Pavlova Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Pavlova is a meringue made by whipping egg whites with sugar and baking them slowly at a low temperature, so the surface dries to a thin, crackable shell while the inside stays soft and marshmallow-like. Whipped cream and fruit go on top. The name honours the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured the southern hemisphere in the 1920s.

Egg whites, sugar and cream were all long-established staples in Australian and New Zealander kitchens, always at hand. What gave the dish its present form was the knack of the bake: a low, slow heat. Baked hot and fast, a meringue dries hard all the way through. To dry only the outer shell while leaving the centre half-raw takes a lower temperature, a longer time in the oven, and a slow cooling inside it. Once home and cafe ovens could hold this bake reliably, the pavlova as we know it settled into place.

It came together in the Australia and New Zealand of the 1920s and 30s, which is when recipes of this type start appearing in cookbooks. Not the court, not the grand restaurant, but the home and the cafe: that pedigree captures the character of the dish.

Two patriotic stories have long clung to the pavlova. The most famous is the Australian one, that Herbert Sachse, a chef at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, created it in 1935. As an indispensable dish on the Christmas table, it kept the argument alive for decades.

Yet this Perth story is undone by both the man and the record. Sachse himself, in a 1973 interview, admitted his version was based on a recipe submitted to an Australian women's magazine by a New Zealand resident. Far from an invention, it was an adaptation of someone else's earlier recipe. Sachse's descendants further told the researcher Helen Leach that since Anna Pavlova died in 1931, dating the creation to 1935 was likely a mix-up of the year. The very year of creation wavers.

It was Leach who dug out that record. In her book The Pavlova Story (2008) she showed that by 1940 New Zealand cookbooks carried at least 21 pavlova recipes. The earliest record to give the pavlova name to the modern meringue form is the 'pavlova cake' in the 1929 Dairy Exporter Annual, though it was built up in layers like a dacquoise and was sent in under a pen name. The form closest to today's recipe survives in Laurina Stevens's entry in the 1933 Mothers' Union cookery book from Rangiora: egg whites, sugar, cornflour and vinegar, baked as one large cake. The Oxford English Dictionary (2010) gave its earliest citation as the 1927 New Zealand Davis Dainty Dishes, but that was a multicoloured jelly, a different thing from the modern meringue. The dictionary gives the origin as 'Australian and New Zealand', naming both countries.

Australia has its own candidate for the earliest recipe. One view, taken by David Burton, holds that the 'Meringue with Fruit Filling' in Emily Futter's 1922 cookbook Australian Home Cookery is the first recipe close to today's pavlova. Michael Symons counters that the recipe contains neither vinegar nor cornflour, and is no more than a meringue cake cut in half and filled. Leach, for her part, dates the first Australian printed recipe to around 1940. On the page New Zealand holds the lead, though that hardly settles the matter.

The researchers Andrew Paul Wood and Annabelle Utrecht, working together, then reframe the question itself. Going through some 20,000 newspapers and 10,000 cookbooks, they found more than 150 recipes for similar meringue cakes predating the name. The line runs from the Spanische Windtorte, a large meringue confection of late-eighteenth-century Habsburg Austria, carried by German-speaking migrants to the United States as the Schaumtorte, until by the 1890s American cornstarch box recipes were being exported to New Zealand. On this view the question of 'who invented it, Australia or New Zealand' is wrongly framed: the technique of the large meringue cake has a long prehistory in Europe, and Australia and New Zealand were the places that, in the 1920s and 30s, named it after the ballerina and made it their own.

The most famous story, the 1935 Perth invention, has retreated. Even so, which of Australia and New Zealand came first has no decisive proof, and pushed back to its European prehistory the question of 'who invented it' hangs unanswered. The charm of this dessert lies precisely in that: no single birthplace can be fixed, yet it put down roots on the tables of two countries.