Otakou Marae - A Peninsula Place

Otakou Marae sits almost at the end of Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin - a splendid collection of buildings tucked away down a side road, a short walk from the water's edge. I went there for the first time three or four years ago with Ngai Tahu's TE KARAKA team, working on a series of Ngai Tahu runanga kai features.

I spent the day talking with local kaumatua (elders) about the traditional importance of Otago Harbour as a food source for the Otakou people and in particular, our discussions focussed on the cockle or tuaki as they are known to the locals. Actually New Zealand Littleneck Clams (Austrovenus stutchburyi), they are the single-most abundant large invertebrate animal found in inter-tidal sand flats in sheltered harbours and estuaries throughout New Zealand.

Tuaki have been an important food source for Muaupoko (Otago Peninsula) Maori for generations and their shells have commonly been found in centuries-old middens. The whole area was once speckled with many kaik (villages) and Pukekura (Taiaroa Head) was an important fortified pa.

It was a perfect sunny day in May when I visited Otakou again earlier this year and I couldn't help remembering my previous visit, sitting outside on the bench seats listening to Matenga Taiaroa talking about his great-grandfather, who walked the same soil; to Tangi Russell, who feels just as passionate about maintaining the harbour's tuaki resource; and to Paul Karaitiana, who lives just around the corner from the marae at Te Rauone Beach. He's been there thirty years or more and still gathers tuaki and other kai moana (seafood).

Otakou is 'home' to Waitaha, Rapuwai, Kati Hawea and Kati Mamoe; and in my view it's one of the loveliest of the southern Ngai Tahu marae. Quite apart from its divine location, I'm intrigued by its hefty, elaborately embellished church, its carvings and other tucked-away treasures. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz www.tekaraka.co.nz

Titi Territory

When I was at Takutai o te Titi Marae in Colac Bay in Southland a few weeks ago for the Ngai Tahu Hui-a-Tau, I was reminded again of what this pretty place is famous for – Titi, also known as muttonbird. I had visited before a couple of years earlier, with Ngai Tahu chef, Jason Dell and photographer Phil Tumataroa in the course of preparing another of the Te Karaka magazine kai features and despite Jason’s best culinary efforts, I wasn’t won over to the taste of titi. Those who are however, seem to love it with a passion and kaumatua from the Oraka-Aparima Runaka were happy to share their memories of titi gathering, or, as it is known in these circles, birding.

Titi, muttonbird, sooty shearwater, Puffinus griseus – they’re all the same – is a migratory seabird and the young birds caught by Maori as an annual delicacy on the Muttonbird Islands, southwest of Stewart Island, are fat with the oils of the fish eaten and regurgitated by their parents. The parent birds come home every night, having eaten pilchards, shrimps, sprats and small squid and the young birds gobble down their oily dinner and grow very, very fat. It’s no wonder they smell on cooking. Kaumatua, Robin Thomson leaned back in her chair and drew in the kitchen aromas. She remembered her 1940s childhood and the excitement of travelling down to Murderers Cove on Taukihepa Island on the old ferry, Wairua.
“In those days our family had a round, thatched wharerau on the island, with a pit fire in the floor and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. We’d put ferns on the floor and our kapok mattresses on top for sleeping.”
Arrival on the Muttonbird Islands was always two weeks prior to the official start of titi hunting on April 1st. It was a time used by each family to tidy up their house, chop wood and make repairs. They would have gathered kelp from the beaches back home, dried it and taken it with them to the islands where it was made into pouches to preserve the titi (see above). When April 1st dawned, everyone would be up early, walking through the bush to their own area, their manu. “We’d get down on our stomachs and reach into the nest holes. In my grandfather’s day, he used a strip of fern and he’d turn it in the nest and entangle it in the young bird’s feathers to tug it out,’ says Robin.
“As kids it was our job to cart all the birds and do the plucking with mum. On an average day we’d get about 100 birds so that was a lot of plucking. In those days we bagged up the feathers and they were sold as down for mattresses, but they don’t do that now.”

