Cradock – The doughty Liz McGrath, months before she died this year, squeezed my hand and said, with delight, “Tony, Dom Pedros are back! You must do Dom Pedros in your tea room!” Not having a liquor licence (yet), we could be locked up for serving them, but it did get me thinking about fads and foibles.
The former are usually more annoying than they are amusing. The latter are more often delightful. Give me a character flaw or touch of eccentricity any day over a tendency to run with the lemmings.
So when a new diet craze comes along, I usually sigh and wait until it passes, contributing the odd grumpy observation along the way.
But… Okay okay, I admit it. I have strayed to the Other Side. Just tentatively. A brief encounter. Nay, a dalliance, if more toes in the water than bang-bang, thank you ma’am. Oh, out with it, then. My name is Tony and I have toyed with the Banting thing.
It lasted a day-and-a-half so it was hardly your rabid affair. Barely a fling, or even a dirty weekend. Well, I did say I wasn’t really one for fads. They come and they go, and this one will go as sure as no one does the orange diet or the Atkins any more. Do they?
In my tawdry defence, I must insist that I did not actually do the Banting diet. I just gave up carbs. These are not the same thing. The Banting thing involves allegiance to Dr Noakes, learning the secret handshake and saying “dib dib dib” backwards three times while lying prostrate under a crescent moon when anybody serves you potatoes. My knees are no good for any of that.
But I would eschew the bread, the pasta, the spuds, the whole bangshoot, as well as cutting out sugars and switching back to olive oil from the butter I have been splashing around lately as if I had become a butter millionaire.
I would eat only meat and vegetables, imagining what it must have been like to have been Tim Noakes on the day he discovered the Banting diet (okay, let’s not mention the fact that it is named after some other oke, who presumably had something to do with it).
Know this. If it is difficult to stick to a diet when you are just an ordinary Joe on his day-to-day routine, consider how much more difficult it is if you spend all day, every day, eight hours at a stretch, in a restaurant kitchen.
Temptation lurks in every direction. In the freezer lurks raspberry sorbet, luscious and wanton. In the fridge is a pecan pie, all nuts and syrupy sluttishness. If the pecan pie doesn’t get you, the aroma of freshly baked bread will. If the bread doesn’t get you, the mashed potato will. If that doesn’t conquer your timid diet ambitions, the scones will.
Ah yes, the scones. Cheese ones. Made with butter and cheddar. Fresh from the oven. The aroma wafts past you as you stand there in your determination to resist the little buggers.
But the scones win in the end. They always do. And when you have a scone, you have to honour it. So you have to have the butter, and the raspberry jam, and the cream. Oh hell. And you need two, as the first one is just to awaken the palate.
So if you want to conquer the Noakes Oke and his evil plan to rid the word of the dreaded carbohydrates, here’s the recipe Di uses at Schreiner’s Bistro and Tea Room. They’re straight out of the 1970s. Real old school. The kind of recipe you’ll find in an old copy of Kook en Geniet (Cook and Enjoy) or those ever sensible cookery books by Ina Paarman. The cookbooks you find at second-hand book stalls, between the dog-eared James Hadley Chases and the autobiographies by forgotten sports heroes.
The recipe can be used to create a savoury snack with hot butter and cheese in the middle – in which case you use the pepper and the paprika – or as a tea snack with jam and cream. Di uses a dash of paprika when she uses them for the latter, but not salt and pepper.
Old-fashioned cheese scones
1 cup flour (not self raising)
1 cup milk
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 dessert spoon baking powder
Salt, pepper and paprika to taste
Mix the dry ingredients, and gradually add the milk. Use a dessert spoon to put the mixture into an old-fashioned patty tin (the smaller version of the large muffin pan variety) and bake at 200ºC for 10/12 minutes or until golden brown.
Being cheese scones, you need only jam and cream to serve with them, but a grating of cheddar would not spoil them.
Think I might invite our Banting friends around and waft some freshly baked scones past them when their guard is down.
One day someone will read this column, frown and say, “Banting? Anybody remember that?”
But scones will still be around.
Weekend Argus