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Eating Roadkill, Pukekura, New Zealand

publication date: Dec 1, 2007
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author/source: Polly Evans
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Pukekura is a small place: it has a population of two. This couple, Peter and Justine Salter, claim to be ‘mayor and mayoress, law enforcement officers, cook and cleaner, gardener and rubbish man’ of their tiny township on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. ‘Some days you may catch us stressed out, most days we're worn out, occasionally we pass out,’ they say.
 
The Salters are also publicans of the Puke Pub (Puke rhymes with cookie). It’s a squat, weatherboard building; inside there’s an old wooden bar, cosy nooks, and copious jugs of the local Monteith’s Original. The pub has an itinerant history. It started life in the late 1800s on the banks of the Waitaha River. In those days, the old horse trail went past the tavern’s door, but then horse carts were replaced with motorcars, the modern highway was built, and the new road didn’t run by the pub.
 
The publican of the day solved the problem with the laconism of a true Kiwi bloke. ‘If the cars won’t come to the pub,’ he said, ‘we’d better take the pub to the cars.’ So he hooked the wooden building up to a trailer and started to move it.
 
He’d hoped to re-establish his business on the shores of a lake a few miles away, but the laws of the day forbade licensed premises to be moved by more than one mile each year. After the first year’s upheaval, the publican couldn’t face the ordeal again so he left the pub where it was.
 
It is, after all, a sensational spot, surrounded by native rimu forest, just a few kilometres from the driftwood-strewn beaches of the West Coast. The snow-capped Southern Alps rise up behind the township, and the Franz Josef glacier creeps infinitesimally slowly downwards an hour’s drive to the south.
 
Peter and Justine have made innovative use of their township’s location slam bang in the middle of the bush: their pub specializes in local ‘wild food’. Roadkill of the Day heads the menu. ‘You kill it, we’ll grill it.’ There are also Bambi burgers. But the Puke Pub’s speciality is possums. New Zealand’s authorities have been trying for nearly 60 years to eradicate their country’s most despised pest and Salter, a former bushman with entrepreneurial zeal, is doing his bit to help. ‘By eating a possum you are helping the New Zealand environment,’ he says.
 
Salter serves his possums in pies, or cooked up into a dish called Guess the Mess (possum, pitta bread, salad and quirky sauce).
 
‘Possum tastes like lamb,’ says Salter. ‘The best way to cook it is to boil it first to get the meat off the bone. The most important thing is that you have a nice, young possum.’
 
Possums can be baked, too. ‘We won a prize in the Wild Food Challenge – for that, we baked the back legs of the possum and served them with mint sauce. We called it “chicken of the forest” because it looked like chicken drumsticks,’ Salter says.
 
Salter likes his guests to know what they’re eating, and to be able to look their dinner – or one of its kind – in the eye. At the Bushman’s Centre across the road, with which he hopes to educate passing motorists about the local trapping and hunting industries, visitors can get up close with three possums that have managed to stay out of hot water – so far. But Salter and Giddy offer refuge to larger animals, too.
 
‘We used to keep a couple of animals – a Himalayan tahr and a chamois – and they liked to trot around inside the bar,’ Salter says. (Chamois Casserole and Billy Goats’ Legs both feature on the menu.) ‘One day, the tahr jumped onto the table while a woman was eating – it loved to jump up on things, you see – and stood right in the middle of her meal. I offered to bring her another plate of food, but she was pretty relaxed about it. She just lifted the tahr out of her dinner, put it back on the ground, and carried on eating.’
 
Getting there: Pukekura is on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, about 50 kilometres south of Hokitika on Highway 6. The Puke Pub is one of the only two buildings in town. Really, you can’t miss it, but the phone number’s +64 (0)3 7554008 if you need it.
 

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