A biography and cookbook in one, this book had me wondering how I should tackle the review. The book revolves around a coloured woman, Mietha Klaaste, who grew up on the farm Langverwacht at the foot of the Langeberg Mountains in the Western Cape. Above all though, the book is a tribute to all those nannies and maids who took care of their employers’ homes during apartheid. Nannies, like Klaaste, who loved the children they took care of as if they were their own.
Neil Stemmet’s narrative gives voice to Klaaste as she tells of her life seen through the eyes of a coloured child during apartheid.
There’s a tinge of sadness in the biographical section of this book and one senses the injustices of the system without any direct references being made.
Klaaste tells of the simple food she learnt to cook from her mother, who in turn learnt it from her mother and grandmother.
As Klaaste writes in her introduction, “Mommy taught me to honour the meat and vegetables when you cook by adding as little seasoning as possible.” And the recipes are precisely that: simple down-to-earth heritage food handed down through the generations.
Klaaste speaks of her childhood dream of becoming a teacher, only to realise at the tender age of 13 that this was not to be because her parents saw her locked into the same fate as theirs – servants to the white family on whose farm they lived.
She refers to this as a turning point in her life and she becomes resigned to a life of servitude.
She devotes her life to taking care of Daniel, her baas’s child from the day he is born. Her life is so intertwined with Daniel’s that when the family moves away when he is a teenager, she is devastated. Daniel himself is shattered by the move because he shared all his joys and tribulations with his nanny.
The tinge of sadness comes out as a torrent of pain the day Daniel and his family leave – he a heartbroken child and she a broken surrogate mother.
It is at this point that Klaaste reveals how at the age of 13 she was robbed of her innocence by a drunk white man. She tells how her mother helped her destroy the life growing inside her and how this had marked her forever.
Klaaste later finds employment at a hotel and ploughs her energy into night school to get the education she was deprived of as a child, but the thought of Daniel never leaves her.
The recipes reflect the simple life of the Cape coloured people in the days of apartheid.
They include, among others, bully beef vetkoek, fish pie with potato crust, chicken pie, bean soup, pumpkin bredie, beef in beer, snoek tart, recipes for making various jams and traditional wedding cake. Others which stand out are smoorsnoek, sweet-and-sour chicken, springbok biltong and milk tart. Most of the recipes are accompanied by pictures.
There’s a list of home treatments for several ailments and even a recipe for making soap – the way it was made on farms for centuries.
This is by no means a conventional recipe book – the recipes appear following the line of a narrative.
The book is not about gourmet food, but rather down-to-earth simple fare without frills – healthy and economical meals any family could tuck into.
Bitter + sweet – a heritage cookbook by Mietha Klaaste as told by Niel Stemmet is published by Human & Rousseau