Even More Pavlova

I seem to be doing New Zealand’s work of cultural differentiation from Australia for her. Yesterday I found that The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, edited by Tony Deverson and Graeme Kennedy for the New Zealand Dictionary Centre (2005) has finally hit the shelves of the Starr Main Reference Room in the Sterling Memorial Library here at Yale. However, I was shocked to find that they ascribe pavlova, n. (p. 832) simply to “orig. NZ & Aust.” I feel strongly that this is technically incorrect. My own researches have clearly demonstrated that the canonical pavlova was named in New Zealand, and co-opted soon afterwards by the envious Depression-era housewives of Australia. In her exhaustive The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand’s Culinary History, Helen Leach has evidently gone into same the question in far more exhaustive detail, but thankfully she appears to concur. I have not yet had an opportunity to read her book, but I am assured that my copy is on its way from A1 Books in the village of Westham in East Sussex. In due course, therefore, I should say that unless we uncover unequivocal Australian evidence in the form of some pre-1929 smoking meringue “orig. NZ & Aust” should definitely read “orig. NZ,” punkt, point, basta così. Meanwhile, pavlova, n., the brave promotional gambit of Davis Gelatine (a rather sordid jelly concocted with inter alia milk and orange juice), and pavlova, n., the American ice-cream (c. 1926) of which I can find no trace at all, evidently require separate definitions. None of which helps us to solve the problem of pavlova, adj., the mysterious color quite aggressively marketed by at least a handful of Melbourne department stores between 1926 and 1928.

Further thoughts about “Pavlova”

Let us now sift and sort the colors listed alongside the mysterious “Pavlova” in the sequence of enticing advertisements published in the Argus newspaper (Melbourne) between April 1926 and October 1928 for Georges, the Myer Emporium, Read’s and Maclellan’s of Chapel Street, Foy and Gibson of Collingwood, The Mutual Store of Flinders Street, and Payne’s Bon Marche of Bourke Street. The number in parentheses refers to the percentage frequency with which certain colors burrow their persistent way into this complete repertoire of “Pavlova” color references. (The number is omitted if the relevant color recurred in fewer than 15% of the ads.)

White: cream; ivory; sand; and white (qua white);

Pink: chardron; cyclamen; flesh/nude; fuchsia; glycine; petunia; pink (qua pink); rose (32); salmon; shell, and vieux rose/vieux rose saxe;

Red: amourette; bois de rose (67); burgundy (19); cardinal; coral; flame; henna; Sahara; mulberry (16); plum; red (qua red); new red; rosewood; ruby; russet; scarlet; strawberry, and wine/beaum (wine) (25);

Orange: apricot (25); orange (qua orange); oriflamme; sunset, and tangerine;

Brown: almond; beige (16); brown (qua brown)/full brown/mid. brown/nut brown; burnt oak; caramel; cedarwood; cinnamon (16); cocoa (19); fawn (35); mole; nigger; raisin; rust; santal; tabac, and tan/light tan;

Yellow: champagne (19); lemon (22), and reseda (mignonette) (22);

Grey: grey (qua grey) (16), and putty;

Green: apple green/new green; bottle (25); bracken; jade; lettuce; palm/palm green; spring, and vert de gris;

Cyan: eau de nil/nil/nilesque;

Blue: delphinium; Dutch blue; Elizabeth blue/pale blue/Princess blue; navy (29); pervanche (periwinkle)/pervanche blue (19); Persian; saxe/light saxe (35); sky (29), and turquoise;

Violet: amethyst; helio[trope]. (25); lavender; mauve/deep mauve (29), and parma/parma violet;

Black: black (qua black) (32).

