Gourmet magazine takes poetic look at N.Z.

Press, 25 November 1982, Page 11

Gourmet magazine takes poetic look at N.Z.

NZPA staff correspondent Washington

New Zealand is as reassuring as afternoon tea, Americans are told in a long feature article in “Cuisine,” a glossy gourmet magazine, which bares the secrets of pavlovas, roast lamb, and kiwifruit in its November issue.

“The towns are heartland U.S.A. the cities manageable, with high-rise cores blending into pretty suburbs of lacework wooden houses framed in moon-size zinnias,” says the writer, Arline Inge. “Waiters don’t pout over tips, police don’t carry guns, people simply don’t drive after drinking, and, occassionally, honour boxes stand in for cash registers.

“Morever, once you have discovered that *yace’ means yes and ‘might’ is mate in this soft southern hemisphere English, there is not even a language barrier.” Inge writes about sheep weaving “a design in perpetual motion across emerald meadows, flowing in putty-coloured rivers over velvet hillsides, scattering to nibble or convening to rest in crevices of rocky knobs or wildflowered hillocks.”

“In fact” she says, “sheep, grazing along the runway fences are the first New Zealanders you see as you touch down at Auckland Airport.”

Inge has nothing but praise for New Zealand food, except for mutton birds. She gives recipes for pavlova

(“the pride of New Zealand”) eel, oysters, blue vein soup, salmon, trout, lamb, venison, and kiwifruit sorbet.

The mutton bird, she suggests, could go back to the drawing board: “after an unsuccessful attempt by the chef to boil away its fish-oil flavour, the bird is broiled and presented on your plate like half a chicken — which you will wish it were.”

“Women here smile secretly when you ask how they maintain their figures,” she says.

“High fashion gaunt has not taken hold in this land where Maori men traditonally have not considered slimness a virtue in women.” Pronunciation of “Maoris,” she tells her readers, is “MAIR-eez.”