South Africa is a country of diasporas. Nowhere is this more evident than in the many cuisines that carry with them the personality of people who have migrated from some heartland far off. When they eat, they truly believe they are devouring some aspect of their proud history and it grants them permission to vehemently hate the food of everyone else.
It’s daring to suggest, likewise, that too many locals detest anything culinary that lands from abroad. One therefore hears a cautionary alarm bell ringing when it comes to the insider-outsider food debate, casting doom on any real hope of multicultural bliss.
Externally, though, cookery-book heroes and heroines have been traipsing through exotic landscapes for decades gathering ideas for overpriced, ostensibly authentic artifacts.
The new move is for disparate groups to use food to foster multicultural understanding. Nigella Lawson’s 2004 Feast (Chatto & Windus) actually evolved from her work with an international group of chefs supporting tolerance, and she had recipes for Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Eid.
Into the mix comes veteran South African food writer Phillipa Cheifitz’s South Africa Eats (Quivertree), a timeous exploration of some exotic personalities who have changed the way people around them cook.
The book contains portraits and recipes gathered by Cheifitz from her Ashkenazi grandmother Annie Kantor, the Sephardic Gina Saban, restaurateur Mariana Esterhuizen of Cape Dutch and French Huguenot stock, cookery teacher Ramola Par-
bhoo, the late Greek matriarch Sophia Protoulis, Italian restaurateurs Mario and Pina Marzagalli, Debbie McLaughlin of Hilda’s restaurant at Groote Post, Portuguese cookbook writer Mimi Jardim, food editor Dora Sitole and Malay food fundi Cass Abrahams.
With this menagerie it was down to Cheifitz, best known as consultant food editor of Woolworths’s Taste magazine, to construct a well-balanced menu of traditional dishes with a modern slant.
The mix has some unpredictable moments (Mario’s crumbed brains with capers you wouldn’t get anywhere else, for example). Yet on the whole, its chapters on original cuisines (just less than half the book) are all too familiar: things such as blintzes, borscht, broccoli pasta, green curry and buttery Greek biscuits called kourabiedes.
It’s in the second half of South Africa Eats that things hot up, with magnificent portraits by photographer Craig Fraser of individuals whose life in food defines who they are. They are restaurateurs, market stallholders, fishermen and the like.
The recipes are in places exotic without being unfamiliar (waterblommetjie and sorrel risotto) and, in others, homely without being boring (smoked turkey and lentil soup with goat’s cheese).
Come the World Cup, there will be travellers looking for mementoes of their, hopefully, fabulous stay. If they’ve slept well and dined well, it’s likely that books such as this will be tucked in their luggage as they go back home.