NATIVE SWEETS

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 96, 24 April 1928, Page 6

NATIVE SWEETS

In the windows of the sweet shops all the nuts one can think of are blended with sugar into confections that cause small noses to press flat against the plate glv ss and small, and even big mouths, too, to water. Walnuts. Brazil nuts, hazel nuts, bewitched with sugar, or made piquant with salt —they are all there to tempt us.

Where are the nuts of Maoriland? Up in the branches of the big tawa are the long-shaped purple berries, mostly kernel, and nearby is a hinau covered with oval berries, ready for picking. The ground will soon be strewn with them. Every autumn old Maori women come from the more settled districts for the gathering of these nuts. Hinau berries are the most prized. They are pounded with a rounded wooden stick—ground up to a floury mass. The Maori woman shakes this through a piece of netting fine enough to capture husks, coarse enough to allow the crushed, kernel to pass. She goes over the whole, picking out pieces of nutshell. Into this some honey is mixed, wild bush honey, rather dark in colour. This porridgey, chocolatecoloured mass simmers gently on the fire—then is set aside to cool. It does not set, but it has a spicy, gummy flavour, and Maoris young and old relish it tremendously. I looked at the mass of dark-coloured honey. Barney had smoked the bees of out the hollow trunk of an old tawa a short time ago. Roars of laughter greeted the news that I had read in the "Star" of people becoming ill from eating wild honey. "Tutu," said Barney, "taken very ripe not good for the honey. Cook it, then all right. If wild honey makes you die, then all Maoris would be dead a long time ago." Nearby was a large pile of tutu berries, looking like rather indifferent prunes. With a handful of rough fibre Rawiri rubbed off the purple flesh. These kernels went into the steam hole and were covered over. They took several hours to cook. Ere they had time to cool brown fingers picked them gingerly from the pile. Round about sat old and young munching the soft, pulpy nuts. I tasted one—floury, curious—but many find olives peculiar, so there it is.

Tutu, so poisonous to stock, is not dreaded by the Maoris. When the pretty bead-like strings of little berries hang ripe under the bough that loves to overhang a bank or stream Maori women gather them. They press the juice and flesh from the tiny kernel bV straining or rubbing with their supple fingers. They simmer the juicy mixture over a fire. This is a jam, and they eat sparingly of it. Superstition dies hard, and I have seen too many cattle mad with pain ere they died for me to test tutu jam willingly. It is the young succulent slioot which causes the mischief with cattle. One old Maori told of a lazy wahine who left seeds in the jam and thus all the children became verv sick.

Ihe soft black bud of the mamuku, or black pnnga, which grows so luxuriantly in Auckland gardens, is cake, sponge cake. The black liairv covering is easily removed; then the bud is cut into large chunks and baked in the steam hole until the outside skin crackles. Inside is the soft yellow flesh, somewhat porous, rich and rather sickly. There is certainly a resemblance in its appearance to cake. M.J.B.