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Alison Holst’s Dollars and Sense. (Image: Tina Tiller)
Alison Holst’s Dollars and Sense. (Image: Tina Tiller)

KaiApril 12, 2023

How do Alison Holst’s ‘budget’ recipes from 1995 stack up in 2023?

Alison Holst’s Dollars and Sense. (Image: Tina Tiller)
Alison Holst’s Dollars and Sense. (Image: Tina Tiller)

Alison Holst’s 1995 cookbook Dollars and Sense compiled a collection of meals for New Zealanders on a budget. Charlotte Muru-Lanning takes a look at how affordable those recipes are when you apply today’s food prices.

Within the ongoing cost of living crisis, the ballooning price of food has dominated headlines the world over. Across the board, grocery food in February in New Zealand was 12% more expensive than the year before. The price of meat and fish jumped 9.8% in the same period, and fruit and vegetables made an astonishing 23% leap. And this was before the flooding in February that devastated some of the most fertile agricultural areas in the country.

Against this bleak and bank-breaking backdrop I found a beacon of hope at the local library in the form of Dollars and Sense: Eating Well for Less, the 1995 edition of a cookbook by one of the godmothers of New Zealand cooking, Alison Holst. 

“It can be discouraging and demoralising to walk around a supermarket, looking at food prices, knowing that you do not have enough money to buy the things you would like,” Holst writes in the introduction. “I hope that this book will help and encourage you, if you want to spend only a small amount of money on food.” 

The book, published in 1985, 1995 and then 1999, is filled to the brim with recipes that combine the warmth with practicality that Holst is so known for. Among the collection of recipes geared toward budget-minded families are plentiful casseroles, soups and slow cooks. And of course plenty of versions of Holst’s famous pancakes.

What I really wanted to know was, almost three decades later, would these economical recipes still pass as affordable?

For this, I selected 15 recipes at random from the dinner recipes in Dollars and Sense. Then, I chose the seven meals from the bunch that served at least four and that had the most similar ingredients, so as to condense my shopping list as much as possible. I made an online grocery list from all the ingredients at my closest supermarket. I chose the cheapest version of each item – except for eggs (free range by the dozen), Worcestershire sauce (Lea and Perrins over the cheaper brands) and tasty cheese (a block rather than the slightly cheaper grated version). I roughly calculated the percentage of the ingredient used in each recipe to determine the cost to cook each dish.

Here’s a breakdown of seven nights of dinners for four.

Monday: Mediterranean bean soup

This soup called for one and a half cups of dried haricot or baby lima beans, two to three garlic cloves, bay leaves, two large onions, two carrots, two to three stalks of celery, a 400g can of whole tomatoes, a quarter cup of chopped parsley, and salt and pepper. 

The most expensive elements of this were the celery stalks, which I’d estimate at about $2 worth, from a whole celery that cost an eye-watering $6.99. I swapped the listed dried beans (not available at the supermarket) for a can of cannellini beans that cost $1.60 – but it would likely be more economical to use the dried version. Still, this dish worked out to be the cheapest of all the dinners of the week. 

On its own, this would likely be enough to serve a whānau of four as it’s described as “about eight servings”, however, as it’s a relatively bare-bones soup, Holst does suggest that one serve this soup with “crusty, solid bread”. As such, a slice or two of buttered toast for each person wouldn’t go amiss here. A bag of Vogel’s (my preference) was $5 or you could grab a bag of the cheapest white loaf for $3.

Estimated ingredient cost: $9.54 

Mediterranean bean soup (Image: Dollars and Sense)

Tuesday: Tuna and tomato casserole

The ingredient list for this involves 100g of pasta, an onion, two stalks of celery, a can of Mexican tomatoes, a 185g can of tuna, one tablespoon of lemon juice, parsley, a few tablespoons of cream cheese, a cup of tasty cheese and paprika.

This dish is practically begging for a side of roast vegetables, some just-boiled peas or a big bowl of salad with a sharp dressing – meaning an additional cost of around $3.30-$5.50. 