A favourite method of preserving the birds is to tahu them – “that’s how they were done in the pre-European days before salt. The katu, or balls of fat inside the birds were removed and rendered down and the birds were cooked and preserved in that. (See second image from top). They’ll last a year preserved that way and locals say they taste very different-greasier and not salty and definitely delicious. Most say the whole titi tradition was and still is, important to family. It’s special. It’s spiritual they say. That day, Jason Dell has worked his culinary miracles and served up twice-cooked titi in a hearty winter boil-up, confit of titi, little titi pies and salad of titi confit. It all looked a picture but seemed a world away from the freshly cooked tahu titi, potato chips and fried bread that Robin Thomson used to enjoy with her family on the wilds of Taukihepa Island. www.tekaraka.co.nz www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

Our Feathered Friends

I’ll confess from the start that this is not the best picture of our pretty native tui that you’ll ever see. I was in the middle of the bush on Ulva Island (near Stewart Island in the very south of New Zealand) with a small camera and an inadequate zoom, so everything is a little fuzzy - although you can still he his shiny green-black plumage and the distinctive white wattle under his beak. So that’s the excuses out of the way…. Now to one of our loveliest song birds…. It seems hard to believe now but the tui was once an important food source for Maori. When I was doing one of the kai features for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine recently, I spoke with one man, who said his grandmother always loved tui. She’d catch them, pluck them (the feathers were used for cloaks and kete decorations), impale them on a stick and roast them over a fire. Like most people in this day and age of rigorously enforced penalties for harming native birds, I was slightly horrified. I could hardly believe him. But he was right of course. Maori would frequently hunt and snare the birds at the beginning of winter when the birds were fat and healthy. It still seems a shame to me – they wouldn’t have made the biggest feast after all and they sing so beautifully. Tui are also masters at mimicking other birds and animals and in the old days, Maori are said to have kept young male birds in cages and taught them to talk. The birds would be kept in isolation – away from any noises they could copy – and new words would be repeated until the bird had learned them. The phrase 'me he korokoro tui – like a tui’s throat' is also high praise for a gifted speaker.

Eeling at Wairewa

I stopped at Wairewa’s pretty Mako Marae on my way to Banks Peninsula last week and took these photographs through the fence – I LOVE that traditional style fence by the way. The marae sits on the edge of Little River Village about 30 minutes from central Christchurch and I last visited when I was writing the kai (food) series for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine (which is now free online by the way). As always, drawing memories of traditional hunting and gathering methods from the kaumatua (elders) was a delight – so much information about the old ways is fading and it’s important that as much as possible be saved before its gone.

One person who was generous with his memories was John Panirau, who has been eeling at Wairewa since 1948. He remembers around 30 family drains but he says the barrier between Lake Wairewa and the sea was much narrower then.
“The width of the bar has trebled since then and the sea no longer comes over all of it. The eels were much more plentiful too and it was nothing to catch five or six hundred in a night – and there was still plenty left for other whanau. “I remember one tangi we had, three of us lads were sent down to the drains and we were back in an hour with a hundred eels. The tuna were so keen to get to the sea they’d slither across the shingle in broad daylight and we’d just rake them up.

“You don’t see that now,” he says. As kids, he and his friends had to help prepare the drains and learn how to make the parua. “And if we made it too deep we were told off – and we were always sent home if we stepped over the drains. All those rules have been broken over and over since then. Nowadays people actually put bridges over the drains and that’s very upsetting for the old people. Tuna and the whakaheke is still a very important part of our community but as the elders disappear, the young ones change the tikanga. Many of them have not been brought up here so they don’t have the same feelings that the old people instilled in us. If you’ve been steeped in the protocols you’ll follow that pathway but when our kids are brought up in the cities the values are different,” John says.

