There, in a food cabinet at The Wooden Farmer Cafe in Putaruru, sits a piece of Australasian baking history – a Louise cake. And, if you head over to Bennydale, where The Wooden Heart Cafe offers a broad mix of traditional fare, you will also find another historic favourite – ginger crunch.
The two cafes and their locations are completely unrelated of course but, for Otago University Emeritus Professor Helen Leach, the story behind these two slices and several other of our baking favourites, there is a close connection.
In an address delivered in Wellington late last year, Professor Leach presented details of her investigations into our baking history. She found that we were guilty of not only upsizing the portions we were eating but also enriching them.
She cited the Chinese chew as an example.
“What was going on in New Zealand and Australian kitchens was enrichment,” she said.
“It involved butter but not sugar. And it was not led by manufacturers trying to increase sales of their products. It was a trend that emerged in the home kitchens of both Australia and NZ, so blame must lie in our homes with our mothers and our grandmothers.”
The American recipe
The original American recipe for the Chinese chew never contained butter but “by adding four ounces of butter to the original American recipe, the kilocalorie content of a typical proportion changed from 123 to 193.”
Over the years, Professor Leach has amassed a collection of more than 2000 old cookbooks.
“Now many, like me, are showing their age and proximity long ago to sooty stoves, eggbeaters, and greasy fingers. The oldest book I have dates to the 1880s. The majority fall into the category of fundraising books, also known as community cookbooks.”
She says the fundraising books provide valuable information about the cooking habits of particular communities over the years.
“The national multiple edition recipe books like those from Edmonds, Aunt Daisy, the Women’s Institute, provide kitchen output of successive decades. Including the popular dishes, overseas influences and access to ingredients.
“They also provide valuable information about the evolution of recipes, and that is where the archaeology comes in. Such as the pavlova, on which I wrote a book with my sister Mary about the trends in pavlovas and who invented them.”
Prompted by an article titled “Nostalgic recipes from our Kiwi Past,” and using the database she had developed, Professor Leach decided to look into the history of a particular local favourite, uncooked slices.
“I found that these uncooked squares and slices made their debut in the late 1940s, quite an important time in terms of the slow lifting of rations.
“Underlying this research is my investigation of one of the most important food-related issues of the 21st century – supersizing.
“We have all noticed the increasing sizing of bars of ginger crunch, Louise cakes and muffins in the display cabinets of our local cafes. My friends and family normally cut these into two or three portions, at least while I am watching. At the same time, we blame the bakers, the chefs, the cafe owners and ultimately, the Americans that started the giant muffin fashion.”
But it’s all a bit more complicated than that, she says.
She referred to a “classic” American research paper produced by Dr Lisa R Young and Marion Nestle and published in 2002. Titled “The contribution of increasing portion sizes to the obesity epidemic,” Professor Leach said the authors concentrated on food items prepared outside the home, but they did compare two editions of a classic American cookbook ‘The Joy of Cooking’.
“They looked at the 1964 and the 1997 editions. The latter recipe specified fewer servings of the same recipe. Meaning that the portions were expected to be larger. When I read this paper, I realised that the data from my collection of cookbooks would be a perfect place to investigate this process.”
She discovered that supersizing food had been underway in the United States since the 1970s “and we weren’t far behind,” she says.
“Like most people, I believed that supersizing was comparatively recent. So, I decided to test that view against various editions of the Edmonds Cookbook. I compared the 1992 edition with a copy of a book called “Edmonds Classics” published in 2005. Because it emphasised favourite recipes from the past, I expected to find the old recipes converted to metrics but otherwise unchanged. Wouldn’t you? But I was wrong. The editor had made significant changes.”

Some of these changes represented supersizing, such as Afghans going from 30 to 20 biscuits, Almond biscuits from 36 to 25, Yoyos from 26 to 16, cinnamon cream oysters from 16 to 12, bran biscuits from 30 to 20, and rock cakes from 20 to 16.
“They are all the same amount of ingredients, but the instructions in the end as to how many slices or pieces to cut show supersizing.”
She said it was simple supersizing, with no change in ingredients or quantities, just a decrease in the number of portions and, therefore, an increase in their size, mostly in the horizontal dimension.
“While these six recipes were all for baked items spread out over an oven tray, what about the squares and slices you bake in a tin of a specified size, usually 20 x 30 cm? You multiply these by 1.5 to 3 while still using the same tin, but where would the extra volume go? Upwards, of course.
“Typically, the old recipe was cut into 24 squares, each 5 x 5, and the same squares may now end up being twice as thick as in the original recipe. You could call it vertical supersizing, but it may also involve something else, which I have called enrichment.”
Blatant enrichment
Professor Leach said the most blatant example of enrichment in the Edmonds Classic Book occurred with Ginger Crunch. The original 1993 recipe contained ingredient requirements of 50 grams of butter and half a cup of icing sugar. Twelve years later, the same recipe called for 150 grams of butter and 1.5 cups of icing sugar.
“The result you can see in many cafes with its sickly layer of thick icing overwhelming the original crunchy base. Ginger Crunch has been both enriched and then, usually, supersized.”
In the 69th edition of the Edmonds Cookbook, Professor Leach noted the producers had reinstated some of the restrained old ingredient levels.
Her discoveries here led her to increase the number of cookbooks under comparison, but once again, she found her discoveries of supersizing and enrichment confirmed.
“As a result of my analysis of historical records, I am now convinced we must recognise enrichment as a different phenomenon from supersizing and tackle it directly,” she concluded.