Taihape Meal – Best of Country Tucker

The Pork Board would have been delighted at the generosity of the serving, and the dishing of baby carrots must have represented close to 10 per cent of Ohakune’s winter juvenile crop, though some of them looked too small to be parted from their mothers just yet.

There was also a massive wedge of roast pumpkin still in the skin, a fist-size kumara, and a couple of potatoes that individually could have and would have choked a hippo. As well, a sturdy ladle of peas had been added, along with a pottle of apple sauce, pork crackling which would have catered to a Te Kuiti rugby tournament, and, as Julian, of Enid Blighton’s Famous Five would have said, “lashings of gravy”.

For $20, it was the sort of meal a shearer who had just finished a nine-hour day punching through 550 lambs would have relished, or a shepherd fresh in from a sodden, chill afternoon checking out a mob of 750 lambing ewes.

The Taihape motellier said the Gumboot Café, just down the road, served good food, and he wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t fancy, and it wasn’t described with super-couth italicized names on the menu, but the unwritten guarantee is you won’t walk out hungry if you clear your plate.

And I just loved it that my wine glass was filled to within 2mm of the brim, instead of some miserly dribble in the bottom of a glass tub on a stem that fancy establishments seem inclined to dish up.

Of course, Andy Williams crooned away softly in the background, and along one wall a wood fire chugged out warmth and good cheer that helped draw additional custom into the restaurant.

Outside the night had dropped in hard and fast, a chill settling over the little central North Island town soon after 5pm as the sun crept away behind western hills. By 7pm the curbside grass was turning brittle as frost set in.

We had left the Waikato in the early afternoon on another sunny day that was warm if you sat in a sheltered area. The weather people predicted 13 deg C maximum, and they may have been optimistic.

In any event, we poozled gently south, through Otorohanga and Te Kuiti, turning off at the Eight Mile and heading to Taumarunui. We had travelled this same road in late April, spending the long Easter weekend exploring tracks in the Tongariro National Park.

Then, the land was disheveled and scruffy, smothered in patches of spiky, brown weeds and thistles and long rank grass. Colour trees along the way had given the otherwise dying region a broad flash of colour with their autumn brilliance. Such colour is all long gone.

Now the trees are stark and bare, standing limp, and forlornly waiting for the miracle of spring renewal that will see them burst back into life and leaf. 

In attractive contrast the once-messy paddocks are clean and neat, close-cropped where the stock have sought the last of the available pickings, and, from a townie’s point of view, they look smart and tidy. Probably the cockies are viewing such manicured paddocks with something of a grimace, knowing they need every blade of grass they can get over the next couple of months to ensure birthing cows and ewes and hinds and other stock mothers have some reasonable volume of fresh tucker to ensure adequate flows of  life-giving milk.

But the countryside certainly looks picturesque at the moment – the weeds are gone, the sward is still green, and at least on the rolling and hill country the land hasn’t begun to pug. It may be a little different on the low country of the Waikato / Hauraki flats that less than a century ago were mostly sodden swamps.

Down in the central North Island, the region was a delight to travel through. 

Each of the three mountains – Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu – was cloaked in fresh, gleaming snow and they all stood sharp and potent against the blue-sky background. Further out on the far eastern horizon the Kaweka and Ruahine Ranges also showed up clear and distinct, and the air was crisp and crystal.

This less-populated countryside is a favourite of mine, always somewhat more laid back than the urban centres. Farmers on their quad bikes, or walking their paddocks with their several dogs at heel, have the time and the inclination to return a wave of acknowledgement, and the people generally are not so obsessed with appearance or status.

We had a waitress who whistled staunchly along with Andy Williams in the restaurant, and she was snugly clad in sensible trackies and hefty sneakers. And the smile was as warm as a manuka fire, and just as genuine.

Other guests came in, placed orders and were duly bug-eyed at the massive piles of good food placed in front of them – beef or lamb roasts similar to my pork, slabs of lasagne that could have doubled as flight decks on an aircraft carrier, grilled chicken breast that included the back legs and a wad of veggies. A clothes basket of chips was an optional extra.

And what I really, really liked was that the salt and pepper shakers both worked – they were full of condiments, they were clean, and the contents sprinkled readily and plentifully over my food. I like lots of pepper, and frequently vow never to return to a foodery which proffers a pepper-shaker that is either empty or constipated.

The walk back to the motel was through a crackling night that promised to slide into the serious minus numbers over the next few hours. Fifty-million bright stars were all staring wide-eyed at our little planet.

In the morning the cold was rigid and hard and white and without mercy – the type where you start the car, turn the heater and windscreen fan to full, and retreat indoors for more coffee while the transport thaws.

How did those early settlers cope a century ago, breaking in this tough back country, and living under just a sheet of canvass and with little more to keep them warm than a pair of moleskin trousers, a couple of heavy woollen shirts and a ton of sheer guts?

And before them, an even hardier whanau, who had neither moleskin nor wool, but were probably even more staunch.

There are still a few people who live in such country with few of the modern-day soft-life trappings, and somehow I envy them their extraordinary hardiness.

Kingsley Field is a writer who has published two volumes of these outdoor columns and is now working on a third. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz

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