But this did not seem to be the attitude of Julie Dalzell. I interviewed the founding editor of Cuisine magazine on a Friday morning after stopping at a nearby bakery for two mince savouries. I lingered at her front gate to finish scoffing down one savoury for breakfast, and stowed the other in my bag to eat cold for morning tea. Inside her nice home, I asked Dalzell what she was going to have on Christmas Day, and her answer sounded like a flaccid cracker popping open not with a bang, but a whimper.
‘We don’t have huge amounts,’ she said. ‘I always do hot ham, and something scallopy or something salmony for starters. We tend to eat at two, and then go for a swim.’
She sat at her kitchen table with a cup slopped full of cappuccino. I hated everything she stood for, but she seemed a good sort. I expected to meet a cheerful, formidable trout; she was a cheerful, formidable trout, fifty-five, with inevitable politics: ‘You start left and you grow right as you get older.’ I doubted she was ever especially left. She spoke with an accent cultivated at private Rangi Ruru Girls’ School. She married at twenty-five, remarried at about thirty. She has a very trim figure, and attractive hands that gently stroked a prized exhibit on the table – the very first issue of Cuisine.
The magazine is about to celebrate its twenty-first anniversary. For two decades it has kept pace with the New Zealand revolution in food, in cooking, in ingredients, in restaurants. Dalzell now works as a consultant for the Fairfax publication – we have the same paymasters. She bought Cuisine in its first year. For a song? ‘Yes. The publisher was going under, so it wasn’t exactly expensive to buy. But by that time I was madly determined it would succeed.’ It did. Dalzell lives in Herne Bay, that scented, pretty suburb tucked in by the water close to downtown Auckland; she has flowering bougainvillea in the front yard, a swimming-pool out back. Cuisine took off after she invested $250,000 in a very effective billboard campaign in 1996. She sold the magazine in 2002. ‘It was a good sum. We bought this house the year before; we called it the mansion on mortgage mountain. It’s so good to be able to pay off a mortgage …’
No doubt. I admired her business sense, and despised her role in the food revolution, which has annihilated the good honest New Zealand tearoom, and led to more and more and more espresso slophouses, drowning in focaccia, pesto, aioli, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and other muck. ‘But tearooms are still around,’ she said. Where? She thought for a while. ‘We found one in Lumsden! That was so exciting. We were beside ourselves. We had chicken sandwiches on white bread, and a cup of tea.’ I felt like killing her. She made it sound so quaint, naughty, a wheeze. ‘And there might be one in Paekakariki,’ she said.
Because I regard modern diners as dazed, picky gluttons trying to satisfy their jaded appetites with endless blather about ingredients and menus, I suggested to her that the food revolution had made New Zealanders stupid. She said, ‘It makes them opinionated about things they’re not necessarily skilled or schooled in. But that’s okay; whatever your palette is. It makes people fashion-followers, as opposed to perhaps developing their own confidence in making a choice about what they’re going to eat. But stupid? No, no.’
Because I regard modern dining as a childish pastime, I suggested to her that the food revolution had made New Zealanders infantile. She said, ‘I think it’s our play dough. We like playing with food and making stuff. It’s a creative thing, perhaps a nurturing thing.’
Her talk of creativity and nurture was insufferable. I asked her when she last ate a Dunkin’ Donut. ‘I don’t think I’ve had one for about forty years. Are they good?’ Oh, yes. Has she breakfasted on a delicious bacon and egg muffin with a hash brown at McDonald’s? ‘No. No. I toast Vogel’s bread and tomatoes.’ I imagined her nibbling a joyless slice for breakfast on Christmas Day.
Her language was not the language of crisp, lovely doughnuts, and happy meals served in wrappers. I asked her what was ‘in’ these days at restaurants and slophouses. She said, ‘There’s a lot of risotto going on. Pork belly. And a weird thing called molecular gastronomy. It’s a very highbrow way of cooking. It’s food that doesn’t look like itself, or taste like itself.’
I asked her what she wished was ‘out’ at restaurants and slophouses. ‘Pork belly,’ she said. ‘And I do wish the fashion of having huge focaccia and basil pesto would go away. I like home-made pesto, but I don’t like pesto that sits in jars and changes its flavour from that beautiful fresh basil, pine-nutty thing to tasting of something three steps down the track.’ And then she declared: ‘Pesto was probably the biggest mistake of the ’90s.’
She was indisputably an authority on such matters. She was very exact, and possibly quite mad. I asked her to define the typical Cuisine reader; she came up with an answer that reminded me of criminal profiling.
She said, ‘She’d be forty-five to fifty. She would live perhaps in Mt Eden. She would have been perhaps a teacher, or high up in administration. She would work full time, but probably dropped down to part time now her children are beginning to leave school. She likes to have her own income. Her husband likes to cook occasionally. They will eat out once a week, and entertain at home twice a month. They earn about a hundred – yes, combined. They won’t buy a new car, but they’ll have two cars in the family.
‘And they fight over the magazine when it arrives in the mailbox. She’ll sit down and covet it with a cup of tea or glass of wine after a long day, and she will
