Before I left New Zealand, I just had to try mutton bird - both for its name and because it was part of the colonial world of iron-pot stews, giant roasts, cabin bread and salted provisions. A Maori delicacy taken up by white New Zealanders, mutton birds were sent around the country in boxes and barrels to vary the national diet.
I turned to Aunt Daisy for help. She had been a pillar of New Zealand cuisine for 30 years, broadcasting cookery on the radio after a burst of "Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do". Her recipe calls for them to be simmered in water for 30 minutes, drained, then grilled or fried until the fat "turns golden".
If anchovies weighed well over 1lb each, had wings, and were covered by a thick layer of white, muttony fat, this is what they would be like - salty, fatty, peculiar and not at all bad.
But mine was an act of culinary archaeology, for New Zealand is changing - in its food, its wine, its leisure and use of the countryside - and has moved on from the mutton-bird age. For the visitor, there is, often, literally, a new flavour to the New Zealand experience.
In the national parks, the landscape is becoming a kind of shrine to the past - the natural past, before the white man or even the Maori came. But in the farmed countryside, agriculture is no longer totally dominated by sheep and cattle. Now, wine, fruit, southern European vegetables and even olive oil constitute what one hotel owner calls a "new food ecology".
Chris Knowles, who with his wife, Julia, runs the Hotel d'Urville in Blenheim, in the Marlborough wine country of South Island, triumphantly puts on to the table a wicker basket containing wonderful artichokes, peppers, tomatoes, asparagus and mushrooms. They would do Provence proud, and their taste matches their appearance.
A few hundred miles further north, just off the coast of Auckland, the vineyards, galleries and restaurants on the small island of Waiheke - where some of New Zealand's increasingly good red wines are made - create a similar but jazzier ambience. Waiheke, with its music festivals, art shows, restaurants and fine beaches, is a pleasing place, if crowded at weekends. A house on the beach here would cost from £60 a night, self-catering, but you can also enjoy the island on a day trip from Auckland.
In the towns and cities, meanwhile, cafes are the new phenomenon, with all kinds of connections to their Californian, Australian and British equivalents, but with their own quirky differences and, of course, the fine raw materials of New Zealand. There are also outstanding restaurants, most of which did not exist 10 years ago. Towns also boast large bookshops, elaborate sweet shops and specialist lingerie establishments of the kind that have almost disappeared elsewhere.
And all these changes are happening in a society where tourism is becoming central to the economy. But seductive as it is, there is also something irritating about the new style of New Zealand: it sometimes thinks it is more original than it is; and it sometimes has a quaking sort of poshness to it.
Such quibbles notwithstanding, this backpackers' paradise and great place for eco-tourism is now becoming a destination for the discriminating traveller, who finds the combination of natural beauty, good food and wine and a light, convivial feel to the townscape refreshing.
A New Zealand holiday can embrace all of these in a single day. For example, you can walk along the Queen Charlotte track, from Ship Cove - at the top of South Island, where Captain Cook anchored - to the Edwardian resort and harbour town of Picton on the Marlborough Sound. There, you are in the cathedral that the national parks have made of the forest, by felling pines and other European trees to let the old plants - tree ferns, trees with scaly bark, bushes which perch on other trees, all manner of strange things - regenerate.
A motor launch will take you out to Ship Cove, stopping on the way at Motuara Island, where Captain Cook sealed a treaty with Maori chiefs by giving them three-penny bits. It is now a nature reserve for rare birds, which peck at your bootlaces under the impression that they are worms. Another water-taxi takes you back to Picton for a meander around old seaside pubs and curio stores, and then it's back to the d'Urville hotel, in Blenheim, for a frittata of fresh New Zealand whitebait, with a fine Sauvignon Blanc from the Cloudy Bay vineyard a few miles away.
I stayed in a variety of better-than-average boarding houses, which are comfortable, serve fine breakfasts and sometimes good dinners as well, and the proprietors tend to be helpful and convivial. They range up to £80 a night for a double room, and the better ones are much in demand during the season. I particularly liked the Peace and Plenty Inn in Devonport, across from Auckland, and California House in Nelson.
Pies are one of the pleasures of New Zealand that pre-date the recent food revolution.
Like Australia and South Africa, New Zealand is a pie culture - it is not unusual to stop in a seaside town and find a baker offering a dozen or more varieties, including mince-and-cheese, steak-and-oysters, chicken-and-asparagus, egg-and-bacon, pork-and-apple. The fish-and-chip shop may have scallops, oysters and clams, as well as fish such as the orange roughie, and two kinds of chips, one made from the red-fleshed Kumara - the New Zealand sweet potato. Maoridom is the only dimension of New Zealand life that, so far, has no true tourist face. True, there are the splendid treaty grounds at Waitangi, where the governor's house has been reconstructed, and there is a museum, a Maori meeting house and an immense war canoe. But Maoris do not have much of a place in a tourist industry that is expanding, often, in areas of great importance to the Maori people.
New Zealand is often a ghostly place. There are the ghosts of the animals man destroyed, of the Maoris, whose tattooed faces look out from pictures in the museums and whose fortified look-outs and assembly places are now nature reserves or history parks, and of the white New Zealanders whose farms have vanished in the bush. The world of Aunt Daisy, who died in 1963, is largely gone, along with the towns that, except for the pubs, shut at 5 p.m., the full churches and chapels, and the remote agricultural settlements such as Awaroa. In their place is this attractive if sometimes uneasy culture, reaching out for Mediterranean and Californian models. It is a celebration of good food, good wine and the good life, but also of a difficult and different past.
Martin Woollacott travelled to New Zealand with Air New Zealand.