BITTER + SWEET: A Heritage Cookbook
By Mietha Klaaste as told by Niël Stemmet
Published by Human & Rousseau 2015.
Cape Town - Traditional country food meets the soul-stirring story of a rural woman, a domestic worker and nanny, who tells her life story to Niël Stemmet in 29 chapters.
The reminiscences start with her childhood on a farm near Robertson and finish as her charge, the adolescent son of her employers, leaves the Western Cape to head to a new life in the then Transvaal.
Mietha Klaaste was also a keen and talented cook who regarded preparing meals as a privilege rather than a chore.
So it seems only right that between the events that coloured her humble life, she shares her recipes; wonderful, honest fare where the simplicity of farm produce is never overshadowed by surplus ingredients or fancy garnishing.
A third element is Stemmet’s inclusion of carefully selected poems and excerpts that emphasise the content, physical and spiritual, of each preceding chapter. They come from diverse sources ranging from the Bible to Lewis Carroll, from Adam Small to Ingrid Jonker, from Antjie Krog to timeless nursery rhymes.
The food covers every meal from breakfast to dinner, including special occasions like tea parties and weddings.
The breakfast highlight of baked sweetcorn offers an alternative to rusks and porridge, while tea was likely to be Clanwilliam rooibos with condensed milk. To accompany it, over the weekend, were scones or crumpets or delicious ginger biscuits.
Weekday fare ranged from bully beef and rice when fresh meat was not available, to warming bredies, served with snow-white rice.
Vegetables were ever present, usually sweetened and lightly spiced. Desserts were comforting and substantial, with buttermilk pudding and melktert high on the favourites’ lists. Most of the recipes are illustrated with gentle colour photographs that are in harmony with the printed instructions.
Klaaste’s childhood was happy, living in a house on the farm of her parents’ employers: her mother worked in the big farmhouse, her father was the foreman on the farm. It was the period in South African history when apartheid laws were in full force, but this did not much affect her early days: this child of nature enjoyed school as much as she loved wandering along the banks of farm streams, looking for tadpoles and crabs.
She used to listen to stories that illustrated the hardship endured by family members living further north, in arid Namaqualand, where real poverty invaded every aspect of life. Klaaste longed to go there, and take them huge supplies of food to lighten their burden.
Life’s hard knocks started when Klaaste was told she could not go to high school, but had to start work for the farmer’s son Johan and his new wife Susan.
Not long after this Susan gave birth to her first son Daniël and, as his nanny, Klaaste replaced her hurt about missing her education with a fierce love for this blue-eyed baby, a love that thrived and blossomed as she nurtured him from babyhood through to adolescence.
As a young teenager she was raped by a member of her employer’s family, an episode which affected her permanently, and resulted in attempted suicide.
These low points were countered to some extent by a busy schedule of domestic duties and, always, the joy she felt when Daniël arrived home from school.
He was a loner, as was she, he enjoyed nature, as she did, and they both loved to cook and to eat, so the bond between them was unusually strong.
This all came to an abrupt end when Daniël’s parents decided to move to Gauteng, or the Transvaal as it was then, to look for more lucrative work.
Klaaste was told she could not join them and was given a new radio, the furniture in her servant’s room and a box of chocolates as thanks for 16 years of dedicated service.
But, thanks to an innate strength, she used the parting to return to school, going to evening classes while working in a Robertson bakery during the day.
She used the local library extensively, reading widely, listening to gramophone records and studying recipes in cookbooks. She cooked her favourites, first at home, then as the hotel cook at the Majestic Hotel. She also entered – and usually won – competitions for jams and baked goods at the local agricultural shows.
She was, as she said, “known as a top-class cook”.
Of course a story like this ends with as many questions as answers, and we are left to ponder on many a subject even as we glance through Klaaste’s method of roasting chickens which were sold in aid of funds for the local orphanage.
This is a book that is probably best absorbed in Afrikaans, but Marietjie Delport is to be commended for a great translation.
Recently, South African born chef Prue Leith is quoted bemoaning the fact that many contemporary cookbooks may be classed as “food porn” – either featuring a celebrity of some kind, or consisting of numerous photographs of glamorous landscapes, such as Tuscany, with little or no real writing on the cuisines.
Bitter+Sweet offers a striking contrast, and the publishers apparently intend forwarding Leith a copy.
RECIPE
Mommy Sarah’s scrumptious pumpkin fritters
2 eggs
3 cups cooked pumpkin, mashed
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of ground cloves
pinch of white pepper
2 cups self-raising flour
3 tsp baking powder
2 cups sunflower oil for baking
cinnamon sugar for sprinkling
Syrup:
2 cups soft brown sugar
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup Ideal milk
2 tbs butter
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cornflour
Beat the eggs and mix with pumpkin and seasoning.
Sift the self-raising flour and the baking powder, and mix with the pumpkin mixture to form a soft batter.
Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat.
Spoon dessert spoonfuls of the pumpkin mixture into the oil and fry until light brown, crispy and cooked through. Drain the fritters on kitchen paper, dish up in a serving dish, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and keep warm.
For the syrup:
Heat the ingredients for the syrup, except the cornflour, to boiling point.
Mix a little cornflour with a little water to make a paste, and stir into the syrup. Stir the syrup well. Pour the hot syrup over the warm fritters.
Weekend Argus