Since she was a girl, Naomi Toilalo has had two great loves – her kai and her reo.
Now the former Māori TV presenter and The Great Kiwi Bake Off contestant is helping others bring the two together with her debut cookbook WhānauKai, a collection of baking recipes presented in both English and Māori.
Growing up in South Otago, Naomi – who is of Ngāti Porou descent – very quickly learned the value of baking from her mum Isobel.
“She was very creative and such a great cook. I grew up in a farming community where everyone bakes – a lot of it is because in that farming culture, the work is very physical and after you’ve dragged out 500 sheep during the day, you do just want a piece of caramel slice this big,” says Naomi, holding up her hands to imagine a sweet treat the size of her head.
“I was privileged enough to be around people who really loved to share in that experience of hospitality. So yes, it’s baking and it’s a cookbook, but it’s also bigger than that – it’s an expression of manaakitanga [respect and generosity] and love.”
Fittingly, the first chapter in the book is named after the final recipe Naomi, 40, was able to learn from her mother – pokenga (dough).
“My mum passed about 14 years ago and the last thing she taught me to create was to be able to make bread from scratch. So after she died, it was my mission to perfect it. Now, just as she taught me and her mum taught her, I’m teaching my tamariki. I just want to pass on that legacy. He taonga iti tuku iho [a small heirloom].”
Naomi learnt bread-making from her mum and now it’s an all-hands-on family affair!
That is also why the book is bilingual, stemming from Naomi’s desire to pass on and share te reo Māori, something that is a massive part of her life, family and her work.
Like her love of cooking, her love of her reo began early. At 11 years old, she went to a week-long whānau reunion where the majority of people spoke Māori.
“I didn’t understand a word of it, but my wairua [spirit] just went, ‘This is who you are’. It birthed this kind of awakening,” Naomi recalls.
From there, she did whatever she could to learn the language, studying by correspondence during her school years, which was a testament to her determination considering it operated via snail mail at that time. Then after school, she spent a year at polytech, before undertaking a degree in Māori studies and theatre at the Universities of Otago and Auckland.
The TV presented advises learning te reo in small bites.
Following another great passion, Naomi later turned her attention towards telly – specifically Māori Television, where she could continue to use and improve her reo.
She landed her first gig on Cyberworld in 2005, before going on to shows like Tau Ke, Tu Wera, Tōku Reo, Pūkoro and more. But despite all of this, for years, she remained hesitant to speak her language out loud in everyday life.
“I was good at reading and writing the reo out of uni, but for ages, if I saw someone who could speak Māori, I would only speak English,” admits Naomi. “I was still so scared. It was really sad. But when my first-born [Isabella, 12] arrived, it was like, ‘This is my time to go for it.’
“A baby is not going to judge you, eh? And, you know, a lot of our kōrero with our pēpi are just things like, ‘Are you hungry? Are you tired? Do you want a drink?’ And so I just started practising more and more.”
Since then, she and her husband Paul, 42, have had three more children, Hanaia, now 10, Manawa-ora, six, and Aamalia, five, and all four kids have been raised not just bilingually, but trilingually.
Naomi explains, “I’m the only one in my immediate family and of most of my cousins who can speak Māori, so if I don’t teach them, the generations losing our reo just go on and on. And my husband had grown up in a fluent-speaking Samoan whānau, where they all still speak Samoan now, so it’s like, ‘You’ve just got to go for that, bro.’
“The kids still pretty much only speak English back to us, but we just keep going because we know that it’s in there and that they understand! We’ve never faltered.”
The children were also the catalyst for Naomi’s move into the food world because while she’d always loved cooking and especially baking, she hadn’t considered it as a career move.
Naomi is passing te reo and her baking skills on to her tamariki.
It wasn’t until their youngest arrived in 2017 and Naomi became a full-time, stay-at-home mother that things changed. While she loved being with the kids, she also found herself “ki raro i te kapua pōuri”, which translates literally as “under a dark cloud”.
She says, “I was a bit down, a bit creatively stifled.”
Having a baker for a mum is icing on the cookie for Aamalia.
Eventually, Naomi’s sister suggested she marry her love of te reo with her love of cooking via an Instagram page where she could teach both at the same time. Naomi did that and more, doubling down
first by competing on national television on The Great Kiwi Bake-Off in 2019 and again, the following year, with the launch of her hugely popular, self-made Instagram show WhānauKai: The Giving Series.
With the success of those pursuits, Naomi has learned the importance of kai, not just as a way of showing manaakitanga, but as an extremely useful tool to deliver the language too.
“No matter who you are, the reo has a heaviness to it, eh?” muses Naomi. “Because our people, our tipuna, have gone through so much for it, we all know this kōrero. But if it stays heavy, lots of people will stay hands-off. So my little drop in the pool of te ao Māori is that I want to make it a little lighter.
“I feel like if you hand somebody a piece of cake and tell them it’s ‘keke’, it brings the weight of it back down because food is universal. That is always my hope – just to keep the kaupapa [practice] as light as possible so that people feel like no matter who they are, they’re welcome to the reo.”
That’s why, in her new book WhānauKai, her recipes are written in both te reo and English, so people can easily learn and substitute the Māori words of ingredients and actions, putting them to use
in their own homes.
Naomi says it’s part of simply inserting the vocabulary in small, manageable doses in the same way we hear presenterson the news each night.
“If there are just little pockets of it everywhere, it helps people pick up little bits in a really light, easy way. Often when people learn the reo, all they’re thinking about is being fluent. Mate, I’ve been learning for years and I still have so much to learn. We can only do what we can do.
“But I totally understand that place of frustration like,
‘My wairua knows this, but it’s so hard to grasp onto sometimes,’ and that’s exactly where I want this book to land. Like, ‘I’m with you, I’m on the journey and I know your pain, so let’s just have a biscuit and carry on, eh?'”
Whānaukai: Feel-good Baking To Share Aroha And Feed Hungry Tummies by Naomi Toilalo, rrp $50.
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