Kitchen Equipment

The kitchen utensils were a little more varied in central Polynesia than in New Zealand owing to the use of coconut cream and pounded taro for puddings. Thus the four-legged coconut grater, strainers, stone taro pounders, and four-legged pounding tables were absent in the Maori cooking houses but the local use of fern root required wooden fern-root beaters and perhaps a water-worn flat rock as an anvil. The other equipment comprised oven stones, plaited oven covers, plaited bands for the rim of the earth oven, shell scrapers, gourd water containers, flax platters or containers for serving food, and wooden bowls.