Now clearly there are points of difficulty arising from this exercise, because it is to some extent a matter of guesswork whether, say, “sand” belongs in the category of shades of white, or at the higher-keyed extremity of the browns, or whether “bois de rose” and “rosewood” belong more squarely in the parent categories of red or brown, or indeed where “rust” might go. Is “sunset” red, orange, or yellow? “Saxe” and “vieux rose saxe” constitute a knotty problem because on the one hand saxe has strong associations with Dresden china (in all its diversity of color and style), but, on the other hand, it also retained dynastic associations with the heraldic blue of the kings of Saxony. These are not necessarily inconsistent, so saxe must almost certainly belong with the blues, while vieux rose saxe cannot possibly be anything other than pink. Apart from obvious objections arising from its appallingly racist prompt, it is difficult to see how “nigger” was effectively distinguished from brown/full brown/mid. brown/nut brown; caramel; cocoa; tan/light tan, or indeed black. Finally, I am very doubtful about the remaining three unassigned colors of “nattier”; “orchid”; and “veronese.”

Presumably “nattier” refers to the family of French painters of the ancien régime, and on that basis one might tentatively assign it to the category of pink, but this is by no means an obvious choice, because judging from their airy palette, “nattier” might equally qualify as pale blue or yellow.

“Veronese” even more unequivocally descends from the sixteenth-century painter of Venice (Paolo), and some sort of rich dark red would therefore work well enough, but “orchid” is simply useless as a color descriptor because of the huge number of varieties. Perhaps, keeping in mind the not particularly broad parameters of Melbourne taste in the 1920s, cream or yellow would not be too far-fetched; possibly pale pink, or even purple, which is an intriguing omission here, except for its several glorious incognito appearances under violet; yet purple qua purple is never mentioned.

However we may observe some trends. Reds and browns clearly outweigh blues and greens in both tonal range, basic number, and rates of recurrence. Apart from spectrum-shrugging browns, greys, and whites, which seem consistent with the Modernist moment, fully adherent reds and blues also outweigh the compound colors of blue-yellow (greens), yellow-red (oranges), and blue-green (eau-de-nil), but with (for example) those loud assertions of violet these compounds are nevertheless forcefully present.

Where, then, does the color of “Pavlova” logically go? Certainly where pavlova went, more often than not bois de rose went also. No other color term recurs with pavlova nearly so often. What is so baffling, though, is that no other capsule of references to the color of pavlova surfaces in any other Australian newspaper of the period, and most if not all references to the eponymous ballerina are at best inconclusive.

On September 17, 1926, for example, the columnist “I-no” reported in her “Sydney Notes” in the Canberra Times (under “The Florist’s Art,” p. 14), that “Pavlova and Anna Seymour (the star of Santrey’s Band at the Tivoli), both say that they have never seen anything like the flowers in Sydney, or such art amongst the florists,” but this does not get us very far at all.

It seems to me that the balance of probability points either to the whites or yellows, and not merely because these seem so under-represented against the browns, beiges, putties, flesh and earth tones. Certainly Princess Elizabeth laid prior claim to the celebrity associations of blue, and I doubt if pavlova could have been permitted to encroach upon that imperial quarter. (Also the Duke and Duchess of York visited Australia in 1927.)

If pavlova turns out not to have nestled comfortably among the whites or yellows, my second choice would be to assign pavlova to the palest of pinks or some kind of tinselly silver because what seems most surprising about surviving accounts of ballerina’s costume and toilette in the first J. C. Williamson season was the Argus critic’s references to that odd-sounding pink wig, and those slightly over-insistent touches of “silver tissue.”

I think it is unlikely that we shall ever be certain, unless some long-forgotten clue survives in the archives of Myer’s, or even the personal papers of Dame Merlyn, or some thrifty upper-end Melbourne nonagenarian still has a swatch of light-sensitive fabric buried deep in her work basket, and the memory of a steel trap. Dame Elisabeth?

The Pavlova again

A small but intriguing coda to my exhaustive researches into the question of the origins of the canonical pavlova, New Zealand’s premier cultural export, has last evening emerged from a close reading of Australian Newspapers beta.

Coinciding with the first of Anna Matveyevna Pavlova’s two sensational Australian tours for J. C. Williamson, in 1926 the Melbourne retailers, led by Georges, hitched their caboose to the prima ballerina’s publicity locomotive. In an advertisement for their winter sale that appeared in the Argus on May 19 (p. 15), it was noted that suits and frocks came in “jade, wine, cocoa, Pavlova, bois de rose, and cinnamon.”

