Pavlova with whipped cream and fresh fruit artistic work

By Deborah Lee Walker Contributing Writer

(July 21, 2023) Art is a highly diverse range of human skills that are engaged in creating visual or auditory artworks that express one’s imaginative and technical skills.

A work of art is intended to be revered for its beauty and emotional power, and must evoke one’s senses to a degree of amazement and irresistible wonderment.

Cooking also falls under this classification. Food is carefully presented on a canvas by way of a plate and is embellished according to height, color and texture.

The end result is a piece de resistance that incorporates unbelievable flavors, a reflection of one’s heritage, and professional skills that are brought together by way of seasonal ingredients.

The hot summer is here and a gorgeous, snow-white pavlova accompanied with whipped cream, fresh fruit, and a decadent sauce can be a simple but stunning dessert. If you are not familiar with pavlova, allow me to share the enchanting story behind this international dessert.

The bragging rights for pavlova, paa-vlow-vuh, are unclear. But the name and recipe began appearing soon after Russia prima ballerina, Anna Matveyevna Pavlova, toured Australia and New Zealand during the years of 1926 through 1929.

According to What’s Cooking America, Pavlova was considered the greatest ballerina of her time and her visit to New Zealand has been described as the most anticipated event of 1926.

Her devoted fans described her dancing style as one who glides across the stage as if she had wings. One can presume the light whipped egg whites and whipped cream of this famous dessert was created in likeness of the celebrated ballerina.

Australia and New Zealand have long been at odds over which country invented the antipodean dish. An article titled, “The Pavlova: New Zealand or Australian Dessert,” gives a detailed account on why the bragging rights are not so clear cut.

The article maintains that the dessert we know today can be traced back to 1926, when the cookbook, “Home Cookery for New Zealand,” included a recipe for Meringue with Fruit Filling.

The name “Pavlova” is not mentioned, but the recipe is very similar.

One year later, the sixth edition of Davis Dainty Dishes is published in New Zealand, which included the first known recorded recipe using the name “Pavlova,” but the recipe in- cluded a gelatin as opposed to a meringue base dish.

Professor Helen Leach, a culinary anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said the earliest recipe that uses traditional Pavlova ingredients was published in 1929 in a magazine titled, “New Zealand Rural Magazine.”

So, one might be asking where does Australia come into the picture?

Anna Pavlova stayed at the Hotel Es-

See HOMEMADE Page 27