Cape Town - There are a lot of cookbooks out there these days, and I don’t rate them just because they have pretty pictures. Chef Michael Broughton’s Terroir The Cookbook, published this week, is another matter. You know before opening it that his food is among the finest of any restaurant at the Cape. Even if the pictures were sub-standard, there’s no way the recipes could be – unless he was just throwing together some of the meals he makes at home for the family.
But that’s not the case, as we learnt at the launch at Terroir, the wine farm restaurant near Stellenbosch which celebrates its 10th birthday this week with the book and a nomination as one of the 20 top restaurants in South Africa in the latest crop of Eat Out awards.
“Roger Verge said a recipe is not meant to be followed exactly, it is a canvass on which you can embroider,” he told us. “And that is the approach I’ve taken towards the book. It is a collection of 10 years of recipes. Not all them have made it but it’s a collection of a few of our favourites in the kitchen and a few customer favourites.”
He makes a surprising admission, given how gorgeous the plated dishes are. “The plating images aren’t all perfect. We could have made them perfect and added another 30 or 40 hours of photography on to that. But I chose not to do that because I wanted every element to reflect that soul-nourishing element of comfort and for people to see the vision of the images exactly as it is.
“Sometimes the plate is perfect and sometimes the plate is near perfect. But not every one is always perfect. The recipes may sometimes seem long but once you understand the methodology those can be applied in further recipes.”
He started writing the book two years ago in “a real dumbed-down version” to make it accessible for the home cook. “It was a really hard process and it wasn’t coming naturally, so I decided to stop there and write it again, exactly how we do it in the kitchen at Terroir, and the result is what you see today.”
Broughton is one of those rare chefs who never seems to put on weight. He’s fit and slim, pleasant and charming, and he’s a stayer, having stuck with the Terroir team from day one a decade ago. Kobus Basson, the owner of Kleine Zalze, on which the restaurant is based, told us that at the outset, he had asked Broughton to plan a proper launch of Terroir.
“Michael as you would have seen has got his own ideas and 95 percent of the time it’s wonderful ideas, but when we wanted to launch on the first of October 2004 I said to Michael, ‘Shouldn’t we invite a few people?’ He was coming from Sandton and things were sort of aan die slaap here in Stellenbosch. We had great restaurants but we thought the food and wine experience wasn’t yet going as we would have liked, and Michael said, ‘No, there’s no launch. We start, and if the people don’t like it, we kill the idea.’ But I said, ‘Michael, this is not Sandton. It’s a different place. You’ve got to invite the people and expose them, but he said, ‘No.’ So I said okay fine, and as you can see it worked very well.”
His publisher at Struik was Linda de Villiers, a hard taskmaster.
“Boy, Linda,” he said, addressing her directly at the launch, “never have I been so managed so well since my military days. I remember one of the first e-mails I got from Linda after meeting my deadline for the submission date of the entire manuscript. Next morning there was an e-mail from Linda saying, ‘Dear Michael, I’m somewhat perturbed by the state of your manuscript. You have methodologies missing, plating instructions are not there and many ingredients are simply not there. Please attend to soonest.”
Another e-mail: “Michael, you have said 3g of salt in the first draft of this recipe. We’re now on the second draft and you have said 5g. Which one is it???”
If the plated images in the book are not all perfect, in Broughton’s opinion, they’re not going to appear less than highly desirable to the rest of us. As Basson remarked, “He grasped it and executed it well. As my sons would say, what a boytjie.”
Weekend Argus