Estimated ingredient cost: $16.28

Wednesday: Kūmara corn cakes with ‘brocauli’ salad

For the kūmara corn cakes, you need 500g of kūmara, oil, one onion, two garlic cloves, one cup of cooked corn, ground cumin, a few tablespoons of chopped coriander, two eggs and some self-raising flour. The salad is made up of a mix of 250g of broccoli, 250g of cauliflower, olive oil, white wine vinegar, a garlic clove and oregano.

As we’ve found out the hard way this year, kūmara are dramatically affected by the weather. Wild weather very much equates to wild prices – these were $10.99 per kilogram from my local supermarket, and meant that $5.50’s worth of kūmara were needed for this recipe. The single head of cauliflower for the salad was, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, $7.99.

Estimated ingredient cost: $11.93 for the kūmara corn cakes, and $8.80 for the “brocauli salad”

Thursday: Cabbage topped hot pot

To make this you’ll need oil, two onions, 400g of minced beef or mutton, curry powder, long grain rice, Worcestershire sauce, two carrots, two celery stalks, a packet of soup mix and 300g of shredded cabbage.

Despite its “peasant-cuisine” image, the half cabbage I added to my online shopping cart cost a whopping $5.99. And, let me be clear, these are not those gargantuan cabbages you might sometimes find at produce markets and fruit and vegetable stores, these are absolutely minuscule balls of leaf. 

Estimated ingredient cost: $20.55

Friday: Old-fashioned fish pie

On the ingredient list were: 750g of potatoes, two leeks, butter, a can of smoked fish fillets, two eggs, milk, curry powder, flour and a couple of spoons of parmesan. 

It’s rare that you find cheap leeks at the supermarket in Aotearoa, and yet I was still shocked by the staggeringly high price for the two leeks needed for this dish: $9.58 (43% of the total ingredient spend).

All up, the ingredients needed for this dish would cost around $22.15. However, a dish like this is in desperate need of a crisp green salad – at the very least – to cut through the creaminess. At my local supermarket, the best-value options to fill a salad bowl for a family of four, whether that be a bag of medley salad mix or a globe of iceberg lettuce, go for $5.50 each.

Estimated ingredient cost: $22.15

(Photo: Getty Images)

Saturday: Self-crusting corn quiche

You’ll need to gather together one onion, a tablespoon of butter, two potatoes, half a cup of milk, three eggs, a quarter cup of flour, a can of creamed corn, a cup of tasty cheese and one tomato to make this.

Despite being described as a dish for four, a glance over the ingredient measurements does make me suspect that this is a dinner on the lighter side. With that in mind, it’s likely this course would do well with a slaw or steamed vegetables. 

Estimated ingredient cost: $10.48

Sunday: Lamb shanks with macaroni

The last things you’ll need to add to your shopping basket for these seven weekly dinners are eight lamb or hogget shanks (sadly no hogget shanks at my supermarket so I opted for a pack of three lamb shanks), three onions, four garlic cloves, a 190g jar of tomato paste, oregano, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, rosemary and a cup of macaroni.

Estimated ingredient cost: $26.18

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So how affordable is this week of dinners?

At my local supermarket the total grocery price for all the necessary items on the list for a week of dinners for four came to $218.46. Presuming you already have all the spices, dried herbs, milk, flour, Worcestershire sauce and butter, the grocery basket could cost as low as $161.45. 

To be clear, that’s a grocery basket filled with solely the ingredients needed for dinner and without any of the additional food needed for breakfast, lunchboxes or snacks, or cleaning products or toiletries, or kai a whānau might need for unexpected events like a school shared lunch or visitors.

Alison Holst’s Dollars and Sense cookbook. (Photo: Charlotte Muru-Lanning)

It’s difficult to compare the affordability between 1995, when the book was published, with today, as there’s little specific data available. But, in November 1998, the average entire weekly food bill in Aotearoa reportedly came to $113.97. Today, according to the Reserve Bank’s inflation calculator, that would equate to $209.62. The shopping list just to buy the ingredients for these seven dinners is already $8.84 more than that. 

In 2019, a University of Otago survey estimated weekly food costs for a family of four to meet basic nutritional needs at between $206 and $217 per week. In 2023, the same survey estimated that for a family of four to meet basic nutritional needs it would cost $273 per week. 

