I must say that the sauce was extremely tasty. Slightly spicy, with softly cooked onions and one of those complex Thai curry pastes. That’s what lured me into buying the dish without inquiring about its contents. That’s also what helped me eat quite a few spoonfuls of rice after my “discovery” before discreetly throwing my plate away in a back alley (thankfully, it was a takeaway).
A few hours later, while I was trying to keep my mind away from whether this little thing stuck between my back teeth was an antenna or a wing, I suddenly realised that this was not my first experience eating food that is beyond my cultural barrier – to put it mildly. Last year, I had a chocolate truffle with a crystalized worm inside. Why would I do such a thing? Because I was in that kind of mood. A kind of mood that only comes with specific, extraordinary, WILD events. I had that delicacy last year in one of the world’s weird food summits: the Wildfoods Festival, in Hokitika, New Zealand. Lucky me, the 2012 edition is next weekend, so the timing is perfect to tell you about this experience.
Hokitika is a sleepy seaside town on the West Coast, in New Zealand’s South Island. It’s lovely name means “place of return” in Maōri because, the area being very rich in pounamu – a green stone highly prized in Maōri culture – people did go on long expeditions to get there year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Nowadays, though, tourists come and few of them return. The guided tours on pounamu are far from being fascinating, the local museum is charming but small and the colourful and poetic sunset only happens once a day. Every year, though, the town suddenly wakes up and takes in 10,000 to 15,000 new inhabitants (three to five times its population) for a weekend. Accommodation gets full, people rent out their gardens to campers, visitors go and find a backpacker’s or a hotel 50 kilometres away in Greymouth, and an incredible party wave floods the place for a couple of days.
Copyright: Wildfoods Festival
When you come to think of it, the word “wild” can mean quite a few different things: and that’s exactly what you can find at the Wildfoods Festival. For instance, it was at that event that I came to my final conclusions regarding Kiwis and alcohol: a) They are able to swallow very large amounts of alcoholic beverages; b) It seldom makes them aggressive; c) It does tend to make them stupider than usual. I saw a young man break his ankles when jumping barefoot from a roof on concrete. I saw people playfully tackling others by surprise just to hug them (and giving them a few bruises at the same time).
It was also there, as you now know, that I had my first encounter with foods that are beyond my French eating habits*. I did cheat a bit in choosing a chocolate truffle that completely camouflaged the worm that was hidden somewhere inside and carefully avoided the stallion semen, fried or raw huhu grubs and “mountain oysters” (sheep testicles) that were on offer.
My focus was mainly on foods that come from the wild but are plainly delicious. Having been hosted by a few Kiwi families through the HelpX network – especially on the West Coast where I spent over 3 weeks last year, the gourmet wild food on offer was no surprise to me. The West Coast is one of the most isolated areas in New Zealand; game, fish, seafood and other produce offered by nature are widely available there. I was all the more excited to have “one more whitebait patty”, to loose myself in huge fresh berry doughnuts, to dip venison sausages in home-made sauce and salivate over wild pork. I didn’t go for the paua** because I had been showed the very specific way to prepare it and did not trust sellers with that after a very bad experience at a fish and chips.
Basically, you come to the Wildfoods Festival to eat lovely food, drink good beer and wine (as far as I was concerned I had more rhubarb lemonade than beer, because I was the driver!) and try one or two things you would definitely not eat in your daily life. But you also come there to party. A variety of concerts are on offer all day long, so there is bound to be at least one or two to suit your tastes. There are also additional concerts on Friday and Saturday nights, but with just “normal” food on offer. Like many Kiwi events, the festival has also become a place to come with a costume, preferably a group or couple costume. As a consequence, there is great people-watching to be done – an activity that admittedly goes very well with sitting on the grass and eating!
At the end of the day, costumes are a bit less fresh, hats are slightly tilted. Shorts and dresses are a stretched on the belly area. A huge crowd strolls out of the square – some will be back in a few hours for the Saturday night dance, others are going back to their tents, while many go to the pub. Maybe a few even go and sit on the beach, despite the sandflies, to wait for sunset. For a few hours they have experienced fantastic food, an immensely friendly atmosphere, a great deal of sunshine***, good music and for some the “culinary” experience of a lifetime! As I walked back to the car, little did I know that a year later I would be in Thailand, eating crickets by mistake, and remembering that day I ate chocolate with a worm inside.
Julia
* I must admit that I am being totally weird about this, because I have no major issue about eating snails: once again, cultural barriers!
** Paua, or abalone, is a huge shellfish that is eaten whole (it then looks like a small steak) or minced. It’s delicious when well prepared and awful when not.
*** Well, in 2011 they did, I can’t promise anything about 2012, this is the West Coast!
Official site: www.wildfoods.co.nz
Date: 10 March 2012
Venue: Cass Square, Hokitika
Time: Gates open at 10am, with the festival closing at 5pm
Tickets: Tickets are $37 from Ticketdirect outlets, or $39 at www.ticketdirect.co.nz
Further Festivities: There are concerts on Friday and Saturday nights – tickets are $10 each.
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