Francis Robinson, 81, remembers the days of the horse and gig – days when his job was to run the bags of eels from the drains. It was his job to look after the horses and at twelve, he often joined in the catching and listened to the stories the old people told. “There’s always been a lot of mystery about where the tuna go and what they do and when it comes to catching and preserving them I’ve seen a lot of different ways. But it all comes back to one thing – hard work.” John Panirau agrees: “Learning to catch tuna is one thing but learning how to prepare and dry them was something else altogether,” he says. Francis says the job of preserving a catch of 500 tuna was a huge task that could take several weeks.

“We had to wipe the tuna clean, bone them and then string them up by their heads with harakeke to dry. Then the salting and curing would start. That was hard work and I’d always run and hide to avoid the job,” he laughs.The Wairewa kaumatua all agree that their local tuna are the best in the country.“When you’ve eaten eels from all the different parts of New Zealand, you know that these are definitely the best,” says Francis. The environment is different here; maybe that’s what makes our tuna taste so much better. Our tuna are definitely sweeter. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz www.tekaraka.co.nz

Cockle Cook-Up

Matenga Taiaroa told me he had been gathering tuaki (cockles) on the Otago Peninsular near Dunedin from the time he could first walk. He’d lived close to the Otakou Marae for 73 years and he’d always considered tuaki an integral part of his diet. He still gathers them – “once a fortnight at least” – and puts them in a bowl in the microwave for a minute, (“just to release the muscle”) and then he eats them raw. It’s the way he’s always known. I visited Otakou Marae on the Otago Peninsular for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine a couple of years ago. It was a cloudy day but we had all the fun we always did on these kai feature visits to the various South Island runanga.

“When we were kids we’d take a bucket down to the harbour at low tide to gather tuaki for the whanau and we’d always crack a few open and eat them there and then,” Matenga said. He was one of six children and whoever was around had the job of digging for cockles. He taught his own two children to do the same. Tuaki, or cockles as they are commonly known to the locals, are actually New Zealand Littleneck Clams (Austrovenus stutchburyi). They are the single most abundant large invertebrate animal found in inter-tidal sand flats in sheltered harbours and estuaries throughout New Zealand. They have been an important food source for Muaupoko (Otago Peninsular) Maori for generations and their shells have commonly been found in centuries-old middens. The area was speckled with many kaik (villages) and Pukekura (Taiaroa Head) was an important fortified pa. From early times the peninsular provided a wealth of resources – from tuaki and seals to fish and birdlife.
Sitting on a wide bench seat outside Otakou Marae, overooking the ocean and village below, Matenga Taiaroa talked about his great-grandfather, who walked the same soil, and he was proud of the fact that his family still owned land on the peninsular. “We’re the caretakers here; that’s what I like – the sense of continuity through generations and the fact that we have always only ever taken what we need from the land and sea,” he told me. That day the Otakou team sat down to cockle feast by then-executive chef of Blanket Bay, Ngai Tahu chef, Jason Dell. They were presented with risotto with spinach and parmesan cheese; steamed cockles with linguini and garden vegetables; grilled cockles with pancetta, garlic and herb crumbs; and cockle chowder with kumara and assorted vegetables. It was a far cry from the simplicity of raw, or plain steamed tuaki but the men were enthusiastic about their introduction to new flavours. With paradise ducks honking in the background and steely grey clouds creeping across the cold winter skies, they worked their way through Jason’s modern take on a traditional favourite with happy gusto. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

Mussels and Memories

Kutai or Toretore = Mussel
One of the favourite traditional Maori foods.
I wrote about mussels and their traditional harvest at Tutehuarewa Marae at Koukourarata -Port Levy on Canterbury’s Banks Peninsular, about three years ago, for Ngai Tahu's TE KARAKA magazine. The marae, a cluster of buildings on a grassy slope, is perfectly placed overlooking a stony beach and a pretty jetty. Koukourarata is well known for producing some of the fattest, juiciest toretore around – mussels up to six inches long have been harvested from the bay over the years. Koukourarata was the largest Maori settlement in Canterbury in the mid-1800s with a population of around 400 people. Back then, Maori from Koukourarata bartered shark and other kai moana for eels caught by hapu from Waihora and Wairewa over the hills; and tons of dried fish were carried inland to trade.

