Jewish people developed cooking and recipes to suit both the local culture and their food law requirements. Did a new kind of Jewish cooking develop to any extent in mid-century New Zealand or Australia?

I thought I'd take a hand to look at this, and see what I could see.

First thing, I did was decided I was going to look primarily at NZ here for simplicity, but I will keep switching to Australia periodically. Australia obviously has a much larger community than New Zealand.

The New York Public Library has what seems to be a pretty large list of Jewish cookbooks in English and a few other languages. In this collection, there is only one general Jewish cookbook produced in New Zealand:

The menorah cook book. Auckland, N.Z., 1969. 134 p.

It seems to be a cookbook put out by "Auckland Synagogue and Community Centre", and is subtitled "A Selection of Recipes Contributed by the Jewish Women of New Zealand". There are several used copies for sale online, and it seems as if it was put out in several editions between the late 1960's and the late 1970's. These sort of cookbooks are common for fundraising and community building (the recipes were obviously donated by synagogue members) in religious communities throughout the Anglosphere in the mid-to-late 20th century, though seem less common today. To my knowledge, this is the only Jewish cookbook printed in New Zealand, and if you could get your hands on it (either through a library, or through buying it used), it might answer many of your questions. I would guess it has a mix of Eastern European recipes, British recipes, and possibly New Zealand recipes (I don't know how those would necessarily differ from British recipes), with maybe one or two Israeli or otherwise Middle Eastern recipes.

On that New York Public Library list, there are two more cookbooks published in New Zealand:

Goldwater, Reinza. Recipes my mother taught me. Auckland, NZ, 1985. 94 p. [listed by NYPL under "Latvia"]
Hirschfeld, G. (Gisi). Gisi's cooking book. Wellington, NZ, 1999. 117 p. [listed by NYPL under "Austria"]

Here, we see books that apparently were published by New Zealand Jews, but harken back more directly to Old World Jewish cooking.

There are several cookbooks in the New York Public Library collection printed in Australia:

Bialik College (Hawthorn, Vic.). Parents Association. I love to eat Jewish : the Australian Jewish cookbook. Hawthorn, 1971. 102 p.
Carmel School (Perth, W.A.). Seriously scrumptious. Perth, 2006. 179 p.
Koval, Ramona. Jewish cooking, Jewish cooks. London, 2001. 143 p.
Nu-kooka : a modern cookery book. Sydney, 1934. 178 p.
Nu-kooka : a modern cookery book. Sydney, 1947. 216 p.
Sephardi Synagogue (Sydney, N.S.W.). Awafi : Sephardi cooking. Sydney, 1990. 159 p.
Debasque, Roger. Lebanese, Iranian and Israeli cooking. Sydney, 1979. 71 p.
Smorgon, Hayley. Cooking from memory: a journey through Jewish food. Melbourne, 2006. 185 p.
Smorgon, Hayley. Cooking from the heart : a Jewish journey through food. Melbourne, 2012. 319 p.

Here we see much more diversity, but mainly they seem to fall into three categories: local fundraising cookbooks; attempts to make cookbooks about the "old country" (or Israel); contemporary commercially published books. Some fall into more than one categories, such as the Sephardi cook book that appears to be both a fundraiser and a cookbook of the old country. Nu-Kooka (subtitled "A Modern Cookery Book, containing Best Jewish and Continental Dishes, Cocktails, Savories, Confectionery [sic]" in the 1900 edition, with the later edition adding "Revised and re-edited and including the latest American recipes") seems to be the "classic" Jewish cookbook in Australia, and includes, among other things, a recipe for an enema, Jane's cinnamon biscuit, and matza balls. It was apparently put together by the Temple Emanuel Women's Guild.

Since I can't seem to obtain the books, I have tried to find reviews of the promising books. ABC broadcaster Ramona Koval's gathers recipes from famous Australian Jews, people like Melbourne-artist and chef Mirka Mora and moral philosopher Peter Singer. From the review in the Australian Jewish News, the recipes seem interesting, but not particularly representative of a distinctive Australian/New Zealand Jewish cooking.

Looking through other Australian Jewish News articles about cookbooks and kosher restaurants, I don't get the sense that there's a large amount of particularly Australian Jewish food. In the tale of a closed restaurant in Sydney, I saw this interesting claim:

For the most part, the menu has stayed the same. There’s a mix of Continental dishes — cabbage rolls and rice, langosh (Hungarian potato cakes) and bauernschmaus (a dish the Germans and Austrians call “a farmer’s feast”) — and, perhaps surprisingly, an extensive offering of kosher Chinese entrees.

“We were the first to offer kosher Chinese not only in Australia, but in the world,” Mr Genadt boasted. “We started in 1966. Everybody told me I was crazy. But for us, it was always important to satisfy the customers."

I have no idea if that claim is true, but it's an interesting one to think of: for a kosher restaurant to "become Australian", they needed to start making some Chinese food. Today, worldwide, sushi, pizza, and various faux-Israeli foods seems to be the preferred types of non-traditional foods in Kosher restaurants, and indeed, the article notes that Tibby's closing means "only a handful of kosher venues remain in Sydney. Most of them are either cafes or pizzerias, such as Katzy’s Food Factory, Bondi Pizza Gallery and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen." Melbourne, it should be noted, seems to have far more Kosher options (more than Boston, I was surprised), including a Kosher fish and chips shop.

This all makes it seem like it's not so much available ingredients causing the change (for instance, Glick's, apparently a popular kosher bagel bakery chain in Melbourne and Sydney, doesn't appear to offer any flavors not available in New York), but rather, wanting to participate in global and local cultures. At least, these are the types of recipes published in recent years in the Australian Jewish News, for instance a "Greek-inspired spinach and feta pie" or this clearly heath food inspired recipe for "chocolate power balls".

I think there is probably some disconnect between "Jewish cooking", which is a heritage activity that connects with Jewish roots, and "Kosher cooking", which is practical activity of making food that conforms with Jewish law. You can have Kosher Chinese food and Kosher pizza, but those foods don't necessarily become Jewish foods, if you catch my drift. The one recent column in the Australian Jewish News that listed cookbooks (in a column envisioning a Jewish MasterChef-like competition called BesterChef). All four of the cook books the author explicitly mentions are very tradition takes on Jewish cuisine (though incorporating both Sephardi and Ashkenazi influences) and none are published in Australia. The seven dishes he proposes the contestants cook are all Old World, mostly Ashkenazi favorites that you could as easily imagine in a Jewish cooking competition in Argentina, the United States, South Africa, Germany, or Romania (Israel has tended to de-emphasize Ashkenazi food and replace it with Sephardi favorites in its national vision of Jewish cuisine).

I find very little evidence of a distinctive Australian or Kiwi Jewish cuisine... but I am having trouble imagining a distinctively American or British Jewish cuisine either. Lox and cream cheese (replacing Old World salting with Canadian smoking), kosher hot dogs, deli sandwiches, awful but wonderful Manischewitz wine (made from a grape you could grow in New York State at time when importing wine kosher wine was difficult), egg creams, there are certainly a few things, but not that many.

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