Remembering what makes the food of mourning taste a little sweeter.
My husband Bill died unexpectedly one afternoon. He’d been unwell for a while but there was no suggestion that he would be gone so suddenly.
It was a shattering day. Our two sons and I spent time with him at the hospital after his death and then we came back to our house in Hamilton. A tight core of family and friends had got there before us and when we walked in at about 6pm the dining table was laden with food.
This was eight years ago, the anniversary of Bill’s death is December 8, so the actual components of the laden table are a bit blurred now. But I remember a platter of rotisserie chickens, salads, cheeses, crusty bread, maybe sausages on the barbecue, and there were probably ice creams for later.
We are largely a Pākehā family but one of our nephews blessed the kai in te reo and his wife, who is Māori, offered a korowai from her whānau for Bill. So when we brought him home the following evening the beautiful cloak was placed upon his casket.
When I think about Bill’s death, in the lead up to his anniversary, I remember not so much the grief and the loss – time has smoothed some of the raw edges – but the generosity of family and friends who fed and sustained us during that time.
Like many in Aotearoa-New Zealand, we connect to other cultures beside our own through marriages and I have attended tangihana for members of my whānau on marae at Kāwhia, and have been privileged to have been the celebrant at some of these tangihana. And, of course, I have enjoyed the bountiful hākari (feasts) afterwards, always seated meals, and I’ve marvelled at the many hands involved in their production.
So this is written to remember and celebrate the innate kindness that underpins our diverse communities in Aotearoa in times of loss and sadness. And to reflect on what I know most about, which is Pākekā funeral catering because given my age of 75 I’ve attended a lot of funerals and eaten quite a few pastries and asparagus rolls. Asparagus rolls – white bread and tinned asparagus if they are done according to old-school specifications – are nowadays mocked by some. Not by me, and more on these later.
Good food is absolutely central to a Pākehā farewell and, as with Bill’s death, it flowed through our front door from the get-go. One of my friend’s reminisced about this a while back. She said, “When we heard about a death or illness in our town, my mother would put on her apron, turn on the oven, and start cooking.”
In the lead-up to Bill’s funeral, our family and friends (young and old) arrived with love and comfort in the form of gorgeous home baking, bacon and egg pies, quiche, lasagne, vegetable bakes, and boxes of fruit, salad greens, bread, cheese and other treats. In the tradition of my friend’s mother, they’d turned on their ovens and started cooking, or they’d gone shopping, and they fed us for a week. It was humbling to be the recipient.
Pākehā don’t have a base camp like marae, or the tradition of dedicated ringawera in the kitchen, but we improvise. Our house became the Funeral HQ and my brother-in-law, one of my sons and a nephew stationed themselves at the kitchen bench and ran the show. Bill had been an excellent cook and he had done this essential funeral work himself.
The kitchen hands made cups of tea for visitors, offered plates of baking, fired up the barbecue for dinners for multiple adults and children, did fridge and freezer management, and when we ran out of space in the freezer they “borrowed” more from the neighbours. After the crowd dispersed I lived on this generosity for a while. Can’t be bothered cooking tonight? There’s a fish pie waiting in the freezer.
For the service itself, I went for classic Kiwi finger-food, more Edmonds Cookery Book and Country Women’s Institute than perhaps Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the culinary Bible of many early Pākehā families. I have a handsome 1906 edition, the size of a small door-step, which belonged to my grandmother Winifred. The remarkable Mrs Beeton is unusually silent on the subject of funeral food although her chapter on sandwiches has some gems among the suggested fillings, including anchovy and haddock, sardine butter, Astrakhan caviar, and bloater and watercress butter.
There were none of these at Bill’s funeral: we had afternoon tea with small tarts and golden sausage rolls with crowd-pleasing aromas, ham, egg and lettuce club sandwiches, wedges of bacon and egg pie, sweet slices such as Louise cake and tan square and, yes, asparagus rolls with their soft green centres and subtly sweet and savoury flavour. The world-famous-in-Aotearoa uncomplicated stuff, nobody went home hungry, and Bill loved a good sausage roll.
Nowadays, there is no “one-size-fits-all” with how Pākeha do funerals, and funeral food. Some families may have a public event with a catered afternoon tea, as we did; others opt for a smaller invitation-only farewell perhaps followed by a lunch or dinner, or maybe an immediate cremation and then a memorial service and drinks and snacks. I like the increasing flexibility around this, people honouring their dead and feeding the bereaved in ways that feel entirely appropriate for them.
We did a cremation memorial service arrangement last year for an old uncle. At his prior request, his service was followed by a slap-up party with prosecco, gin and excellent catered food on what would have been his 100th birthday. He’d missed this milestone by three months and would have been highly pissed off about it. But pleased we’d honoured his wish for a farewell party.
In another ceremony, there was a headstone unveiling earlier this year at Kāwhia Cemetery for a dear cousin. Piwakawaka were dancing among the trees and the Kāwhia Harbour was the perfect backdrop to the event. Afterwards, we went back to the homestead and there was a fine spread of hāngī food and kaimoana as well as soft and pillowy fry bread, salads, a truly magnificent trifle, and brownie.
About 40 whānau members, from home and away, sat at trestle tables in the winter sunshine and we talked and laughed, celebrated the living and the departed, and filled our plates with the generous kai.
A final word on asparagus rolls: these were my special request to the caterer for Bill’s farewell. I remember my mother making them for afternoon teas, funerals and various events. And the care she took in cutting the crusts off fresh, sliced white bread, patiently rolling each slice out extra-thin with her wooden rolling pin, adding a smidgeon of softened butter, slotting in a spear of tinned asparagus, folding it up in the prescribed manner, adding it to the stack on a rectangular plate.
There was something curiously comforting about having these on the table for our big day.
