Cape Town - Small town cooking means having to be inventive. You’ve invited somebody for dinner who owns the best shop in town, the Hantam Huis, although to call it a shop is like calling a Great Dane a mongrel.
People ooh and aah as they traipse through a series of rooms painted in extraordinary Hantam Karoo greens and browns with distinctive friezes, past mannequins draped in exquisite vintage clothing, display cabinets full of toys from the 1930s to the 1960s, kitchen bric-a-brac and countless other lovely things.
Along the way is a room in which shelves are filled with fruit preserves, jams and relishes – so many it’s impossible to choose. And rooibos teas and buchu teas and honeybush teas and whatnot. But you don’t want to invite the guy round and serve him food from the family business. That would be almost like inviting somebody for dinner and asking them to bring their own food.
So I wasn’t keen to plunder the shelves of the Hantam Huis, despite it being the best source of all sorts of things in town. Instead, at the excellent Calvinia butchery next door, I spied a little plastic jar of powdered biltong – dried biltong that had been finely grated. At the Spar I bought a tub of everyday cream cheese. At least I thought it was ordinary cream cheese but when I got home and looked a bit closer, I saw that it was blue-cheese-cream-cheese. No matter, that would go very well with biltong, I reckoned.
I had bought a slab of farm butter (yes, from the Hantam Huis) so I decided to use some of that, and to counter the effect of the blue cheese – which tends to dominate anything to which you add it – thought I would melt some of the farm butter and add some dried ground coriander to it, which is a traditional flavouring for biltong.
Outside the kitchen door of the house we were staying in was the tallest lemon tree I have ever seen, towering above the house, and from this I plucked some of the best-looking leaves. I am on a bit of a lemon leaf bender at the moment, as they add a subtle lemon base flavour to almost any stew, stock or sauce. Use them instead of bay leaves, as they have a similar effect in their citrussy way.
In fact, I was making a chicken curry for a main course – with chicken breasts from the Spar – and shredded lemon leaves went into that to give it a citrus slant. I also made a chutney with tinned chopped tomatoes, sultanas, ground cinnamon, turmeric (borrie) and fennel, dried chillies, sugar (there’s not much by way of palm sugar in Calvinia), and those shredded leaves.
Having plundered the town – and some of the gardens – for ingredients, I decided to go in search of a new CD, as I had fogotten to put some in the cubbyhole before leaving Cape Town. There had been five in the car already – Paul Simon’s Graceland, an old Simon and Garfunkel album (coincidentally), Dusty Springfield’s Am I the Same Girl? (which has great tracks on it including Spooky and Son of a Preacherman), the Rocky Horror soundtrack and a singularly forgettable Elton John album that someone gave me but I wish he hadn’t. Not that I don’t like Elton but this was from his mid-period when not much was happening.
After five days of all that, you need new sounds. So I started going into shops in Calvinia to see if they had anything other than Kurt Darren, Groep Twee and old Jim Reeves albums. Let’s just cut it short and say they don’t. Not even Kurt Darren or Jim Reeves, or even Ge Korsten. Nada. At the Spar, desperate, I asked a cashier if there was anywhere, anywhere at all, that I could buy a CD. Any CD. I would settle for Sonja Herholdt, just give me some new music please. Fokofpolisiekar maybe? Asseblief, man. Come on, I’ll even buy Worsie Visser en sy Boesmanland Orkes’s Greatest Hits Volume Five. Nope.
A greying manageress sauntered over, sensing my distress, and asked what was going on. Between sobs I managed to tell her the whole sorry story.
“My dear,” she said, “this is Calvinia, we don’t go in for music here.”
I am not making this up. She really said that.
So, listening to Bridge Over Troubled Water (again), I got into the kitchen back home and made, first, the chutney, then the biltong paté (to set in the fridge) and finally the curry.
The biltong paté recipe goes like this:
Hantam Karoo biltong paté
1 tub blue cheese-flavoured cream cheese from the Spar
1 small plastic jar of powdered biltong from the butchery
Farm butter from the Hantam Huis
½ tsp ground coriander from the basket of stuff you brought from home
A squeeze of lemon juice from the rather sad-looking pack of tiny, barely ripe lemons you bought at the Spar
Lemon leaves from outside the kitchen door
To garnish, some strips of biltong from the packet you bought to take home to your daughter (but don’t tell her)
Scoop the cream cheese into a bowl. If you buy plain cream cheese, but want a blue cheese flavour, also buy a wedge of blue cheese and finely crumble about half of it into the cream cheese, and stir throughly.
To this, add as much of the ground biltong as you like. I used about two-thirds of the jar as I did not want the bluese cheese to dominate. I’d say about the same quantity as the cream cheese. Stir this, with a wooden spoon, until you have a biltongy spread.
Melt some farm butter in a saucepan and add to this some finely ground coriander. Pour this into the paté and stir well until it is fully combined. Add a sqeeze of lemon juice and stir again.
Scoop this into the little cobalt blue enamel cups you bought at the Hantam Huis, hoping your guest won’t notice, then stick them in the fridge to set for a couple of hours.
To distract your guest’s attention from the cups, stick a lemon leaf on top with a sliver of biltong alongside (which you hope your daughter won’t miss). - Weekend Argus