In a report published in 2021, food security collective Kore Hiakai Zero Hunger Collective used these weekly food costs to consider the affordability of food within different income scenarios. Really, whether or not these meals from 1995 are affordable or not isn’t a yes or no answer – rather, the affordability of these meals depends on your income.  

When it comes to a two adult, two child family living off Jobseeker income with a total net income of $905.30 after $501.25 housing costs and $307.84 fixed living costs, $96.21 would be left over for food. Enough for less than half the groceries needed to make these dinners. On the other hand, the same family formation living on the median wage would have around $690.97 left over after housing costs and fixed living costs. While around 64% of the Jobseeker family’s income is needed to pay for basic grocery expenses, 26% of the median wage family’s income is needed for the same.

While we might all share in our shock over the price of eggs or kūmara or cabbage needed for a so-called “budget” recipe, these numbers perhaps best express how the burden of the cost of living crisis is felt far more profoundly by those on lower incomes than those who earn more.

(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

KaiApril 11, 2023

The secret lives of recipes

(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

For the most part, recipe books haven’t formed a significant part of our archives in Aotearoa. But they should, writes Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum curator Nina Finigan.

The plain brown cloth covering the tiny booklet is frayed around the edges. On the cover a faded handwritten note reads: “This book of receipts …. belonged to our grandmother Ellen Macnamara / Dated 1813…”. Receipts in this context means recipes.

This unassuming handwritten booklet lies within Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum’s manuscript collection – one of the thousands of documents, letters, diaries, legers and notebooks held within the walls of that grand building that overlooks the city from its perch on Pukekawa. As a curator I help take care of this collection and work to bring new voices into it. People think of museums as quiet spaces. They aren’t, they are loud. A museum storeroom echoes with the voices and histories of thousands – not just those who have been collected but also those who have done the collecting. And so, much of my role is about listening.

Ellen’s recipe book says many things. But its presence also reveals cracks – the spaces in between the things that are collected and remembered by institutions like mine. Albert Wendt once wrote: “…history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we have forgotten.” I try to listen for what calls out from those forgotten places too.  

Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu.

Ellen Macnamara’s booklet is split into two halves. The first contains recipes – things like jellies, puddings, pies and meads. The second is filled with folk remedies for everything from a cure for the common cold to a cure for breast cancer – the latter involving a poultice made from turnip leaves. The language and ingredients are not always familiar. Things like calves’ hooves are pervasive in the ingredient lists, and my attempts at transcribing it are peppered with question marks and ellipses.

Yet I find myself returning to it again and again.   

Over the years I’ve wondered why this tiny thing so persistently draws me in. Why it is that any opportunity that arises to show visitors, I bring it out of its bespoke grey card enclosure and carefully untie the cotton ribbon that helps shield its 210-year-old pages from the outside world. All wrapped up like the world’s most utilitarian birthday present.  

It may be small, but it is precious.   

Scanned photographs of Ellen Macnamara's recipe book. One image is of the cover, the other is a page featuring a hand written ginger bread recipe.
Ellen Macnamara’s recipe book in the Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum’s manuscript collection. (Images: Supplied)

This article is really an appeal to you, dear reader. We are looking for people to talk to about their family recipes. We want to explore questions of migration and settlement, of community and belonging, of cultural disruption and preservation, of who we are and how food is at the centre of it all.   

Ellen’s book is an anomaly in Auckland Museum’s manuscript collection. A search of “recipe book” “recipes” “receipt book” only comes up with a handful of examples. Others may be lurking in the collection, waiting to be discovered. But when I reflect on all the questions that unfurl from this book, I lament this absence. I think of all the stories we could tell, of all that are missing, all that we could share with each other. 

What would it look like to build a repository of recipes at Tamaki Paenga Hira? An archive of recipes and food stories that are inherent to this place and those that have travelled here. Recipes transmitted through generations via the written word, through oral traditions or ones that have been reclaimed. 

It’s no secret that the lives of women have not formed a significant part of the historical record and that our histories can be hard to find within our archives and museums. Objects like this recipe book are so precious because, among many things, they document the lived, everyday experiences of women. They whisper to us of their interior worlds and about what knowledge they held. They tell stories about what it means to be human that otherwise might go unheard.  

