David Veart is an archaeologist with the Department of Conservation in Auckland, and author of First Catch Your Weka. Evenings often see him trying recipes out and presenting the results on his collection of Crown Lynn china. Dave is currently working on a variety of new projects, and studying family manuscript cookery books brought from Scotland to New Zealand in the late 1880s in his spare time.
Read an article about David Veart and his book First Catch Your Weka in the Otago Daily Times
BOOKS
First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking
‘'First catch your Weka,’ the explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage and onion and roast it on a stick. In that simple way began a great tradition of New Zealand recipes that takes us from Heaphy, to the Edmonds Cookery Book, to Alison Holst and Hudson and Halls, and on to the meal on your plate today.
In First Catch Your Weka, Dave Veart tells the story of what New Zealanders cooked through the recipes we used. Analysing the crusty deposits and grubby thumb prints on a century and a half of cook books, he chronicles the extraordinary foods that we have loved: boiled calf’s head, Bill Rowling cake, Irish famine soup, tinned kidneys with mushrooms . . . First Catch Your Weka illuminates the elements that make New Zealand cooking distinctive (our love affair with sweet baked goods, our enthusiasm for home-made jams and chutneys, the perpetual lump of protein on the plate) and how our cuisine and culture have changed (the development of a nationalist cuisine of kumara, whitebait, and mussels in the 1920s, the arrival of Asian influences in the 1950s, the television cooks of the 1970s).
Throughout this history, Veart finds a people who, as Heaphy suggested, frequently first liked to Catch Their Weka - building a meal out of oysters taken from the rocks, vegetables from the garden, and a lamb from the neighbouring farm. By telling the history of what we ate, First Catch Your Weka tells us a great deal about who we have been.