What Is Pavlova And Where Does It Come From?

Ask anyone if they know what a pavlova is or where it comes from, and the response might be an international list. As with many recipes, the real origins are hazy and older than we might think, having transformed over time into the dish we recognize today. The matter of the pavlova's origins, specifically, has attracted some passionate researchers in recent decades, and they have discovered a surprising melange of cultures that have come together to create something so uniquely sweet and widely beloved. From all the intrigue regarding the pavlova origin story, we know that it has German heritage and a Russian name but has long since reached the relative status of national dish in Australia and New Zealand. As for how this all came together, myths and vagaries abound. 

The mystery of how the pavlova came to be and where it became most popular only seems to enhance the dessert's appeal. A recipe that's simple yet sophisticated, the pavlova is, in any case, easy to love. It's no wonder so many have claimed it as their own.

Pavlova is a light and airy dessert made of a soft, baked meringue topped with sweetened whipped cream and fruit. Complex despite its minimal ingredients, it is a dessert that is well-suited to adaptations and appropriate for any season, since tropical fruits and berries pair equally well with the meringue and cream base. Texturally, a pavlova is simultaneously decadent and light, as the chewy meringue provides a pleasant contrast to the thick cream topping. 

A pavlova meringue is unique to other meringues, due to the addition of vinegar and/or cornstarch when whipping up the egg whites. The chemical reaction of these ingredients with egg whites and sugar ensures that the meringue, once baked, will still be soft on the inside rather than internally brittle, as with other meringue variations. Instead of a crisp structure all the way through as is the case for a traditional, purely egg-white meringue, the pavlova's softer consistency is what makes the dessert so coveted. When ready to serve, the crisp outer shell of the meringue yields to a soft center which can then be cut in slices like a cake.

Though the origins and evolution of the pavlova into the meringue and cream confection we know today are up for debate, the pavlova's name has a clear point of inspiration. Named for Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova, the dish is said to resemble a ballet tutu in form and the dance's lightness in texture. The dessert and its ballerina-inspired name both have origins many vaguely believe to have appeared in both New Zealand and Australia sometime after 1926. It is true that the location and time frame correlate with Anna Pavlova's tour of Australasia, for which she was lauded with widespread acclaim. 

It's not all that surprising that an early 20th-century dessert would be named for a known public figure. Pavlova is one of numerous desserts created around the turn of the century named after famous people who left their mark in Australia, New Zealand, or both. Peach Melba was created in the 1890s to honor Australian opera singer, Nellie Melba, when French chef Auguste Escoffier's time at London's Savoy Hotel coincided with Melba's London tour. Lamingtons, another dessert of disputed origin between New Zealand and Australia, are cake squares covered in chocolate, rolled in coconut, and allegedly named for Lord Lamington, governor of the Australian state of Queensland from 1896-1901. The pavlova continues this period tradition of dishes named after known figures, and the pavlova dessert's popularity may be related to the celebrity associations the name provides. 

Contested origins notwithstanding, the pavlova quickly became a popular dessert in both Australia and New Zealand. Today, it is such an integral part of the two countries' cuisine that both consider the pavlova to be a quintessential dish, if not a national dessert. Light and fruit-forward, pavlova has all the fixings to be the perfect summer confection, which makes it a holiday staple (and often the pièce de résistance for a hot afternoon barbecue) in Australasia where the seasons are reversed and the end of the year falls in the heat of summer. But although fundamentally constructed from the same base of meringue and cream, pavlovas tend to differ slightly in each country that claims the dish as their own. In Australia, the confection is traditionally topped with passionfruit, whereas in New Zealand, the fruit of choice is, fittingly, kiwi.

Because the pavlova has become such a fixture in both Australian and New Zealand cuisine, popular belief in the dessert's origin myth presumes that the dish originated in one country or the other. But there's much evidence to suggest that the pavlova is the legacy of European meringue-based cakes that became increasingly popular from the 19th century onwards, once advancements in mixing technology made meringues much easier to whip up. Why the pavlova remained more popular in Australia and New Zealand than anywhere else remains somewhat of a mystery, but both countries have valiantly safeguarded this adopted dish for decades.

