When choosing
from a wide range of objects, artifacts, books or whatever, to assemble a
collection, it is generally assumed that there has to be a certain ‘rarity factor’
in that genre. Let’s disregard for a
moment collectors of Rodin sculptures and van Gogh paintings; let us avoid Mills
and Boon paperbacks, as well as those collections of matchboxes, Coca-Cola cans,
barbed wire and car numberplates.
They range from the sublime to the ridiculous – but to every man his own taste.
Since I am among
bibliophiles (or you would not be reading this), I am quite certain that each
one of you has at some time or other felt that quickening pulse, that tingle of
excitement and that ‘Eureka Moment’
of discovering a rare and precious item to add to your collection. In our case it was most likely a book; something
that was published either a very long time ago, maybe in a small print run, or
the publication’s companion volumes might have had the misfortune to be stored
in a warehouse which was set alight during the Mau Mau insurrection (as the
lore of a rare golfing book I once handled, would have it) or got bombed in the
Blitz.
Alternatively
you can look towards the future.
Like the art connoisseur who buys unknown, ragged artists’ weird collages or
splashes or daubs on street corners for a few Rands,
in the hope that they have just met another Gaugin in the making. You are speculating that one day they will be
numbered and catalogued – as well as valuable and sought-after. In print terms, you might collect those hefty
tomes that come in plastic bags and are thrown over your garden wall – I’m
talking about the Yellow Pages – since I confidently predict that they will be
as the dinosaurs in less than a generation from now.
The people that use them now will go to the computer and find whatever they are
looking for on Google. The
era of the search engine is here, to assist you in obtaining all your needs,
fancies and desires. So let’s
explore that a little further, without going into the pro’s and cons of
electronic media as a whole – and the demise of the printed word, as is being
threatened in the same breath as global warming.
No, let us have
a look at a truly endangered genre of books, which, if publishers have any
business sense whatsoever, will die out in the immediate future. I am talking about cookery books. A strange choice perhaps, since you can walk into
just about any type of bookshop (with the exception of those dealing
exclusively with religious matters) and you will find hundreds of titles to
choose from – covering every aspect and every cuisine; mostly beautifully
illustrated with mouth-watering pictures of dishes gleaming with the ‘shine’ of
butter, and almost fooling the senses to the degree where you can smell the
aroma. So why are they endangered?
This was brought home to me about a year ago as I watch food programmes on TV
with great enjoyment. Eastern
cuisine is among my favourites, so I learnt about a Korean dish named kimchi. This was described as a sort of sauerkraut-type,
fermented cabbage preserve, with some very daring occasional additives like
shrimps or fish – not normally the sort of food we would care to have standing
round the kitchen unrefrigerated for a month or two.
My interest was
piqued. As my sister was leaving for
Singapore
in the next few days, I asked her to find me a Korean recipe book, if she could
locate one in that great Asian crossroad.
But my thirst for knowledge demanded instant gratification. Suddenly a flash of inspiration – Google it ! I
entered the word into the search form, breathless with anticipation, and in
0,29 seconds I had at my beck and call 229 000 odd recipes. I won’t bore you with the process and results, but
for the rest of the summer, my kitchen and refrigerator exuded faint whiffs of
sulphurous emanations from batches of kimchi in the ripening and eating stages
of development. I got quite fond of
the stuff.
A short while
later an Irish friend, who has an Argentinian wife, introduced me to the
concept of ceviche – a food made in
heaven, according to him. It
consisted of raw fish, citrus fruit, onions, garlic, chillies and suchlike
forms of sustenance. I had no
Peruvian or Chilean cookbooks, so once again I turned to the big G on the
screen – and once more 114 000 entries were lined up for my perusal. Ceviche is now one of my favoured starter dishes
with which I like to surprise unsuspecting dinner guests.
I was hooked. Since then, I won’t
say that I have entirely deserted my trusty shelf of cookery books, but I must
confess that I regularly dive into the wealth of choices presented to me on the
net. Not to say that I slavishly
print out a copy every time I find something – but it is oh, so easy, to find
inspiration and a bit of basic advice on techniques.
The sheer number of dishes available boggles the mind.