With characteristic competitiveness Myer’s chimed in on June 12 (p. 9) with Saxony frocking in “bracken, bois de rose, Pavlova, almond, bottle, palm green, and parma violet”; bordered frockings in “Sahara, bracken, amethyst, Pavlova, palm green, nut brown, bottle, bois de rose, nigger, and rust”; and English velours in “wine, Burgundy, plum, Pavlova, saxe, Princess blue, bottle, navy, and black.” 

At around this date the ugly term “nigger” was also applied to the color of shoes and gloves sold by Debenham and Freebody in London, but that is, of course, irrelevant. What is so interesting, however, is that among the more conventional prompts, one finds here (so insistently capitalized) a loud tribute to the ballerina exclusively in terms of color, as well as, of course, a deep bow to the arrival on April 21 of Princess Elizabeth of York, a powerful reminder that The Queen was hugely famous from birth.

Gradually filtering “down,” on June 22 we find the following advertisement placed by the Charles M. Read Stores of Chapel Street, Prahran, for their winter sale, (“having purchased the entire stocks of Messrs. Wallace and Shorter Pty. Ltd., in voluntary liquidation, from Messrs. Wilson, Rattray and Danby, Public Accountants, 41 Queen Street”), namely a “Wholesale Slaughter of Woollen Dress Goods” consisting of Kasha suitings “in diagonal stripe effects of Pavlova, Dutch blue, bottle, russet, and new red,” and tubular Jersey cloth in “rose, rosewood, santal, bois de rose, Pavlova, deep mauve, cinnamon, cocoa, rose, beige, mole, grey, new green, Persian, beaum (wine) [sic: beaune], spring, vert de gris (two shades), Elizabeth blue, sky, light tan, wine, full brown, navy, also black and cream.” 

Among Melbourne retailers it seems only Read’s of Chapel Street gamely persisted in this vein. On September 20 (p. 15) their after-stocktaking sale featured French colored chiffon taffeta in “pervanche [sic: pervenche, i.e. periwinkle blue], bois de rose, plum, navy, white, brown, raisin, champagne, wine, mulberry, nattier, vieux rose saxe, rose, beige, chardron, parma, Pavlova, cocoa, and black”; inch crepe de chine in “santal, rosewood, rose, beige, chardron, cocoa, parma, mulberry, burgundy, Pavlova, mauve, bois de rose, vert de gris, navy; also ivory and black”; all-wool Jersey frocks in “saxe, reseda, nude, putty, Pavlova, wine, bottle, fuchsia, and fawn,” and all-wool Jersey jumpers in “red, reseda, jade, bois de rose, cardinal, saxe, fawn, putty, grey, and Pavlova.” 

Read’s of Chapel Street were still pursuing the same strategy in the Argus on January 6, 1927 (p. 11), where the full-page advertisement for their bumper annual half-yearly sale was headed “Silks at Remarkable Sale Prices”:

French crepe de chine, 6/11 Yd. 38–40 in. wide French Crepe de Chine, a good heavy weight All-silk Cloth, in shades of helio[trope]., grey, nigger, salmon, petunia, vert de gris, lettuce, lemon, Pavlova, apricot, champagne, burgundy, fuchsia, reseda. Usual price 10/13; SALE PRICE, 6/11 yard.

It is hard to reconstruct with any degree of precision the color of “Pavlova,” except by a tedious process of elimination. However, I earnestly hope that an answer may yet reside in the vast body of critical comment that accompanied the ballerina’s Australian engagements. Certainly it was not ivory, white, or any other vaguely predictable (or even unpredictable) color that one might readily associate with an on-stage prima ballerina, nor by the insistent jostling around Pavlova (the color) of various pinks, mauves, greens and pale blues does Pavlova appear to stray in any of those directions. We may well be dealing with some sort of rich gold or warm, sunny, buttery yellow.