The pavlova's origin remained somewhat unexplored until the 1970s, when Herbert Sachse, former chef at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, Australia, came forward claiming the recipe as his own invention. According to Sachse's story, he was commissioned in 1935 to create desserts that would entice ladies in for afternoon tea. According to the BBC, the name "pavlova" came from the Esplanade's house manager Harry Nairn who remarked that Sachse's meringue dessert was as "light as Pavlova," giving the treat a title which rode the legacy of continued acclaim for the Russian ballerina who had toured the region a few years prior. 

This presumption that the dish came from Down Under was relatively uncontested until Sachse's death, which reopened the subject for debate in the 1980s and '90s, prompting a deep dive into Australian food history. Findings revealed that New Zealand technically does have more claim to the dish due to the country's own recipes for pavlova-like desserts appearing a few years sooner than Sachse's. While it has been proven that Sachse was by no means the inventor of the pavlova, his version — whether plagiarized or adapted — likely helped boost the dessert's popularity in the 1930s. Though perhaps not their intention, cookbook authors Jan Berry and Helen Wearing-Smith summarized the pavlova's place in Australian cuisine diplomatically by including it in their 1993 compilation, The Proud Tradition of Australian Cooking, a collection of "inherited recipes" from cooks who came before. 

Australia's claim to the pavlova's origins in the 1970s inspired outrage amongst many New Zealand women who counterclaimed that Sachse's recipe was more plagiarism than original invention. This sparked a new rivalry between the two countries which has come to be known as the Pavlova Wars; a debate which has never been officially settled. New Zealand's argument remains that their home cooks had been baking pavlovas well before any Australian claim to the dish. Anthropologist and author Helen Leach's research into the pavlova's history is what confirmed that New Zealand pavlova recipes do technically predate Australia's claim, with written evidence published as early as 1929. It's possible that New Zealand bakers could have been serving pavlovas even before that if recipes were shared by word of mouth, but a lack of formally published recipes suggests the pavlova was the invention of neither New Zealand nor Australia, but rather a dish adopted and modified by both countries. 

Without proof for an original or emblematic recipe from either side of the pavlova debate, Leach concluded that pavlova was probably a trending name change for preexisting and continually evolving meringue cake recipes which are a much older phenomenon. "There was never an original pavlova cake recipe ancestral to all later variants," Leach summarized in an article for Gastronomica. "What was spreading around New Zealand, and later Australia, was the fashion for calling meringue cakes by a new name commemorating the superstar Pavlova."

The pavlova meringue cake was part of a widespread renaming phenomenon, and there were numerous (but very different) dessert recipes also called pavlovas which came out around the same time. An early example, dating back to the 1911 New Zealand Herald, is the Strawberries Pavlova, a glacé of sorbet fitted into an elaborate cake mold. Later came a layered gelatin published by the Davis Gelatine Company in Australia in 1926. In 1927, the New Zealand edition of the company's cookbook published a completely different recipe by the same name for walnut and coffee-flavored meringues with a cream and cherry filling. These later recipes whose publishing dates coincide with Anna Pavlova's 1926 Australasian tour have no real relation to the dessert we know as a pavlova today, but their shared appellation provides some insight into how the origins of today's pavlova may have become obscured. 

"People most often confuse the history of the name with the history of the confection..." New Zealand lexicographer Harry Orsman wrote in his 1996 letter to Helen Leach, which was included in her book The Pavlova Story: a Slice of New Zealand's Culinary History. Despite bakers' nationalistic fervor in Australia and New Zealand claiming to have invented the pavlova themselves, the recipe's hazy origins suggest that there was no true inventor of the dish — it simply evolved over time and happened to regain popularity when given a new name in the early 20th century. 

As for which recipes have an ancestral claim as part of the evolution into today's pavlova, Dr. Andrew Paul Wood and Annabelle Utrecht, from New Zealand and Australia respectively, dug into their rivalry for national desserts to reveal that the Pavlova's story is much deeper and more diverse than any legends dared to go. The pair discovered that meringue cakes and desserts served with cream and fruit have been relished since at least the 18th century, and were especially popular in Germany. 

