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​Cookbook celebrating Southland’s food heritage to be launched

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He Waka Tuia
Art and Culture
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Heritage

He Waka Tuia Senior Curator: Exhibitions Gemma McDonald with a copy of the Preserved cookbook, which will be launched to the community tomorrow

Heritage doesn’t just live in museums. Sometimes it lives in a seasoned pan that’s cooked the same dish for 30 years.The same jar of relish made every year with surplus green tomatoes. A freezer full of lamb joints. And notes written into the margins of recipes – adding, changing, and quietly improving what came before.

Born out of the Heirloom exhibition at He Waka Tuia in 2025, the Preserved cookbook – a collaboration between Louise Evans, the creator of local foodie favourite Wee Magazine, and the team at He Waka Tuia – was set to be launched as a culmination of this year’s Heritage Month celebrations at the Invercargill gallery on Friday.

He Waka Tuia Manager Sarah Brown said the project had garnered a wide-ranging response from the community.

“The idea of food as heritage – recipes being handed down from one generation to another, on battered pieces of scrap paper or simply from lived memory and experience – really resonated with people,” she said.

Responses ranged from chutneys beloved by families across generations, to Russian desserts that transcended families immigrating to the deep south, handwritten anonymous submissions, and her mother’s own ambrosia, she said.

“Every contribution clearly holds so much meaning and nostalgia from the people who took part, and the end result is a really poignant reflection of our community: our people, our places, and our stories.”

The project brought together food, storytelling, and artefacts from across Murihiku, with recipes sitting alongside oral histories, photographs, and objects that people had held onto for decades.

The Preserved cookbook was created by local foodie favourite Louise Evans and the team at He Waka Tuia, with recipes submitted by members of the community

Evans said Preserved was an attempt to capture small, everyday pieces of local food culture before they disappeared, with the project borne out of a curiosity about the quiet lives and stories that sat behind the food we made and shared.

“If you want to understand a region, you should look inside its freezers and cupboards. Preserved is, in a way, a small archive of exactly that. The things we think of as completely ordinary may turn out to be the most interesting record we have of who we were,” Evans said.

Preserved had been made possible through the digitisation of local works, the creation of new pieces, and the retelling of histories that might otherwise remain tucked away in kitchens and family cupboards.

“If you’ve ever read Wee Magazine, Preserved will feel familiar. It’s the same curiosity, just turned inward – into homes, histories and the things people choose to keep. Both are about noticing the stories that sit quietly in our region and giving them the space to be seen. Wee Magazine celebrates what’s happening now in our food culture. Preserved looks at what’s been carried through, the habits, recipes and objects that have shaped how we eat over time.

“Through Wee Magazine and now Preserved, I’m building a body of work that captures Southland’s food culture as it actually exists not just what’s served, but what’s kept, shared and remembered.”

Evans was also set to launch the inaugural Wee Fest, which would run in the city from 9 to 12 April.

“If Preserved is about capturing the stories we’ve inherited, Wee Fest is about experiencing them in real time, meeting the people, tasting the food, and being part of it as it happens.”

Preserved would be available to the community for free at He Waka Tuia.

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