From butter-laden ’70s classics to today’s fusion feasts, NZ On Screen‘s new Food Show Collection captures not just tasty morsels but our evolving culture through the decades. Amelia Berry goes on a gastronomic journey through the collection – available to watch online now.
Food, cooking, eating—it’s such a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives that even pointing that out feels a bit redundant. But because of that total centrality, what we eat and how we cook it becomes a fascinating index of trends in fashion, culture, and society—even economics and ecology.
That 1950s Women’s Weekly advice on preparing tripe, your grandma’s handwritten apple cake recipe; they’re not just a roadmap to a rather unusual dinner party, they’re a unique window into particular times, particular places, and particular people.
NZ On Screen’s brilliant new Food Show Collection offers a wide-ranging survey of television that celebrates Aotearoa’s culinary cultures. From cheese rolls to tuna, from the backyard hāngī to carving up coconuts in the Cook Islands, the collection isn’t just a nostalgic look back at cosy TV cooking classics—it’s an essential and unparalleled insight into New Zealand’s social history. And good fun to boot!
Of course, there’s a strong showing from our biggest names in small-screen cookery.
“My whole philosophy on food, in fact on life, is: more flair and less fuss!” says Jo Seagar in an episode of her classic Real Food for Real People. Between that and Jo Seagar’s Easy Peasy Xmas, she’ll have you giving up measuring spoons for good and letting your new devil-may-care attitude loose on a spread of crowd pleasing (but simple!) hors d’oeuvres.
Where Jo Seagar is the jolly auntie with a twinkle in her eye, the iconic Alison Holst presents her classic recipes with a hypnotic warmth—the Bob Ross of kiwi cookery. In the collection, we’ve got Alison Holst Cooks – Bread and Cheese and that saviour of many a first time flattie Alison Holst’s Microwave Menus. But the Holst highlight is definitely her appearance on the overwhelmingly 70s variety show Nice One with Stu Dennison. They definitely don’t make ‘em like that any more.
Then, for the oldest show in the collection, we have Aotearoa’s original TV chef supreme, Graham Kerr in The Graham Kerr Show. In this 1966 episode, Kerr answers questions from his very demure and strongly accented audience. Aside from a couple of uncomfortably dated anecdotes, Kerr’s show is a gleeful blend of vintage kitchen tips, peculiar recipe ideas (try ‘Long White Cloud’ this Christmas!), and stern admonishments over spaghetti and cakes.
And it wouldn’t be an NZ food show collection without the chaotic brilliance of Peter Hudson and David Halls. The 1982 episode of Hudson & Halls in the collection gives modern audiences an idea of just why this silly, anarchic show (with maybe more bickering and antics than actual cooking) was so beloved. “Just shut up a minute!”
But it’s not just culinary superstars, The Food Show Collection sees a bevy of singers, actors, and musicians entering the kitchen. A Taste of Christmas is unbelievably star-studded, with the wonderful Peta Matthias joined by King Kapisi, Hinewehi Mohi, Hinewehi Mohi’s mum, and more! Over on Cam’s Kai, Chef Cameron Petley is joined by The Dead Lands actor Lawrence Makoare for an incredibly charming tour of the Avondale markets and some KFC (“kai for cuzzies”).
“Ko te mea ki a mātou o kōnei, ina ka āta titiro ki tērā te ‘wild food’, hei aha tērā. Ko te kai Māori pea,” says Tim Worrall on an episode of Peter Peeti’s Kai Time on the Road, “Yep, ‘bush tucker’. Well for us, from here, if you consider the notion of ‘wild food’ there’s no point. It’s perhaps just Māori food.” Kai Time is just one of several shows covering the diverse and delicious world of Māori cuisine. Joe’s World on a Plate sees international chef extraordinaire Joe McLeod showing off brilliant fusion recipes, including a mouth-watering pūhā and kawakawa salmon. And in a fantastic one-off special, My Kinda Kai, comedian Pio Terei travels from Hokianga to The Bluff to put together the ultimate hāngī.
The Food Show Collection really gets into the great breadth of local cooking cultures. You can catch Iranian ex-pat Ojan Khoey cooking up Persian dishes on Ethnic Cooking (very dated title, but that’s 1994). Down in Palmerston North, ‘meme queen’ Abigail Leonita Masengi investigates NZ’s Chinese food traditions on Sik Fan Lah!. Then, beyond the bustle of the studio kitchen, Hunger for the Wild and Kiwi Kitchen track down the rural, regional, and retro of NZ food.
Further afield, Peter Gordon’s Pacific Harvest takes him from Stewart Island to Rarotonga on a personal journey through the flavours of the pacific rim. On Real Pasifik, chef Robert Oliver tours the Pacific Islands on a mission to highlight the unique cuisine that he loved growing up in Fiji. And on Karena and Kasey’s Kitchen Diplomacy, the MasterChef NZ winners trek to South Korea to get to grips with the local delicacies.
Speaking of MasterChef, it wouldn’t be a cooking show collection without a few fiery competitions! Alongside the debut episode of MasterChef NZ, we’ve got a whole season (!) of Māori TV cult classic Marae Kai Masters, and perhaps the most peculiar show of the whole collection, Chef on a Mission. More a challenge than a competition, Chef on a Mission sees Simon Gault cooking meals in New Zealand’s most high stakes, high pressure environments—for the episode in this collection, it’s the Maui Gas Field oil rig. “If you’ve seen the movie Waterworld, that’s kinda what it feels like right now… it’s ALL METAL!”
“The vibrant food scene in Aotearoa is evolving even as I type,” writes Peter Gordon in his illuminating backgrounder to the collection. “What I love about the collection — and many others on NZ On Screen — is that the far and recent past can be easily accessed. There’s so much to explore.”
With all the above shows and more, you’re sure to find something to inspire you—to cook, to travel, to reflect on the past and the present. As Simon Holst (son of Alison) says in his piece accompanying the collection; “There’s something about watching cooking shows that you don’t get from other media.” And he’s right, there’s nothing quite like NZ On Screen’s Food Show Collection.
