A fruit, a feast, a famine, a favourite recipe

Sunday, 27 July 2025

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist specialising in feature writing, including criminal justice investigations.

OPINION: One of the first things the courier dropped off when we shifted south to our village last year, was a package from up north.

It was from writer Steve Braunias, and contained a cake.

More accurately, it was a loaf, a tamarillo loaf, and it was a welcoming gift to our new home.

It was spectacularly good, still nestled in the aluminium foil loaf tin he’d baked it in, and layered with wonderful, less common, golden tamarillos.

Steve kindly included the recipe, handwritten, sourced from the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, noting that a few minutes here and there in the cooking time could see it veer from perfection to dancing with desiccation.

“I left it in maybe two minutes more than I should,” Steve worried, but we thought it was bang on.

Nevertheless, with that warning in mind, I hovered over the loaf tin when I tried the recipe for the first time, a skewer in hand, lancing it far too often, to see if it was done enough.

When Steve visited the region a few months later, I baked him his loaf for sustenance as he travelled around.

And since then, I’ve made it many times, and added an extra layer of tamarillos to the mix because, well, why not?

It’s become a bit of a go-to when the tins need filling.

It’s simple, different, tasty, and when you slice it, the red tamarillos have turned papal purple inside.

Native to South America but adopted with relish by New Zealand, sort of in the same way as feijoas, midwinter is prime time for tamarillos, and they colour and lift our porridge every morning now.

Uninspiringly and unromantically dubbed tree tomatoes originally, a member of the New Zealand Tree Tomato Promotions Council concocted the name tamarillo in 1967 in an effort to make them more exotic and appealing.

While they’re maligned by some, to me, they’re a sensational fruit, with a knockout zing.

The only problem is their price, which is partly due to how difficult they can be to sustain (can’t cope with frosts, hate the dry, don’t like the wind, trees need replacing frequently).

We buy in bulk.

And so it is that Steve’s tamarillo loaf recipe sits at the top of the sheaf of favourites that are stuffed into the front of one of our recipe books.

The recipe book is my favourite one - one by Kiwi cuisine queen Alison Holst and her son Simon.

Its green cover is faded, its spine needs some sellotape, its corners are curled.

Its pages are blotched with stray splashes, the mark of all good recipe books, and a guide to the very best dishes within them.

On the back is a picture of Alison and Simon, standing in a kitchen, all wooden cabinetry and utensils and tufts of herbs behind them.

I’ll swear that’s the kitchen I met Alison Holst in.

That meeting remains one of my saddest culinary experiences.

I was a student journalist doing some work for Wellington’s Evening Post, and was asked to interview Holst. I can’t remember exactly why, presumably she had a new book out.

As I drove to her Karori home that afternoon, my mind was full of the banquet of baking I would sample as we chatted amiably.

I had foregone lunch in greedy expectation.

I had prepared a list of questions that was overlong and full of irrelevancies, in the hope of extending the interview as long as possible, to prolong the grazing.

I approached the house as a pig might waddle when preparing to nudge open the pantry door.

In the end, I’m not sure if I was even offered a cup of tea.

But I do know that I sat in that kitchen for a very long time, and not one baking tin was lifted down from the cupboards, not one waft of a fresh pastry curled from the oven.

All I could spy was a jar of Krispies on the bench. It never made its way to the table we sat at, its lid forever fastened.

I lingered. I made up more questions. I overstayed my welcome.

I left shamed, mystified, and very hungry.

But Alison Holst, Dame Alison as she became, has in truth fed me for decades, through her recipe books.

Staggeringly, she wrote 100, and sold millions of copies, before retiring, when she first noticed the effects of dementia.

Right now, it’s nearly morning tea time.

This is the time I switch on the coffee machine, go to the freezer, and get a muffin for my partner.

It’s a blueberry and banana one my partner makes in batches.

It comes from another recipe bible that sits on our shelves, Marvellous Muffins.

It too is by the marvellous Alison Holst.

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