Mussel patties courtesy ex-Executive chef of Blanket Bay, Jason Dell.
I recall Matapi Briggs, then 75, telling me how she remembered a Koukourarata childhood that revolved around the sea. “The sea was our life. It meant everything; it was where we played and where we found our food. We knew where all the best kaimoana was and we only had to walk along the beach to pick cockles, paua and mussels off the rocks. We never needed a boat.” She talked about the times they made fires on the beach, slipping fat mussels in their shells into the ashes and eating them there and then. One of their jobs as children was to gather mussels for family meals but they were taught from an early age only to ever take what they needed, unless the family were taking kaimoana as koha for another runanga. “Our mussels have always been sweeter and juicier. I think it’s because there are a lot of freshwater creeks running into the sea here,” she says. “It’s common for them to grow to four or five inches long.” In the old days - “when my parents were young” - mussels were preserved in seaweed by the tahu method. They’d split the seaweed, put the mussels in and fill the pouch with hot bird fat. They also did that with paua,” Matapi says.

Matapi’s younger sister, Tokerau Wereta-Osborn also has vivid memories of a happy Port Levy childhood. She was just 18 months old when she arrived in the bay and now, her great-grandchildren are the sixth generation of her family to enjoy everything the bay has to offer.
‘The bay has never changed in my opinion. It’s always been a wonderful place to live and the kaimoana has always been plentiful. We used to walk out to the island at low tide to collect mussels, paua, oysters, cockles and conga eel. Our favourite way of eating mussels was simple - they were just opened, scalded in their shells, drained and then eaten with a bit of vinegar and onion. Sometimes our mother would make patties, or she battered the mussels whole but I always preferred them plain with vinegar,” Tokerau says. “I always loved making a fire on the beach and cooking the mussels in the ashes, or on a piece of hot tin and eating them fresh. When we needed to store them we would make a circle of rocks just offshore and keep the live mussels there. It was like our fridge and it saved us going out hunting for them each time we wanted a meal.”

Inanga Season

Whitebaiting on The Avon River, Christchurch 2008 Ajr

It’s whitebait season again. I was reminded of that twice last week – when I saw the ‘baiters’ working the Avon River and when I visited Riccarton Market and saw a stall selling whitebait fritters. Most New Zealanders are familiar with whitebait and have probably tasted them at some point in their life. What most people don’t know is that five separate galaxiid species make up the whitebait catch – inanga, banded kokopu, koaro, short-jaw kokopu and giant kokopu. Inanga (Galaxias maculates) is the most common in most river systems. All whitebait species spend part of their life cycle in fresh water and in the ocean and it is estimated that over 99.5 percent of the larvae die between hatching and returning from the sea as whitebait. Some of those inevitably end up in the whitebaiters’ nets and that’s just the way most whitebaiters like it.
At The Box, Waimate. Ajr
I’ve had some terrific encounters with whitebaiters in the name of journalism. Last year I did a story on the fishermen who trawl for whitebait within the residential stretches of the Avon River in Christchurch; I’ve watched the men at The Box, just off the coast near Waimate, fighting the treacherous seas to fill their buckets with their favourite delicacy; and I’ve interviewed the kaumatua of Arahura on the West Coast for one of Ngai Tahu’s Te Karaka magazine kai features. It was for the latter that I spoke with Te Maori Raukawa, who told me she was 83 the last time she went whitebaiting at the Arahura River mouth just north of Hokitika. We were all sitting down on the banks of the Arahura River, the sun on our backs, the skylarks singing, the sock nets in place in the river and chef, Jason Dell moving his spatula with a calming rhythm that lulled the hungry kaumatua into a state of mouth-watering anticipation.

