Cape Town - In towns throughout England there are markets where you can buy anything from fresh vegetables to electrical goods or dubiously cheap shirts and jerseys, or jumpers as they’re called there.
I say dubious because the bloke who sold them at our weekly market in Chichester looked decidedly dodgy. He reminded me of Delboy from Only Fools And Horses. There’d be row upon row of rails from which hundreds of items were hung, all for just “two for a fiver”.
You had to wonder where he’d got them, or which truck they’d fallen off. I never did pluck up the chutzpah to question their origin, for fear he might clobber me. Pockmarked skin and eyes that looked as if they’d seen plenty of solitary time out of the sun can have that effect on you.
These are nothing like the posh farmers’ markets where you can buy fresh produce from source. This is the poor cousin of the farmers’ market, like the down-at-heel family Hyacinth Bucket tries her best to ignore in that lovely British sitcom, Keeping up Apearances. You wouldn’t want to serve anything from these markets at your famous candle-lit dinners.
When we arrived in Chichester in 2002 we were pretty skint while we waited two months for the first pay cheque to come in (the newspaper company I’d got a job with had an odd system of paying you your first salary only after you’d worked two months). I chanced upon the market on the first Friday I was there. There were two competing vegetable stalls, with cries of “Lovely tomatoes, five for a pound” or, towards the end of the day, “Box of veg, a pound the lot”.
When they got right down to the wire you had the odd spectacle of a burly Cockney man offering anyone who passed a bag of veg as “a pound for a pound”. As if it wasn’t confusing enough having the same word for the currency and weight. At first I wasn’t sure whether I was paying a pound for five carrots or buying a pound of carrots for a fiver.
They had rectangular plastic bakkies big enough to hold a cabbage, five or six potatoes, a bunch of leeks, several carrots, turnips, a bunch of parsley, onions and tomatoes, a swede (like a large, sweet turnip), some broccoli and possibly a cauliflower. All for £1. On a budget, that was a week’s worth of vegetables for a quid.
First time I took advantage of this, I paid my £1, picked up the plastic container of veg and walked off, wondering who the stallholder behind me was yelling at as I left. A week later I went back and after the customer in front of me had paid her £1, the stallholder poured her veg from the bakkie into carrier bags. I turned bright red.
Try as I might, I could never find two treasured items: gem squash, and butternut. The former is seen as an “exotic gourd” there – the Brits really don’t know what they’re missing – with butternut available only in the better supermarkets like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s.
We South Africans have a passion for these squash, but it’s not shared by everyone out there. When mentioning butternut, the response was generally: “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen those but don’t really know what to do with them.”
Butternut are in plentiful supply right now in South Africa. I bought a very large one the other day for less than R10. It’s been a lean month, and food prices are high, so it was good to make a satisfying family meal with that butternut, a few sheets of lasagne, a tin of tomatoes and not much else. With rosemary from the garden, an onion, garlic and a goodly splash of dry white wine, butternut lasagne can be a pretty fine thing.
The key is for lasagne not to be sloppy. It’s tempting to make loads of sauce for fear the lasagne won’t cook through, but I find less makes for a firmer lasagne dish that’s pleasing to the eye as well.
Butternut and rosemary lasagne
Serves 4
1 large butternut
4 or 5 rosemary sprigs and more for garnish
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
Olive oil for frying
1 glass dry white wine
1 tin chopped tomatoes
½ cup (125g) tomato puree
4 sheets lasagne per portion
Cheddar cheese for topping
Breadcrumbs
Salt and pepper to taste
Peel the butternut and slice it thinly lengthwise. Be careful not to cut yourself. Alternatively, slice into thin rounds and then trim them into squares. Don’t discard the bits you’ve cut off, you can use those to fill the gaps.
Oil a large flat oven pan and lay the butternut slices in it (use two pans if one doesn’t hold it all). Drizzle oil over the butternut, scatter rosemary sprigs around, season with salt and pepper and bake in a 180ºC oven until soft. Remove and set aside.
Sauté onion and garlic, chopped, in olive oil, with rosemary sprigs. Add white wine, the tin of tomatoes and tomato purée, stir well, season with salt and pepper, and simmer to develop flavours. Remove rosemary.
Oil an oven dish and spoon in the sauce. Lay lasagne sheets down, pressing down lightly. Spoon more tomato sauce over and neatly lay butternut on each lasagne sheet to match its proportions. Repeat until there are four layers of lasagne, top with grated Cheddar and breadcrumbs. Bake for 90 minutes at 180ºC until the topping has browned.
The lasagne sheets cost R20, the butternut R10, the tomatoes R9. The wine, if it hadn’t gone into the sauce, would have gone into me. And it feeds four. A great dish for a cold night when things are tight.
Weekend Argus