Like all good stories the story of the pavlova is complicated and full of red herrings and folklore. Charmian Smith talks to Helen Leach, author of The Pavlova Story: A slice of New Zealand's culinary history about unravelling the tale of a dish New Zealanders like to consider their own.
The "pavlova wars" break out between Australia and New Zealand from time to time, with each country claiming to be the originator of the light, soft-centred, cream-topped meringue that has become part of our separate but linked culinary traditions.
Her exhaustive research into the history of the pavlova in New Zealand reveals the earliest recipe found so far for a meringue cake called "pavlova" dates from 1929, three years after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova visited New Zealand and Australia.
It was contributed by "Festival" and published in the 1929 NZ Dairy Exporter Annual.
The Australians claim the pavlova was first created in 1935 by a Western Australian chef, Bert Sachse, but they haven't yet been able to find any meringue-cake pavlova recipes published before the 1940s (by then there are at least 20 separate New Zealand recipes) but research is continuing, says Prof Leach.
However, much to her surprise, she found an earlier Australian recipe for a dessert called a "pavlova" published in 1926 in a booklet put out by a gelatine producer Davis Dainty Dishes, and published the following year in New Zealand.
It turns out to be a layered, four-coloured jelly, red, orange, white and green, the colours of one of Pavlova's costumes.
The same recipe turns up in several New Zealand fund-raising cookbooks as part of Davis' advertising.
Australians don't seem to want to claim this "pavlova", she says.
However, this jelly "pavlova" wasn't the only red herring Prof Leach had to negotiate.
In 1928, a Dunedin woman, Rose Rutherford, contributed a recipe for little "pavlova cakes" to the Weekly Press in Christchurch.
These were small, coffee-and-walnut flavoured meringues topped with cream and a glace cherry, not the large, soft-centred meringue cake we know and claim as our own today.
"I hadn't realised before I started writing the pavlova book that there's a difference between an icon and a national symbol.
You could see the national side of the pavlova emerging in the 1950s, and then the iconic side appears in the 1970s and then people want to argue bitterly about it.
People can get quite passionate in these mock wars."
Prof Leach became involved in the pavlova debate in 1995 thanks to the Otago Daily Times.
Robin Charteris, then deputy editor and Prester John columnist, phoned her to check some claims about early pavlova recipes and later introduced her to Noeline Thomson, a regular correspondent to the ODT.
Mrs Thomson remembered her mother making pavlovas between 1928 and 1932.
Prof Leach became intrigued and gave a paper on the subject to the Oxford Food Symposium in the UK in 1996.
Much of her research was done using community fund-raising cookbooks containing contributed recipes.
She had started collecting old New Zealand cookbooks in the 1960s when she and her former husband were impoverished students.
"We were doing a lot of hunting and gathering but [overseas cookbooks] had no information on how to cook paua or pipis or make pavlovas, so I began to collect old cookbooks as we were going around junk shops.
We had no money so we basically bought all our kitchen equipment from junk shops.
They were nice antiques but, because they were kitchen things, they were cheap."
Professionally, she was studying material culture, Maori stone adzes in particular, and became interested in tools and domestic life.
Then, she started teaching a course on the evolution of human diet and realised that food traditions could be traced back just like other traditions.
"Just as in archaeology - you had a tradition of adze-making and you can trace the New Zealand tradition from the Pacific.
Gradually, the forms and the types change and they adapt to new environments, but you can see the family resemblances through time.
We call it cultural evolution."
Prof Leach decided to do the same thing with European material culture, initially in relation to artefacts and utensils.
Then she realised that the old recipe books showed the cultural evolution of recipes, and recipes were proxy for artefacts - dishes made with certain skills from certain ingredients.
"The recipe contains all the information of what was in it and how it was processed, so the recipe's a proxy artefact.
That was the theoretical bit, along with the pure domestic interest in the enjoyment of food."
This was in the 1990s, when food history (like garden history, another of Prof Leach's interests) was beginning to be taken more seriously by academics.
Pavlova has become part of New Zealand (and Australia's) culinary tradition, despite many people thinking we don't have such a thing, Prof Leach says.
"A culinary tradition contains the notion of the foods that we decide are edible, and how you combine them to make a dish which has a name - even societies without cookbooks have named dishes.
The rest of the usually unwritten rules are how you put the dishes together to make meals, and rules about combinations and in what order.
"Those all go to make culinary traditions, so therefore it's not just the ingredients but the utensils, and the cutlery and the plates and etiquette and the beliefs that such and such a food is not good for you, or it's healthy or natural.
Every culinary tradition has a belief system that goes along with the food and the meals.
"Ours is a strong tradition and we keep borrowing into it and we keep adapting it so it's never going to become out of date.
The only thing that's a threat is if people stop cooking," she says.
Adaptation and evolution are important in a strong culinary tradition and the pavlova is really an evolution rather than an invention. Meringues have been around in European cooking since the early 18th century and by the 1920s meringue cakes were popular in New Zealand and Australia.
