Cuisine – Kumara for Matariki

He kai kei aku ringa – there is food at the end of my hands (Māori proverb)

New Zealand/Aotearoa will soon celebrate Matariki with a public holiday, to celebrate the rising of the Matariki star cluster (the Pleiades or Seven Sisters) which signals the beginning of Māori New Year. This marks the opportunity for a period of renewal and celebration. For almost a month we can share the traditional stories and culture, marked in the wider community with concerts and cultural performances, art exhibitions, astronomy workshops, feasts and hāngī.

Very recently, the influence of Māori traditions and unique indigenous kai as nationally recognised taonga (treasures) has provided a point of difference that innovative cooks and chefs now proudly incorporate in their menus. Restaurants, tourism operators, festival and event managers, food truck operators and pop-ups are celebrating traditional food and culture, adding modern flavours and cooking methods to redefine customary fare.

It is a good time to think about exactly what indigenous food is and, importantly, to share feasts with family and friends. The most traditional fare starts with hāngī, but unless you’re brave and bold, that is not exactly something that most of us will choose to dig up our back lawns to do. (I actually did that about 30 years ago when NZ Guild of Food Writers was hosting the late Fred Ferretti, a jovial food journalist for Gourmet Magazine in New York, and we wanted to show him something really unique to our country. It was a spectacularly successful day, but the trays of juicy hot hāngī food dripped and ruined my carpet when we carried them indoors to feast on, and our back lawn took about 18 months to regrow!)

Foods you might like to seek out to try this month are rewana bread, fry bread, a boil up, pork and puha, mutton bird (Tītī,) and any amount of seafood including kina, paua, mussels, and oysters. Sadly, due to the mismanagement of our Mahurangi Harbour by Watercare, we will this month be denied a feast of that one and only true taonga of our area. Oysters taste of the place they’re raised in and there’s not another food treasure that is truly unique to the Matakana/Warkworth region.

It’s highly likely that most of us will sit down to savour a good roast dinner at Matariki. You can add a few traditional flavours to roast pork or roast chicken by seeking or foraging for indigenous herbs and spices such as kawakawa, horopito or pikopiko (fern shoots) or using wild watercress from a safe source.

The one thing that will be essential on the Matariki table is kumara. It is widely accepted that kumara was introduced to New Zealand in the 14th century from Polynesia, and it has been cultivated in the northern climate ever since, especially in the vast kumara beds around the northern Wairoa River.

This creamy kumara gratin recipe was inspired by Monique Fiso, the young Wellington chef who has led the way in the revival of Māori food practices with her spectacular menus at her Hiakai restaurant, and in her book of the same name. When I asked her for a recipe suggestion she told me to use cream “because everything tastes better with cream and butter.”

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Kumara gratin with horopito pepper and cheese

2 tbsp butter
200ml milk
300ml cream
1 bay leaf
salt & black pepper
1.5kg red-skinned kumara
2 pinches horopito pepper (or use chopped fresh thyme leaves)
50g Parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Butter an ovenproof dish, around 30cm x 20cm x 6cm.

Bring the milk, cream and bay leaf to the boil in a saucepan. Simmer for a few minutes, then remove from heat and season with salt and pepper.

Finely slice the kumara and layer this in the gratin dish in neat layers. Cover with the hot cream and horopito and shake to evenly distribute the liquid. Sprinkle with Parmesan, cover with tinfoil and bake for 50 minutes or until the kumara are tender when a skewer is pushed into them.
Serves 6-8