Riccarton Rotary Market, Christchurch. Sept. 2009 Ajr
It was a happy scene that reminded Te Maori of the hundreds of times she and her late husband, Hector, had scooped at the river mouth for hours on end, going out on one tide and staying until the next. “It was hard work but it was lovely when everyone was fishing. They’d all set up in their own places and we were all related, so it was a very social time. But the bait are not as thick as they used to be,” she lamented at the time. I remember being amazed at the time when they told me stories of having so much whitebait in their nets – far too much for family needs - that they used it for garden manure. When sales for whitebait became a reality, the Arahura excess catch was sent to Christchurch on the 5pm goods train. It was put on the market at Ferron & Sons the next morning. Eli Weepu remembers the trains too.
“No one had fridges back in the thirties, so if we got too much whitebait it was always sent across to Christchurch,” he told me. He was just five when his father used to take him down to the river mouth on a horse and sleigh.
“Our dads used to teach us how to make the scoop nets from the straight branches of the lancewood. Long before that, back in the old days, they used to weave the nets out of flax fibre.
“And if the whitebait were running everyone would be down at the river in those days. But we never set nets. We usually only fished for enough for a feed and the best way to eat it was straight out of the river and cooked loose in a hot pan with a bit of butter and eaten with salt and bread.”

The Box, Waimate. Ajr
Back on the Avon in Christchurch Bill Espie is a regular whitebaiter. He’s one of dozens of urban whitebaiters who frequent the banks of the Avon and Heathcote Rivers during the annual whitebaiting season and when the tides are right he heads for his tried-and-true spot beside the Stanmore Road Bridge. He’s a regular there and locals often stop for a chat. That’s half the attraction Bill says. It’s a pleasant distraction in a long whitebaiting day that starts at 7.30am and ends around 6pm.
“I come here every day during the season. If it’s raining I can sit under the bridge but when the weather is good I can sit up here near the footpath and heaps of people stop and talk. It’s a nice relaxing way to spend a day and if I’m lucky I can get enough whitebait for a feed,” he says. Bill has been whitebaiting since he was seven – over fifty years – and although the catch varies he considers it a good day if he gets 1.5 kilograms of bait – and he does, often. “I got around 31 kilos for the whole season last year. I can’t afford to buy it at around $100 a kilo, so it’s great to be able to go home and make a fritter or two.”
Whitebait it seems – and the act of fishing for them – is addictive. They all say the same thing: it’s not just about getting a good feed, it’s as much about the act of fishing and the social encounters, the sharing and the inherent hunter-gatherer spirit that they all share.

H is for Hangi

If you’ve read anything at all about the Maori people of New Zealand, you’ve probably heard about a hangi – the traditional Maori of cooking underground via steam. The hangi is still a popular way of cooking and certainly, on a marae, it is really the only practical way of cooking for large numbers of people who gather for hui (meetings), tangi (funerals) and celebrations. Hangi is about celebration. You don’t have a hangi for no reason. It is a celebration of tikanga (custom) and whanaungatanga (kinship). “From a cultural point of view, ‘hangi is us’,” one kaumatua (elder) told me. “I don’t think we could come up with an improvement on the hangi – it encapsulates the whole concept of bringing our whanau together.”

I recently attended a big hangi at Tuahiwi Marae just north of Christchurch – it was to be the basis of the last kai (food) feature for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine. Buy the time I got there – early in the morning, well before the celebrations were due to begin, the men had already dug the hangi pit and the hole (around 2ft deep) had been fired up and river stones and bits of old railway iron were heating in the flames. Willow wood is a popular choice for the fire because it burns cleanly, leaving little ash and greywacke stones don’t crack in the intense heat. The team had gathered watercress from nearby streams and this was being kept wet in buckets prior to being thrown onto the heated rocks to create steam. It also lines the hangi baskets to act as a barrier between the food and the stones to prevent the food burning. In the absence of watercress, wet cabbage leaves are a common substitute.