As Prof Leach started putting the pavlova recipes she found in early community cookbooks from her own collection and those in the Hocken Library and Otago Settlers Museum, on to a spreadsheet, she got a feeling for the way they developed.
The 1929 meringue cake called "pavlova" was two crisp meringue layers, sandwiched and topped with whipped cream mixed with nuts and glace cherries.
However, from 1933, recipes were for a single cake with a soft centre, topped with cream and various toppings such as: pineapple and chopped walnuts; cherries and strawberries; chopped jelly; passionfruit pulp; kiwifruit; lemon curd; and, in more recent times, chocolate in various forms.
Recipes varied from two egg whites to four egg whites.
One-egg white pavlovas appeared during World War 2 when eggs were rationed.
After the introduction of electric mixers, an all-in-one recipe developed which took 10 minutes of hard beating.
Pavlova recipes were adapted for cooking in the microwave and electric frying pan, and even an uncooked one appeared, she says.
Over the years, we've come to prefer softer and probably sweeter pavlovas, and chocolate toppings have become popular instead of lemon curd - although the fresh fruit topping, especially passionfruit, kiwifruit or strawberries, have been used since the early days.
Pavlovas continue to evolve.
There are now pavlova rolls and mini pavlovas, and they are beginning to appear overseas.
Prof Leach thinks they will become a little healthier with yoghurt or lemon curd toppings instead of the traditional lashings of cream.
She has challenged ODT food columnist Joan Bishop, author of a crockpot and slow-cooker cookbook, to produce a pavlova cooked in a crockpot.
Prof Leach says she has been working on a savoury version as a joke.
It is based on the uncooked pavlova recipe without sugar, and with a cottage cheese topping, but it's yet to be perfected.
"Cooks at home have no hang-ups about changing recipes to suit themselves and passing them on to others," she says.
However, you can't just do what you like with recipes, especially baking recipes.
You have to work within the limits of the chemistry.
To help understand the chemistry of pavlovas, she enlisted the aid of Janet Mitchell, lecturer in the food science department, and Renee Wilson a BSc honours student.
They discovered more sugar leads to a firmer crust; undissolved sugar can make the pavlova sticky; vinegar (or other acid such as cream of tartar) helps stabilise the foam, but cornflour only has a role in increasing the marshmallow effect of the soft-centred pavlova if water is also added and the right temperature is reached inside.
The characteristic soft centre of a pavlova was not due to any particular ingredients, but basically to under-cooking.
"If you have it thick enough, because meringue is a fantastic insulator, the outside sets and prevents the heat from drying out the middle," Prof Leach says.
As recipes are passed on, the instructions may get shortened - a characteristic of bad recipes in fund-raising cookbooks.
A professional food writer may pick it up and clarify the method, give helpful advice on ingredients and put things in the right order so you don't suddenly get to the end of the recipe and realise that you should have done something earlier, she says.
"So there is an art [to recipe writing]. Food writers' skills are in the presentation of a recipe, the creation of a good work flow, adapting the recipe for modern equipment and modern kitchens.
"I like the notion of an interplay between home cooks and food writers. Now, where chefs come in - I'm almost inclined to think they have their own trajectory."
The Pavlova Story contains 12 classic pavlova recipes revised by Mary Browne, Prof Leach's sister, so they can easily be made today.
"I gave her a set of the original recipes and she had to find what the core of those recipes was, and some of them were appallingly badly written, including Rose Rutherford's."
Prof Leach may have retired, but her research certainly hasn't stopped.
She has a schedule of public lectures, including one at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery tomorrow afternoon and she is researching regionalism in New Zealand food.
It's something many people don't believe exists, but she has found evidence for several regional dishes, including the toasted cheese roll which is a southern specialty - but that's another story.
All-in-one pavlova
This is Mary Browne's revision of the all-in-one pavlova recipe which first appeared in 1959, from The Pavlova Story.
> How to make an All-in-one pavlova
The use of an electric mixer ensures a "never fail" pavlova with the classic crisp outer meringue shell and soft marshmallow centre.
2 egg whites from large eggs
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp white vinegar
1 tsp cornflour
4 Tbsp boiling water
Topping
200ml cream
sliced kiwifruit, strawberries or other fruit
Place a piece of non-stick baking paper on an oven tray and draw a 23cm circle in the centre.
Preheat the oven to 180degC with a rack in the centre position.
Place all the ingredients (except those for the topping) into the bowl and beat on high speed for 10-12 minutes until the mixture is shiny and stiff.
Spoon into marked circle and use a spatula to spread evenly.
Bake for 10 minutes and then lower the heat to 150degC and bake a further 45 minutes.
Allow to cool in the oven for at least an hour. Carefully transfer to a flat serving platter.
Whip the cream until stiff and spread on the pavlova. Decorate with fruit.