But Wood and Utrecht's research traces pavlova's heritage possibly back to medieval Arab sweets made from sugar syrup and egg whites. These desserts evolved with various cultural influences and technologies to reach their height in the Habsburg Empire, which had influence across Europe. Desserts that closely resemble the pavlova we know today include the Spanische Windtorte, an Austrian layered meringue, cream, and fruit cake dating back to the 1700s, which would go by other names such as baiser torte (kiss cake) and schaum torte in the following centuries. These tortes expanded out of Europe wherever their bakers moved to, and many ended up in the US, but recipes were prevalent in South Australia by WWII as they arrived with a wave of German immigration. The pavlova appears to be something that developed in name and form across centuries and cultures, less proof of national identity than it is a broader example of a recipe solidifying through a gradual evolutionary process.

Before the 20th century, meringue had been largely reserved for the elite due to it requiring luxury ingredients and lots of labor to prepare — eggs originally had to be whipped by hand, a process that took a lot of time and energy. Amongst the nobility that enjoyed meringue desserts throughout the centuries, Elizabeth I was an early fan of the sweet (as the stories go, she is said to have renamed them "kisses"). Meringues were later one of Marie Antoinette's favorite treats too. Equally enjoyed in forms both simple and complex, the meringue was still somewhat of a luxury dish until an invention in 1900 simplified the requisite egg white beating and thereby allowed for more widespread meringue consumption. 

1900 was the year that the Dover egg beater came out as a revolutionary kitchen tool. This was one of the more successful models of a rotary beater and drastically cut down mixing time, turning desserts that once required nearly an hour of whipping with a fork into confections that any home cook could prepare and serve with ease and pride. With the aid of rotary egg beaters, this new abundance of meringue as a dessert base set the stage for the pavlova to become a widespread phenomenon in later decades. Mixing technologies only continued to evolve throughout the 20th century with the invention of electric mixers, keeping recipes like the pavlova alive as they transformed into something anyone could make.

Besides changing palates and cultural tastes — and despite endangerment in the 1940s due to wartime rationing for the dessert's three primary ingredients of eggs, sugar, and cream — the pavlova has had a few resurgences in popularity, including some unexpected recurrences in recent years. The pavlova got some attention when champion American golfer, Phil Mickelson, reminisced on an anecdote from a 2014 Australian-themed Masters Champions dinner, during which he surprised his fellow golfers with obscure knowledge on the origins of their Down-Under dessert. But the pavlova has also reappeared in the public consciousness as a dessert well-suited to elaborate chef experiments, and has surged to popularity in the past few years as a dish in high-end restaurants. With its return to the luxury sphere, however, the pavlova is becoming equally beloved across internet channels for its democratic bakeability. Due to the occasional unpredictability of the baked meringue, pavlovas embrace asymmetry and provide a blank canvas with which home bakers can experiment with compotes and drizzles galore.

The pavlova wars have also been resuscitated via social media, thanks to an ad which recently appeared in New Zealand's Auckland airport. The Daily Mail reported that this sign reading "Home is where the pavlova was really created" reignited passionate debate and rivalry between Australia and New Zealand. While neither country can likely prove true ownership of the dish, using it as a patriotic symbol has only continued to enhance the pav's popularity.  

For all the complicated debate on where the dish comes from, pavlova requires relatively few ingredients to make, and just a handful of steps to prepare. First, you'll have to separate the egg whites essential to making the meringue base. Next, using a hand or stand mixer, whip the egg whites into soft peaks. Then add in the cornstarch and sweetener and mix until it all whips into stiff peaks. If you've never attempted a meringue before, here's a list of some mistakes to avoid, including not bringing the egg whites to room temperature before you whip them (this is what ensures they reach maximum volume). 

Once the meringue is mixed to the right consistency, pile the mixture into a round mound on a baking sheet, leaving a bowl-like indentation on top which will later be filled with fruit and cream. Bake the meringue for as long as your recipe requires, and let it fully dry in the oven after baking before you take it out and then let it cool completely. From there, the rest is just garnish. Whip up as much cream as you want and pile that into the meringue before topping the entire thing with your fruit of choice. The pavlova's meringue base is neutral enough that it provides a blank canvas for flavor experimentation. While berries or tropical fruits are traditional, there's an equal opportunity to branch into new flavor profiles and make the pavlova your own.