The fire usually burns for about two hours. Then the big wood, the large rocks and the iron are taken out, and as many embers as possible are removed from the pit. Too much ash and embers in the bottom makes the food too smoky. Once the food has been loaded into wire baskets lined with watercress, the rocks and irons are put back into the pit and covered with watercress. Huge clouds of steam rise and the men work fast, stacking the wire baskets on top, draping them with wet cloths and sacks and then quickly burying the pit in dirt. That is then left for about four hours – by then everything should be cooked beautifully. On the day at Tuahiwi we had a tremendous feast. I’ve already posted some images from the kitchen preparations on the day. If you’d like to see those, just click on hangi or Tuahiwi in the label line below this post. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

A Tasty Dried Snack

When I visited Tuahiwi Marae near Christchurch recently, to write about the big hangi – the final in the set of kai features for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine – I got these great shots of Grenville Pitama smoking and preparing tuna (eel) for a snack for the men who had helped lay down the hangi. Once the prepared food had been safely laid on the hot rocks and then buried in earth and left to cook for four hours, Grenville hauled out his tin smoker and set it over the hot embers that had been removed from the hangi fire pit. He tossed a little manuka ash in to flavour the fish, laid down the pawhared (dried) Wairewa tuna and left it to cook for around ten minutes. “You wait,” he said with a grin, “That will cook up beautifully in just a few minutes.” And it did – golden, chewy, flavoursome.

A couple of years ago, one of our kai features had taken us to Lake Wairewa ( east of Christchurch, close to Little River. I spoke with many of the kaumatua (elders) about their traditions of eeling and one I remember was Naomi Butler, who was just ten when she started learning the tikanga of tuna gathering. It was always an important part of her life and by the time she caught her first eel at sixteen, she was well versed in family traditions and gathering practices.Then in her early eighties she talked to me about how eeling had shaped her childhood.
“I was the third eldest of fifteen children and during the war years we’d always be out gathering tuna and kaimoana. But Mum and Dad only ever took two of us at a time when they taught us how to catch tuna.

"Back in the 1920s and 1930s families had their own drain and we’d go and sit there at night and wait for the eels to come in. Everyone had to be very quiet and we’d listen for their tails flapping in the water. We had torches to spot them but you weren’t allowed to turn them on until someone gave the signal. The best time for tuna was when the sky was dark and a norwester was blowing. The eels would be thick then – hundreds of them, writing about in the drains,” she says.
“We’d gaff the eels in their hundreds and toss them into the shingle parua (pit) beside the drains. I’ve been there when over 700 tuna were caught in a night.”
Tuna migration has always had an element of mystery and strict tikanga has surrounded tuna harvest. They have traditionally been caught between February and April during the last quarter of the moon (hinepouri) when the nights were darker and the eels had begun moving down the streams and into Lake Wairewa, ready to migrate out to sea to spawn in the Pacific. Local whanau adhered to strict rules – food, drink and smoking were all banned from the drains and stepping across drains was equally frowned upon. I’ve written about tuna (eels) here before and shown the drying process at Rapaki, which you can see by clicking on traditional foods below this post. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

One Slice or Two?

To the untrained eye, these probably look like any ordinary loaf of bread. In fact they are Rewena Paraoa, which is more commonly known as Maori bread.

I photographed these handsome big loaves - almost as big as cushions - at the hangi at Tuahiwi Marae a couple of weeks ago, that we prepared for the last of the Te Karaka magazine kai features for Ngai Tahu. Rewena bread is traditionally made by creating a 'bug' or 'starter' from boiled potato, flour and sugar and leaving it to ferment for a few days. Some of the starter is then used to make bread and the rest is set aside and 'fed' for future baking sessions. You can use yeast instead of the potato starter, but it is the potato that gives it its distinctive sweet flavour.

