Cookbooks and Cultural Identity in the 20th Century. In this final Macmillan Brown lecture for 2008, Prof Helen Leach of the University of Otago exposes the way in which cultural identity can be gauged from looking at community cookbooks published here through the decades. Pakeha regarded Maori cookery as a relic of the past until cookbooks published in the Maori Renaissance during the 1970s showed its resistance to extinction. In the structure of their meals, descendants of British migrants also adhered to their ancestral culinary tradition until the 1960s; however in their baking they asserted a distinctive Kiwi identity throughout the 20th century. 'Internationalization' in the 1960s brought a flood of new recipes. It was followed by 'globalization' which has not (as yet) undermined either identities or culinary traditions.
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