is simple, that does not mean that it’s easy to master. If you visit Japan, you will see many wagashi shops: traditional Japanese confectionaries known for their colourful jewel-like sweets, often made using ingredients like rice flour or Japanese agar. We have a saying: “Becoming a decent wagashi pâtisserie means mastering anko making.”
I grew up with my grandmother in Nagano, Japan, a prefecture known for beautiful mountains, winter sports and hot springs with monkeys. Grandma was a rigorous, hardworking mother of six children and spun silk at home as her part-time job. Silk production was a flourishing industry in Nagano back then. Making anko was one of a few family recipes I first learnt by watching her in the kitchen. Eventually, I replaced a large part of her recipe, but it was Grandma’s tips that helped me make decent anko at Mizu. Her advice gave me something that my 27 years of experience in the kitchen hadn’t taught me — in essence, “use your senses”.
This reminds me of a Japanese cooking philosophy called ‘mebunryou’, which describes the art of measuring by eye when cooking and not being too reliant on measurements or recipes. The approach becomes particularly important when the recipe requires you to catch small changes or act on the spot, as in the process of cooking anko.
Break the beans with a pinky finger, not an index finger, because it’s always easier to check the softness that way.
How do you check the thickness? Scratch across the bottom of the stockpot with your spatula and wait a second for the paste to fill the gap. See, that’s the perfect thickness.
I always hear my grandmother’s voice in my head as I prep anko in Mizu’s kitchen.
Yuko Segawa is the owner and baker at Mizu Bread in Eden Terrace. @mizu_bread
Mango Sticky Rice
Bon Kornwit Kunthip
There are more than 200 different mango varieties in Thailand alone, each with its own distinctive sweetness, acidity, scent and texture. Some variants are best eaten when green, and others when they’re fully ripe. Two stand out the most to me. The first is okrong (og-rong), an oblong round fruit that’s yellow coloured, with green skin when ripe. When peeled, the flesh is light yellow with an inviting sweet and juicy perfume. The other is nam-dok-mai (the Barracuda mango), which is oblong with a pointy tip. When it’s ripe, the skin is entirely yellow, as is the flesh. This variety is fragrant on the nose, and in taste it’s refreshing and slightly sour, followed by sweetness.
When fully ripened, okrong and nam-dok-mai are both widely used in mango sticky rice. Mango sticky rice is something I never miss when I return to Thailand. When I was growing up, it was the go-to dessert to share with my parents. Back then, I thought all mango sticky rice was equal — I couldn’t understand why Mum would talk about the quality of the coconut cream on the side or whether the sticky rice component was any good or not. None of that made any sense. As I ate more and more mango sticky rice, and went on my own mango sticky rice journey, I slowly began to understand what Mum was talking about. I started to appreciate the details and process behind the dish.
The coconut cream, the rice and the mango should be perfectly balanced; the creamy, salty and sweet flavours all complement each other. After going through the cooking process, the rice grain should be almost see-through and retain its shape when plated or packed. The colours — the rice in a mango sticky rice can come in a rainbow of colours (purple, pink, green and so on) — should come from a natural source. Finally, the rice should be sweet but not too sweet, salty but not too salty. I love to look at the rice grains before gobbling them up… It’s all about personal preference.
Bon Kornwit Kunthip is an IT business analyst and manager at Kiin Thai Kitchen in Mt Eden. He was born in Udon Thani province in northeastern (Esarn) Thailand. His family emigrated to New Zealand in 1997 and he spent most of his primary and high school years growing up in Mt Wellington, Auckland. @kiinthai
Coconut cream pie
Bertrand Jang
Pies are common in Fiji and come in many variations: pumpkin, pineapple and, of course, coconut. Usually they’re made for an auspicious occasion or when someone of high rank comes to your house. Growing up in Fiji, I saw my mum make a lot of pies. These were often with a simple custard base, made from custard powder that set at room temperature. We didn’t have the luxury of things like condensed milk or excess eggs that we could use for pies, so our desserts were a lot more simple than the varieties I make these days. We had a big family as well, so these pies didn’t last. I mean, there were seven boys in the house, so sometimes they were finished before they were even properly set.
Coconut cream pie was something we ate at home, but only on the most special occasions. It was considered a bougie pie for two reasons: one, it had condensed milk, and two, it had meringue. The version we now make at Sweet & Me is even more special, because it’s got three layers: a coconut custard, a condensed-milk egg custard and meringue on top. Essentially it’s in the tradition of the pies I grew up with, but takes things up a notch.
The coconut element of the pie brings back memories of one of my hustles when I was a kid: I’d make coconut fudge and sell it at recess. With the money I earned, I’d buy Chinese sweets — using one sweet to fund another sweet. In Fijian pantries, Chinese sweets are like gold.
Mostly, though, when I think about this pie, I think about my mum and the way she baked for us growing up. She was like a sergeant; she cooked for the whole platoon, the masses. She taught me many things, but baking wasn’t really one of them. Rather, she taught me how to become a clean baker, and that you shouldn’t go to bed until the kitchen is spotless. I continue to pass these skills on in my own kitchen, especially when we’re making coconut cream pie.
