Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery

"Leipoldt is the patriarch of South Africa cooking. He wrote a lot about cooking but unlike modern cookbook authors, he evoked a whole scene rather than just a recipe. When he talks about a grilled fish, he starts with building a fire – with the particular kind of wood, burning it down to a particular kind of ash, and you know by the heat on your hand that it’s ready. It’s for that sense of social and familial context that I picked that book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For example, in my book Planet Barbecue I have a recipe for sosatie , which is a South African shish kebab, traditionally made with pork and lamb, flavoured with red wine, bay leaf and apricot marinade. My recipe comes from an essay Leipoldt wrote about sosatie . He would use the fruit from a certain side of a maiden aunt’s apricot tree that faced the sun for a certain number of hours every day. The skewer would come from a bay tree and it would be whittled a certain way. The lamb came from a farmer up the street, the wine from a particular district. The meat was set to marinate in an earthenware bowl that had been in the family for however long, kept cool on the window ledge by a tree that grew by the window. By reading this little essay, you get a complete portrait of life for South Africans of a certain class in the first half of the last century. All his food writing is like that. South Africans have something called braai [grill], which is every much as essential a piece of their culture as barbecue is of American culture. You cannot understand the South African soul without understanding braai , just as you can’t understand the Argentinean soul without having been to an asado . One, that it’s familial. Two, that it is deeply rooted to a sense of place, to the farm, to the garden, to the food produced locally. Three, that South Africa is a melting-pot culture. Leipoldt is keenly aware that in the space of three centuries Portuguese settlers gave way to English settlers who gave way to Dutch settlers who welcomed French Huguenot religious refugees, who started the wine industry. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the birth of the mining industry and general rising level of affluence required cheap labour in the form of indentured servants from India and Southeast Asia – the Cape Malays – who brought in a taste for Indian, Ceylonese and Indonesian spices, which is all still very much part of the South African flavouring and culture today. He conveys all this by writing about cooking in a simple but profound way."