Toheroa - heritage memories

When Max recalls his childhood growing up in Dargaville near the Kaipara Coast – one memory takes precedent, that of his father preparing a local shellfish so delicious and sought-after, it used to be canned and exported in vast quantities. By Tobias George.

Known by its Māori name toheroa, or long tongue, this large, endemic Kiwi clam once rivalled the turtle for the culinary world’s soup-tureen crown. 

Toheroa have a taste like no other seafood and were once so plentiful on Northland’s west-coast beaches that there were three canning factories in the region, exporting the tongue meat and the distinctive yellow-green soup to the four corners of the globe. Production of canned toheroa started at the beginning of the 1900s and peaked in the 1940s, until the shellfish beds thinned out.  

By 1969 commercial harvesting of the shellfish had been stopped. Restrictions on public toheroa-gathering were put in place in the 1950s and by the 1990s any harvesting was banned (policed by fishery inspectors and hefty fines), with the exception of a Māori customary take, through Ministry of Fishery permits given out by authorised locals for special occasions.

The last opportunity the general public got to dig for their toheroa heritage was a one-day open season in 1993 at Oreti Beach in Southland – one of just two places outside of Northland’s west coast where this shellfish is found. There was a bag limit of five per person and a minimum shell length of 10cm. During the nine-hour digging spree at low tide on that last open day, it is estimated that around 15,000 to 20,000 shellfish were gathered by locals.

Heritage re-found

Max turned 60 last year (2009) and a conversation with an old-timer who remembered his dad and the large sacks of toheroa he generously shared with family and friends, got him thinking of a special birthday occasion.

“While it was my birthday party – I had this vision of gathering with my close mates for one last toheroa dig and making a special event of it.”

He approached the iwi who look after the toheroa beds at Baylys Beach, directly west of Dargaville and the southern entrance to Riporo Beach that sweeps 100km up the west coast of Northland. Max told them of the pending birthday and his childhood memories, the trust work he does helping Northland youth, and the opportunity of a small party of veteran toheroa lovers recapturing their culinary heritage just one more time. A permit was issued for the 60th anniversary of his family iwi.

His group of 20 were given a customary quota of 10 shellfish each and their catch had to be at least nine centimetres in length. A native shellfish of New Zealand, toheroa is one of the largest of the 1200 clam species found around the Pacific Rim.

“I made some little boards with marks to gauge the minimum length of our shellfish that, in the end, averaged over 11cm long,” says Max. 

“Some of the group recall digging out shells much bigger than that in the old days.”
Toheroa huddle up in distinct narrow bands – the juveniles inhabiting the high-tidal beach while the adult shellfish are usually found in the low- and mid-inter-tidal area. 

“I thought we would find them all over the place, but they were in a very narrow 30-metre strip and at the high-water mark.”

Max’s diggers waded through the out-going tide looking for the two tell-tale holes created in the sand by the toheroa feeding filters. 

This bivalve has an extraordinarily long, powerful, white muscular foot of tough flesh, shaped like the human tongue, and often as large, that is uses for propulsion and burrowing.
“The digging was hard going,” concedes Max.

“Our permit required us to dig with out hands – no spades or digging utensils - and once the toheroa know you are after them, they are off.”

When they did catch up with their sand-burrowing catch, the bigger ones took some wrestling to pull out of their anchorage. 

“You had to dig around the sides of the shell, get a good grip and twist them out.”
The shells, held together by a powerful hinge, have a sharp edge that proved a formidable defense to intruding fingers.

“A couple of guys cut the tips of their fingers chasing them through the sand, but it didn’t seem to damper their digging.”

It was a far cry from a century ago when horse-drawn ploughs and pitchforks were used by locals on this very beach to collect tonnes of toheroa for the canning factories. 

Squatting in the wet expanse of golden sands sloping into the Tasman Sea, Max’s gatherers worked with the tide. As the surf thumped methodically along the coast like a salute from a battery of cannons, the spent waves raced up the glistening sand in fan-like semi circles, hissing around their ankles, filling up the hand-dug holes, and sweeping the odd catch back into the safety of the sea. The gulls camped upwind, waiting in unruly quest for an unguarded shellfish. 

Forty years ago, during the March-to-October toheroa season, this beach would have been swarming with extended families filling buckets and sacks with their catch and hauling them up to their parked cars in the sand dunes. 

“It brought back a lot of memories,” says Max.

It was late afternoon by the time the group had caught their quota and getting dark by the time the troops were bussed back home, and with a local pub-stop en route for a chance to disentangle the effects of salt and wind with liquid refreshment and reminisce about old recipes. 

The purists still say the only way to enjoy this shellfish, and any other for that matter, is to eat it raw straight from the shell. Regardless, all sand-dwelling creatures need a lot of washing in clean water to get rid of the grit in their gut, or be left in fresh water for 12 hours while they spit the sand out.

Some of the group made traditional toheroa soup with their catch, and the soup you see in the photographs is from a classic Aunt Daisy recipe book from the 1950s. Max made fritters, just as his father did.

“I wasn’t sure of his exact recipe, but someone said not to throw anything away, which was fortuitous, considering how much effort that went into catching them.”

The large stomach of the toheroa holds a lot of green chlorophyll that gives the meat a greenish tinge when it is minced up.

“The mixture looked a bit of a blackish green mess, but I cooked my fritters the way I cook all my fish – minimally and with few other ingredients – and the finished taste was a memory rush,” says Max.

“It is such a distinctive, unforgettable taste and I had these incredible flashbacks to my youth and visions of my father.”

Heritage lost

As time moves on and memories fade, it will become harder to appreciate the special place our unique toheroa clam played in the history of New Zealand’s cuisine. The taste was almost addictive. 

Noel Holmes, a good Kiwi journalist from the past, in his book Just Cooking Thanks (a play on his popular newspaper column in the 1950s, Just looking thanks), first published in 1963 (republished as Hook it and Cook It in 2004), highlighted that addiction at a time when this country was enjoying its highest standard of living, lobsters were cheap and snapper as big as dustbin lids.

“Here's a shellfish that has driven thousands of respectable citizens to crime. People who hesitate to pick up threepence in the street have crept over the sandhills in the dead of night and stealthily raided the toheroa beds with all the desperate daring of wartime commandos." 

“Men who would punish their children for telling a lie have filled the hubcaps of their cars with toheroa and have greeted beach inspectors with treacherous smiles of blissful innocence.”
The addiction became worldwide and this country has a practice of putting exports ahead of domestic culinary heritage. To this day, we pay export prices for our sea harvest, (unless you catch it yourself) and all seafood resources, following the route of the Toheroa, are getting thinner. Other kai moana treasures have become victim to the export dollar – orange roughy, scampi, spiny lobsters, and bluff oysters  – luxury items these days.

Meanwhile, our toheroa beds are not returning in any numbers that will likely see the authorities re-open a season, even for one day. The surviving beds are still susceptible to storm events, erosion of fine sand substrates, algal blooms, and the movement of beach vehicles, particularly on the juvenile that sit just under the sand, up on the tidal heights of the beach.

Toheroa harvesting on Ripiro Beach in the 1940's. Picture - Dargaville Museum

Autumn 2010 

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