Just a few examples: Beef Rendang, a Malaysian dish – 174 000 hits, Apple
Strudel – 277 000, Yorkshire pudding – 354 000.
I have not established the dish that you can find the most recipes for – but
the omnipresent curry must be among them with 2,88 million recipes on-line. In search of something a little more esoteric, I
had a look at what was on offer if one wished to use the household pet, to whit
Fido or Rover, as ingredients for Sunday lunch.
Yes. I learnt among 295 000 snippets on the subject that though
dog-meat was no longer used in Germany as it was in days of yore under the name
of “Blockade Mutton”, the Swiss cantons of Appenzell and St Gallen (more
generally renowned for their cheeses) have a tradition of producing fine smoked
dog-hams and sausages to this day, and the Swiss government does not see its
role as having to control their citizenry’s appetites.
Despite popular legend and numerous TV programmes, China is on the verge of driving
dog-eating underground due to unfavourable publicity.
Not so the populace of Viet Nam, as also the great Kim Jong Un who has even
fixed the price per kilo on this most necessary adjunct to the national cuisine
of North Korea.
I am willing to
bet that you can find even the most outlandish viands and their best methods of
preparation – the most obscure I could think of was kumyss – Mongolian
fermented mare’s milk – and even for that there were two methods of manufacture
listed. So, would you think that I
am correct in assuming that cookbooks are on their way out? Surely their appeal
in this era of information revolution can only be visual.
Huge sums are spent by publishers on dedicated food designers, photographers,
layout artists and the like to make their offerings nearly as irresistible as
the succulent repasts they promise.
They must be doomed! For those of you who do not want to spend a fortune on
your collecting habit, those who want to get some practical enjoyment out of
your hobby, I would suggest that you start collecting cookery books, and not
just any, but Southern African cookery books.
The subject is so wide that one should specialise.
There’s always time later to expand a collection.
Sub-Saharan Africa is not
historically a culinary paradise.
The food crops grown during precolonial times in the largest part of the
continent, were poor in variety, and from my personal tasting of items such as millet,
sorghum, plantain, yam, wild leaf vegetables and a form of peanut – they were
rather bland and uninteresting in taste.
Protein in the form of game, fish and fowl was available in large quantities
and varieties and are equal to any other continent’s.
Not until the advent of Asiatic and Arab traders being blown across the Indian
Ocean by the Monsoon, and the Portuguese explorers with the riches of the
orient in their sights, coming down the west coast, did Africa get a sprinkling
of spice in their dishes. One writer
who seems to have a different opinion of African cuisine, is Laurens van der
Post. In his ode to food African, First Catch your Eland (Hogarth, 1977) he lauds everything
from a hunk of venison thrown on the fire by his Bushman companions, to Palm
Oil Chop from West Africa and as a crowning indignity the shoeleather and fire
combination from the Horn of Africa, called injera and wat. A prized volume nowadays, but for no discernible
reason, except the celebrity status of its author.
Despite these negative things about African foodstuff, I admit that in the
realm of beverages Ethiopia’s
contribution of coffee ranks in the top three world drinks along with tea and
beer.
So the search
for African cooking science or art can be curtailed considerably – and one
could well concentrate on Cape Cookery
in its widest sense as a subject for collection.
Before rushing out to buy in a vast stock of secondhand works by a number of
very capable cooks, bakers and domestic goddesses, let’s have a look at our
culinary history. A good book to
start with is Renata Coetzee’s work, The
South African Culinary Tradition or
if you prefer the Afrikaans version Spys
en Drank (both published by Struik in 1988).
It gives a good overall view of the straits in which the Dutch colonists found
themselves with regards to foodstuffs and chronicles the early developments of
gardening as well as sketching the content and preparation of meals. Soon a fair approximation of Dutch cuisine could
be found at the Cape, enhanced by the addition of some of the herbs that they
grew themselves, as well as the spices that came from the east, along with the
Malay slaves, who knew so well how to use them.
Added to that was the French component – a nation which was already notable at
the time for some famous chefs, like Escoffier, Careme and Montagne. The author also lists a few of the handwritten
cookery books of the early Cape period, which are of course, unavailable to the
collector, and then gives some background to early local cuisine which I have
already covered, when I extolled the delights and
quirks of cookery books from 1890 onwards in a previous chapter, so we can pass
on to cookery after the great Louis Leipoldt.
