Urban Māori Comfort Food · Pork & Greens
Boil-Up
Photo: Matyas Havel / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
The traditional greens, pūhā, are sow thistle, a common weed, so many cooks still pick their own from roadsides and paddocks rather than buy them.
Pork bones are simmered for hours with potato, kūmara and pumpkin, then loaded with watercress or puha and simple flour dumplings called doughboys, producing a thick, savoury one-pot stew. It's a standard at Rotorua marae gatherings and family kitchens, ladled into big bowls with the bones left in for gnawing.
Why it's made this way: Pork and potatoes arrived with Europeans, and boil-up became an everyday Māori one-pot meal well before city life; sharing a pot of it remains a marker of home and whānau across the Bay of Plenty.
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