Te Radar's Cookbookery!

A comedic celebration of food from the beloved and bizarre cookbooks of our past.  Te Radar has sampled a century and a half of New Zealand cookbooks to find the tastiest morsels, with a side of sumptuous vintage food photography.

Revealing New Zealand’s rich - and weird - home cooking heritage we rediscover celebrity chefs such as Graham Kerr, Alison Holst, Aunt Daisy and Hudson and Halls.  We’ll savour cookbooks designed to get us eating more dairy, tamarillos or kiwifruit, and the desperate lengths they go to:  Cold Sour Kiwifruit Soup anyone?  We’ll get a taste of cookbooks from school fundraisers and recipe contests: recipes supplied by ordinary kiwis that suggest some of us were not to be trusted with food.

Why did we disguise mutton as poultry? Why did Alison Holst believe fried brains were the perfect food for children? And is the brilliant “Recipes With Canned Foods Are Interesting” the greatest cookbook ever written in the nation’s history?

Multi award-winning comedian and documentarian Te Radar dishes up a smorgasbord of kiwi recipes moulded into a deliciously hilarious and sentimental journey through the Cookbookery of our past.