I can not
pretend that I know most of the books that have been published on the subject
since then, but here is a selection of titles that a would-be collector could
start off with. Let's get cooking with ‘Ouma’
Hendrie, who got herself into print with Ouma’s
Cookery Book (Juta, 1940) but I find her hundreds of shorthand, collected
recipes pretty uninteresting, if not repulsive – I mean, who wants to eat the
likes of beefsteak cake, redolent with
suet, cooked in dripping etc. The
only recipe worthy of mention is her ‘Humorous recipe’ in which she sets out a
sure-fire method of making a compliant husband! (page 64).
An obviously Norwegian import by the resounding name of Aagot Stromsoe passes
on some of her presumably inherited lore on the cooking of fish, with an early
effort entitled Do you know how to cook
Fish? (Juta, 194-), which should have had the rider added: Because I don’t.
A horrible little book, utterly lacking in any flair – though it does tell you
how to render inedible perfectly good dried fish by soaking and boiling it in a
solution of slaked lime. This was
followed up by the laconic Fish Book
(Timmins,
1962) almost two decades later.
Nothing wrong with that effort, since the lady obviously spent the time between
authoring the two books in learning some more imaginative ways of preparing
food.
The Department
of Agriculture entered the fray in the postwar years as well, with a number of
editions entitled Foods and Cookery –
Housewife’s Guide (1946) and later variations thereof.
These works were compiled with the health of the nation in mind; setting out
balanced diets, good food hygiene and safe preservation practices, as well as
guiding even the most inexperienced in the arcane arts of boiling an egg and
other more trying tasks.
Hilda Gerber
became something of a domestic goddess by popularising large numbers of Cape
Malay dishes with a number of books, of which Cape Cookery – Old and New, (Timmins, ca 1950) and Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays (Balkema, 1958) are just two examples. Reprints of these still appeared in the 1980’s, so
they are relatively easy to find and inexpensive.
Just recently I
came across the encyclopaedic Jess
Davidtsz se Kookboek, published by herself in 1955, when she held a
professorship in domestic science at a tertiary institution. This was probably the start of the ‘modern cookery
book’ for Afrikaans speaking women. It is also available in English. This no-nonsense work is full of nourishing stuff, properly cooked and embellished
with photo’s illustrating methods and final dishes.
I seem to recall that an added bonus, was a ‘catering appendix’ where it tells
you what quantities you need for 50 – or was it 500? - guests at a party.
Another I would
like to mention is Judy Desmond, as I am a firm admirer of her work Traditional Cookery in South Africa (Books of Africa, ca 1960). Not only does she give a short history of the art
in the subcontinent, but she also lists a number of interesting recipes, often
using ingredients that are far from ordinary.
I know of several modest little publications authored by ladies’ committees to
aid the new bride or raw immigrant in the best utilization of local produce and
amenities. These are often liberally
laced with humour and stuffed with recipes from frying an egg to concocting
your own insecticide. Indian dishes get
their dues in Zuleika Mayat’s book entitled Indian
Delights, which appeared in the
early 1970’s and which went through numerous incarnations ever since. Another is R Makan’s South African Indian
Cookbook and there are any number of books on Cape
Malay
cuisine that should be added to a collection.
Finally I would round off with Vera Heard and Leslie Faull’s book Cookery
in South Africa - Traditional and Today which is a wonderful book on the culinary lore of this vast
subject and the many influences that shaped its present form.
That only just
takes us up to the 1970’s, and there are another couple of decades’ worth of
authors and books – just on the subject of ‘Local is Lekker’ – many of them by
truly innovative, imaginative people who have enriched generations of South
Africans’ experiences of the flavour, aroma and convivial enjoyment of that
great unifier, food. As such it
would be a great pity if all that knowledge were to disappear into that great
electronic limbo that is the internet.
Instead I urge you to give a thought to preserving those endangered, tatty,
grease-stained, scribbled on and utterly used books because above all they are “The
Ghosts of Banquets Past”.
