Recipe said, originated in New Zealand. Keith Money, a biographer of Anna Pavlova, wrote that a New Zealand chef in a hotel in Wellington, New Zealand, created the dish when Pavlova visited there in 1926 on her world tour. Professor Helen Leach, a culinary anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has researched the pavlova, and has compiled a library of cookbooks containing 667 pavlova recipes from more than 300 sources. Her book, The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand’s Culinary History, contains a timeline of pavlova history which gives 1935 for the first Australian pavlova recipe and 1929 for the recipe in the rural magazine NZ Dairy Exporter Annual.
A "Pavlova Time Line" also appears on the Australian website "Australian Flavour" and gives an even earlier date, 1926, when Home Cookery for New Zealand, by E Futter, contained a recipe for “Meringue with Fruit Filling.” It wasn't named but the recipe was similar to today's Pavlova.
It has been claimed that Bert Sachse originated the dish at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, Australia in 1935. A relative of Sachse's wrote to Leach suggesting that Sachse possibly got the year wrong when dating the recipe, but Leach replied they wouldn't find evidence for that, "simply because it's just not showing up in the cookbooks until really the 1940s in Australia." Of such arguments Matthew Evans, a restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald said it was unlikely a definitive answer about the pavlova's origins would ever be found. "People have been doing meringue with cream for a long time, I don't think Australia or New Zealand were the first to think of doing that," he said.
