Katherine's Kitchen: Investigating Colonial Cooking

Overview

Katherine Mansfield is perhaps New Zealand's most famous writer, penning prose about life in early New Zealand, often drawing from her own childhood experiences. She spent many years in continental Europe as well as back in New Zealand, growing in reputation as a writer before her death in 1933. She was raised in Thorndon, in a large old house which now houses the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Museum.

Katie Cooper is a curator at Te Papa Tongarewa, with a special interest in the material culture of domestic life. She has spent many years researching colonial cooking, looking at how the technology of colonial kitchens available to New Zealand's settlers would have informed their everyday domestic life.

In celebration of Heritage Week, Katie Cooper will be presenting a talk "At Home," drawing on her research within the context of Katherine Mansfield's home and family life. It's Downton Abbey, gone colonial. Step back in time and see how early New Zealand family homes would have operated, around the nucleus of the house, the kitchen.