Paul Smith
No other columnist quite captured the mentality of New Zealand - and especially Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s - as the Auckland Star's Noel Holmes. These were days when the weekend was what it was meant to be; when we lazed in a long summer of contentment enjoying one of the highest living standards in the world. Holmes' column called 'Just Looking Thanks' took his readers on all kinds of journeys - many of them pure whimsy. You knew he was a devoted boatie. But we cadet reporters who guided tea trolleys into the newsroom and then into the quiet anchorage of the Features Department where he worked, treated him as if he was God. He was the one who demystified Celebrity for us. In one of the in-house lectures which made up our training, he gave us some advice about how to calm ourselves before interviewing the famous and the powerful. "They're all human" he said. "Just imagine them sitting on the toilet - always helps".  Noel Holmes and his generation of great journalists have gone the way of the Auckland Star and we are the poorer for it. In Holmes' case he left a lasting legacy - a book in his light hearted style. It's called Just Cooking Thanks - being a dissertation on New Zealand Seafoods'. And you know from the title that he's taking a poke at any form of culinary pretentiousness. Here's a sample about a now forbidden feast…
Here's a shellfish that has driven thousands of respectable citizens to crime. People who hesitate to pick up threepence in the street have crept over the sandhills in the dead of night and stealthily raided the toheroa beds with all the desperate daring of wartime commandos. Men who would punish their children for telling a lie have filled the hubcaps of their cars with toheroa and have greeted beach inspectors with treacherous smiles of blissful innocence. And even modest women have been known to shell toheroa on the beach, load their spoils into plastic bags, and hide the bags about their person with shameless ingenuity.  Enough.
I do not inquire into your innocence or guilt. You have toheroa and you wish to cook them. Let us proceed. My own feeling is that you can do nothing better with toheroa than make the classical soup with them. And in this time of plenty, Holmes goes on to describe how to make the soup - and how to cook toheroa in other ways…
* The Encyclopedia of New Zealand says Toheroa (Paphies ventricosa) were once found in their millions on the heavy surf beaches of the North Island’s west coast, and on a couple of Southland beaches. They were over-harvested in the 20th century and since the 1960s have been protected from commercial gathering. Toheroa have become so scarce that they are now a protected species and can only be gathered when the Ministry of Fisheries declares a one-day open season at Oreti Beach in Southland. |