Preparing a Feast

Tuahiwi, North Canterbury. Aug. 2009 Ajr

The cookhouse at North Canterbury's Tuahiwi Marae was a hive of activity on Saturday as the men prepared the kaimoana (seafood) for the big hangi I was writing about it for Ngai Tahu's TE KARAKA magazine. They made light work of the huge piles of koura (crafish) and green-lipped mussels - cooking, splitting, shelling - making them ready for the hangi table. A feast for sure! www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

The Last of the Kai Features

I went out to Tuahiwi Marae 15 minutes north of Christchurch on Friday with the editorial team from Ngai Tahu’s magazine, Te Karaka. It was to be a day of preparations for the last of the Ngai Tahu kai features – a big hangi on Saturday. Over the last four-and-a-half years, Ngai Tahu chef, Jason Dell (who recently shifted to Singapore), Ngai Tahu communications manager and photographer, Phil Tumataroa any myself have travelled to all eighteen Ngai Tahu runanga around the South Island, interviewing and photographing the kaumatua (elders) about the traditional kai (food) their region is known for.

Jason meanwhile, took that traditional food – maybe it was tuna (eel), koura (crayfish), whitebait, kanakana, toheroa or mussels – and gave it a modern twist before presenting a feast to the kaumatua and their invited guests at their marae. It’s been a fantastic series – informative and loads of fun and we’ve met some very special people along the way. I’m sad that it’s all over. These are a few photos from Friday – Jason (in white) in the Tuahiwi kitchen preparing the food, ably assisted by former chef and now Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu’s web officer, Simon Leslie [in striped shirt]. I’ll be bringing you some photos of the actual hangi – its preparation and laying down and the meal itself, over the coming days, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of the spectacular meals Jason has prepared on our previous outings, just click on Traditional Foods and/or TE KARAKA in the index line below this posting. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

It's A Sign!

East Cape, North Island. May 2009 Ajr

I loved the shape of this pohutukawa tree as I made my way to the top of East Cape recently - travelling through Te Whanau-a-Apanui territory. I've spent the last year writing a series of indepth features on Customary Fisheries Regulations for Ngai Tahu's magazine Te Karaka here in the South Island, so I related well to this sign. www.apanui.co.nz www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

A Traditional Delicacy

Believe it or not, these rather ugly little things are a Maori delicacy! Lamprey (Geotria australis) has multiple ‘identities.’ It is also known as the lamprey eel and to most southern Maori it is kanakana – although it is also known as nainai in the Temuka/Waihao Marae area; and in the North Island it is called piharau. Long considered a delicacy by Maori it is also widely eaten in Portugal, Spain, France, Scandanavia, the Baltic countries and in South Korea; and King Henry I of England is said to have died from “a surfeit of lampreys.” I was introduced to these slimy little devils at the Hokonui Marae in February, when we travelled there to write and photograph another kai feature for Ngai Tahu’s magazine Te Karaka.

Kanakana. Hokonui Marae, Gore. Feb 2009. Ajr

I had never seen them before – certainly never tasted them; and I’m almost ashamed to say, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I was completely put off by their awful little sucker-mouths filled with tiny razor-like teeth. But the Hokonui kaumatua were delighted. They don’t get kanakana quite as much as they used to and despite the fact that chef, Jason Dell hadn’t cooked them before, they seemed more than satisfied with their hearty lunch. They may not have been expecting their kanakana to come with marsala potato, warm parsnip salad and chilli and lime baked gurnard - (they’re used to simply pan-frying them fresh from the river) - but the verdict was unanimous – for his first time cooking kanakana Jason Dell had done pretty well. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

More From the Food Files

2008 Ajr

Contemporary Kai

A Toheroa Taste Treat

Courtesy of Ngai Tahu chef, Jason Dell

Another dish prepared for Ngai Tahu's Te Karaka Magazine