On this day in 1935 Bert Sachse is credited for creating the pavlova. Sachse was a chef at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, Western Australia. It is said that the pavlova was named after ballerina Anna Pavlova who had visited Australia in 1926 and 1929 and had died in 1931. Australians like to use this date to claim pavlova as a national dessert.

New Zealanders have a problem with this. Professor Helen Leach, a culinary anthropologist at Otago University in New Zealand, found a pavlova recipe in a 1933 Rangiora Mothers’ Union cookery book, along with an even earlier copy of the pavlova recipe from a 1929 rural New Zealand magazine. She’s written the story up in “The pavlova cake: the evolution of a national dish”, an article in Food on the Move: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1996, edited by Harlan Walker.

The pavlova, a whipped cream-filled meringue dish usually topped generously with passionfruit, strawberries or kiwifruit, is considered the national dessert of both Australia and New Zealand.