Ah, summer. The sap is rising, and so are anxiety levels on either side of the Tasman as editors cast about for something suitably soft and creamy to fill the spaces that have emptied out as normal people head for the beach and barbies. And which fruit shall that come topped with this particular silly news season?

Yes, just in time for 2024, it’s the old journalistic chestnut over which of the two countries can lay just claim to the pavlova.

As conventional editorial wisdom has it, New Zealanders and Australians are forever at loggerheads over this and many other questions of who invented what first. In which of the country’s cafés was a flat white first served? Who should be held responsible for unleashing Russell Crowe on the cinematic world? Where did the alleged pop band Crowded House come from? But the debate over the origins of ‘our’ cake-like dessert has been going on now for almost a century, making it possibly the longest-running culinary spat this side of the absurdly vehement arguments in the Middle East about who invented hummus.

As the latest iteration goes, a new advertisement that appeared next to the baggage carousel at Auckland airport around Christmas has spurred a ‘declaration of war’ between the Kiwis and the Aussies over the allegedly beloved dessert, which, depending on whether you happen to be consuming this fluffy meringue construction in Canberra or Christchurch, comes served with strawberries, kiwifruit, passionfruit, or, er, pineapple cubes.

The offending sign was put up by the local energy company Contact. It shows two children with the legend: ‘Home is where the pavlova was really created’. Not Australia, mind, but little old New Zealand, or so the sign suggested. And the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

The pav debate particularly interests me, though, not least because of the bookish meditations it has spurred. In a recent work, The RNZ Cookbook, one of the book’s New Zealand authors interrogates the question of the dessert’s origins. The recipe for pavlova appears in Home Cooker for New Zealanders, in 1927, he notes, although since the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova had not yet visited the Pacific and given her name to the dish, it went under the more workmanlike name of ‘meringue with fruit topping’ for the next couple of years. On the question of in which country the ‘pav’ first appeared, however, he prudently ducks for cover. This is an author to whose epicurean judgments I would tend to listen (full disclosure: I am the author) but in another work, The Pavlova Story, the rather brilliant Helen Leach, a food historian at Dunedin’s University of Otago, also comes out squarely in New Zealand’s corner after claiming to have discovered twenty-one recipes in the Kiwi cookbooks even before the first one had appeared in Australia. As does the Oxford English Dictionary, which confirms that the recipe first appeared in New Zealand. Well, sort of. The one it refers to actually uses jelly; a strictly Aussie touch.

Even so, although mine is almost certainly a minority Kiwi opinion, I think I’m probably more with the Australians on this, even though you could also argue that the dish’s origins are closer to England’s Eton mess than either side will admit. (Another theory has it originating from the aristocratic kitchens of Germany sometime in the early-1800s.)

I lean toward the Australian narrative because the first recorded use of the word for the dessert seems to have been by Harry Nairn, house manager of Perth’s Esplanade Hotel. In 1935, Nairn declared – referring to the visiting St Petersburg dancer – that the dish tasted ‘as light as Pavlova’. This does seem to be where the name we know it by started.

Another strike against the Kiwis is that New Zealand hasn’t been terribly auspicious over the past century when it comes to inventing new dishes of any kind. Yes, we have an impressive export-led economy when it comes to meat and horticulture. But as far as the local restaurant and food culture goes, it’s almost entirely import-led, enthusiastically, and uncritically embracing international trends, much as wider popular culture has, over time, embraced the hula hoop, bad English pop music, or peculiar American academic theories about race. Truly indigenous dishes, give or take a few Maori staples, are few and far between. All of which may or may not be correct, but misses a more important point. In that spirit, here’s a slightly adapted pav recipe that ought to work a treat in either New Zealand or Australia.

Ingredients

6 egg whites

Pinch of salt

2 cups caster sugar

1½ tsp vinegar

1½ tsp vanilla essence

1½ tsp cornflour

whipped cream and fresh fruit

Method

1. Preheat oven to 150˚C. Line a baking tray with baking paper and draw a 20cm circle on the baking paper. Turn over the paper so that the pencil line doesn’t transfer to your pavlova.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat the egg whites with the salt until stiff, then add the sugar very gradually while still beating. Keep beating for 5 minutes to dissolve the sugar.
3. Add the vinegar, vanilla, and cornflour.
4. Pile the meringue in the centre of the circle and use a spatula to spread it out to the edge of the circle keeping it as round and even as possible, making a slight dip in the top.
5. Bake for 45 minutes, then leave to cool in the oven overnight.
6. Using two spatulas, lift it carefully onto a serving plate, fill the centre with whipped cream and kiwifruit… er, sorry, passionfruit.
7. Pause for a moment next to the kitchen counter and ask yourself this: if Satan in his infinite cruelty were to unleash a diabolical dessert on the world, would even he have green-lighted the nauseatingly sweet, cloying, tooth-rotting excuse of a pudding in front of you?
8. Balancing the cake carefully, walk over to the other side of the room, open the rubbish tin and use a fork to empty what’s on the plate into the kitchen tidy.
9. Make a rice pudding instead.
10. You’re welcome.