They also offer a remarkable immediacy to the past – so close you can touch it, taste it. This book is over 200 years old and yet, despite the handwriting and the occasional unfamiliar ingredient, I recognise what I see. For the most part I can read Ellen’s words and I can follow her instructions. Calves’ hooves aside, I can find most of her ingredients in the local fruit shop, at the butcher, in the aisles of the supermarket. And in my 21st century kitchen I can recreate her 200-year-old recipes. Reaching through time Ellen speaks directly to us. Her voice is not muted or secondary – she holds command of her universe. This knowledge has traversed continents and sustained generations.  

Ellen compiled her recipe book in a coastal township in Dublin county which was known at different times as Kingstown and Dún Laoghaire. In 1878 her daughter, also called Ellen, immigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand with her family – part of the wave of migration that brought many Irish here in the mid to late 19th century – and they brought this book with them. Among all the other family treasures, this tiny thing was deemed important enough to join them as they embarked on a new life on the other side of the world. Eventually, the book would be passed down to Sibyl and Josephine Mulvany – Ellen Macnamara’s great-granddaughters and two of New Zealand’s first studio weavers. In 1995, it was gifted by the family to Tāmaki Paenga Hira, along with the sisters’ weaving collection.  

But, back to the book’s arrival in New Zealand. I often wonder, why a recipe book? And, what did it mean to a family in this new place? Did they continue to use it? Or was it simply a link to home, something to anchor them in a new and unfamiliar land?  

Recipes and food traditions are highly specific to place. What happens when they are transplanted to a new location with a different climate, different produce, different culture? Food – the produce we use, how we prepare it, share it, and build identity around it – is essential to the human experience. And though they may be ubiquitous, there is nothing simple about a recipe. Recipes passed down across generations remind us that history is very much a living thing. Cultural continuity, identity and belonging reside in the words of recipes – they help keep our cultural DNA intact.  

But in instances where there has been cultural disruption, family recipes, or a lack of, perhaps only underscore the severance. I could use my own family as an example. My grandfather was a wonderful cook. We have recipes passed down to my mother from him and his Scottish family – when I think of my Gar I think of shortbread, hot cross buns and steamed Christmas pudding. These are buttery, pillowy, fogged up kitchen window reminders of home, love and connection. But there are other sides of my family where there is palpable disruption… 

A loaf of braided challah bread on a wooden board. The photograph is taken from a bird's eye view.
A challah made by the author. (Image: Supplied)

In the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to make challah – a bread traditionally made and eaten by Jews on Shabbat. I’d never made it before, but I had always wanted to. I’m not sure if this was simply because it looks pretty and I love bread or if it’s because it’s Jewish and therefore dwells somewhere in my cultural DNA – in the part of me that’s passed down from my Gran and connected to a place in north-east Poland; a place to which I have never been and may never go. I don’t know if this part of my family made challah – it’s an assumption on my part that they did. We have inherited no stories of this tradition; certainly nothing is written down. And so, making this bread (it wasn’t particularly successful I’ll add) and feeling connected to that part of my heritage might be total fiction. But when you don’t have a tangible link, you fill in the gaps.   

As I clumsily plaited the strands of dough, glazed it with egg-wash post-bake, and took a photo of its gleaming lumps and bumps, I felt a sense of… pride? This feeling was acute, I think because I know that this particular identity marker has not always been a source of pride. This absence of cultural inheritance is the result of many things. The pogroms of the late 19th century might be one. Migration and attempts at assimilation may be others. But this absence could also tell us about shame and fear, about hiding parts of yourself that might give you away and the role that food plays in this complex interplay between cultural identity, the private self and the world around us.  

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— Editor-at-large

Countless things radiate out from this small, personal example: migration, belonging, identity, war, heritage, cultural loss and reclamation. These words make it seem like I’m trying to aggrandise my story. In fact, it’s the opposite – this is an example of how the smallest (and most confused and patchy) story about food and recipes can unlock such complexity. Versions of this story are repeated in so many families. But there comes a point when time and distance has moved around us so completely that we don’t even look for the old ghosts anymore. We don’t know they were ever there to begin with.  

So in that moment I felt grateful that I could make this bread, which my ancestors may or may not have made, and feel proud. And I thought of how it might feel to have a recipe book like Ellen’s in the family.