Te Radar's CookBookery!
Theatre Royal, 78 Rutherford Street, Nelson
06/09/2024 - 06/09/2024
The Classic Comedy Club, 321 Queen Street, Auckland
01/12/2024 - 01/12/2024
Production Details
Writer / Director: Te Radar
Writer: Ruth Spencer
The Radar Foundation
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.
Theatre Royal Nelson
Fiday 6 September 2024
7.30pm
McCombs Performing Arts Centre, Cashmere High School, Christchurch
1 November 2024
https://www.eventfinda.co.nz/2024/te-radars-cookbookery-chs-spanish-class-fundraiser/christchurch
The Boatshed, Blenheim
15 November 2024
7.30pm
Booking Link TBC
The Classic, Auckland
1 December 2024
5pm
Booking Link TBC
Visual design / Performer: Te Radar
Visual design: Ruth Spencer
Comedy , Theatre , Solo ,
120mins
Culinary lunacy, celestial voices, Aunt Daisy's recipe for swan, and Te Radar - a splendid recipe for holiday fun
Review by David Charteris 03rd Dec 2024
We are welcomed into the Classic Comedy Club by celestial voices which is a surprise in this environment.
An excellent female choir organised by Te Radars wife, sits above us and are a delight but are soon drowned out by the chatter of the full house audience.
On the Comedy Club artists page, Te Radar is described as an award-winning satirist, documentary maker, writer, stage and screen director, terrible gardener, failed war correspondent and amateur historian.
Based on the content of this show, he certainly is not an amateur historian.
For two hours he regales us with the history of cooking books written in and for New Zealand and its gullible book buying public.
With great relish, he leads us through the myriad of these moments in time and place which should be read like any great novel.
Te Radar’s CookBookery is the name of the show, but it could also be called ‘Culinary Lunacy!’
Te Radar is an extremely polished storyteller and with non-stop patter and humour, he gives us a huge amount of information about these books from the first ones written in the 1880s right up to the 1980s.
As all the familiar writers’ names come up, we get murmurs of recognition and gasps of delight at the total bonkers things that some of these people were advising us to create and eat.
My favourite from the show is an Aunt Daisy recipe for swan. Te Radar calls it not so much a recipe, more an exercise in surrealism. Brilliant.
Alison Holst’s name gets a round of applause as does the much-loved Edmonds Cookbook, first published in 1910, which we learn is a history of the ways New Zealanders eating habits have changed over the decades. I was pleased to learn that, back in the day, an Edmonds Cookbook was sent to every newly married couple and that the chapter on ‘Food for Invalids’ had quietly disappeared.
The audience loved this show and all its madness. I mean, who grates a banana? Who wants to make ‘Cabbage – Cum – Carrot?’ Who wants to make imitation cherries from carrots and raspberry jelly?
We do, apparently.
A joyous ride of a show through our peculiar New Zealand history, something that Te Radar has done with our history before and, hopefully, will many times in the future.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Go for the cherries, stay for the carrots
Review by Sarah Wilson 25th Sep 2024
Many New Zealanders might agree that although our cuisine of the last 100 years wasn’t the fanciest in the world, we certainly made up for it in tenacity.
Te Radar has been developing this show in shorter styles, with the premiere of the two-hour version getting a genuine endorsement from the Nelson Theatre Royal audience. The stage is simple with a classic 1980s cookbook on a pedestal and a pull up screen, giving a retro vibe of the classic slide night. From the moment Te Radar appears, he radiates warmth and enthusiasm, and it’s very clear that he really knows his stuff when it comes to New Zealand cookbooks, as a longtime collector, experimenter and taster.
The format of the show is simple – Te Radar is our guide through New Zealand cookbooks, highlighting their wonders and absurdities. The screen is a never-ending parade of glorious photography, improbable dishes, helpful serving suggestions and unwilling models. Te Radar is in his element, with a well-written storyline that drives the show, a rhythm that keeps the audience enthralled, and the confidence to veer off-script to cater to reactions and interjections.
The show looks at cookbooks through the 20th century, exposing their many foibles, indulgences, and downright optimism. Tired of eating mutton three times a day? Try Colonial Goose. Run out of butter? Reach for the codfat. Need some cherries? Well, go to the show for the most ingenious solution imaginable. It seems that New Zealanders have a real knack for disguising foods as other foods.
All the well-known experts are referenced – Aunt Daisy, Graham Kerr, Alison Holst and Hudson and Halls – and the phenomena that is Edmonds, and Te Radar has some clear favourites amongst the lesser-known cooks, and this is where his knowledge really shines.
The beauty of putting the recipes on screen, is that the audience can read the ingredients and instructions alongside Te Radar’s commentary – it really heightens the collective enjoyment, and encourages the laughter and chorus of “oh no’s!”
Te Radar’s Cookbookery! is the perfect recipe for a night out – lots of laughs, loads of eyeopeners on taste and presentation, some frank advice on what to avoid in the kitchen, and the reassurance that we’ve come a long way in our kiwi culinary adventures.
It’s a cracker of a show. Go for the cherries, stay for the carrots.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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