In any case this hitherto forgotten meaning of “Pavlova” is yet to make it into the Australian National Dictionary, nor even the Oxford English Dictionary and I must speak to the editors about that careless omission. The fact that the color of Pavlova has since vanished into the ether of forgotten fashion (only to be supplanted by a meringue “cake” with New Zealand provenance) goes some distance towards explaining why it is not there, however we must as a nation aim for complete coverage of our linguistic heritage.

Of course, there is the issue of letting sleeping dogs lie, because once you start down this path only insanity awaits, because inevitable questions arise as to what on earth chardron, nattier, parma, and Sahara actually looked like. “Saxe” clearly relates to Dresden china, which, given their broad palette does not help very much, but at least we may assume “bottle” was green.

The Pavlova

It is a painful truth, but one which must be faced up to, that the pavlova, that iconic Australian dessert, a staple since the 1930s, was actually invented in New Zealand.

The pavlova was named in honor of the great Russian ballerina Anna Matveyevna Pavlova (1885–1931), who toured Australia and New Zealand for J. C. Williamson in 1926 (March to August), when Robert Helpmann (aged seventeen) was among the local cast of supernumeraries.

Not surprisingly, Pavlova’s visit to New Zealand was described as “the chief event of 1926,” and according to the ballerina’s biographer, Keith Money, the pavlova was devised by the head chef at a hotel in Wellington, the nation’s windy capital, which dangles winningly from the southern tip of the North Island.

Anna Pavlova made a return visit to Australia on her last world tour in 1929 (March to July), but on that occasion she did not go back to New Zealand.

Now, the earliest printed reference to a dessert called “pavlova” comes in a cookery infomercial booklet, Davis Dainty Dishes, published for Davis Gelatine New Zealand Pty. Ltd., of Christchurch (est. 1913). The Oxford English Dictionary and the Australian National Dictionary agree on this point.

However, this Davis recipe is not for a meringue-based dessert, the canonical pavlova, but for a type of jelly—consisting of a cup and a half of hot water, a cup of orange juice, half a cup of milk, three dessert spoons of Davis gelatine, six of sugar, and different sorts of artificial coloring, combined and set in a mould. This same recipe, a red herring as it were, persisted in subsequent Davis Dainty Dishes up to 1937.

However, the second (1927) edition of Terrace Tested Recipes, a collection published by the ladies of Terrace Congregational Church in Wellington, contains an ingenious submission by Mrs. McRae for “meringue cake” that is nearly identical to the classical pavlova, but makes no reference whatsoever to the eponymous ballerina.

Several other New Zealand cookery books from 1926–29 describe similar pavlova-style meringue cakes, while successive editions of Futter’s reckless Home Cookery For New Zealand (1926 and 1929) contain a recipe for “meringue with fruit filling,” which likewise makes no mention of the danseuse.

It was not until the publication of the first edition of Practical Home Cookery: Chats and Recipes, selected by the mysterious “Katrine” (1929), that meringue cake and the name “Pavlova” finally converge. The presence of chopped walnuts worries me, though, suggesting as it does a degree of unbridled experimentation. Larousse Gastronomique gives 1929 as the year of the orthodox pavlova, and they may well be right.

Great confusion has arisen from the 1973 testimony of Mr. Herbert (Bert) Sachse, sometime chef at the Hotel Esplanade in Perth (proprietor: Mrs. Paxton). Mr. Sachse claimed to have invented the pavlova as an afternoon tea delicacy in 1935, an affectionate memento of Anna Pavlova’s 1929 visit to the hotel. He also claimed the recipe he followed was clipped from the Ladies’ Mirror: The Home Journal of New Zealand (April 2, 1935), so one presumes that his working definition of the word “invent” was fairly broad.

Unfortunately none of this helps us, although the weight of evidence suggests that the dish itself was invented in New Zealand well before Pavlova’s arrival, and named for her there no later than 1929. The article about Anna Pavlova by Jane Pritchard in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is unequivocal: The pavlova was both created and named in New Zealand.

Evidently it was co-opted by outrageous Australian housewives during the Great Depression, without adequately acknowledging this, New Zealand’s premier cultural export.