Platter’s books for cooks

The Bok are Coming: A headline written in hope, before South Africa took to the field in the 2011 Rugby World Cup…but one thing we can predict, with certainty – these big guys have cooked their geese, had their chips, however you want to put it, now they’ve collaborated on a best-selling recipe book. When they come home it will be aprons on, and – no excuses – into the kitchen to ENGAGE!

You might suspect them to favour brawny dishes, and they do; just about the only exception is JP Pietersen’s delicate and elegant Salmon Wraps (smoked salmon, avo, pesto, salad, etc). Otherwise this is a hearty helpings book, full of family favourites and memories of mum’s home-cooking. A great gift for aspiring chefs, and more than macho enough to present to any of the men in your life.

Recommended recipes: John Smit’s Butternut Soup (a current food cliché which he, or, perhaps, his clever wife Roxy, re-invents very successfully), and his classic Bolognese sauce; Bakkies Botha’s Cheese and Bacon Bread; the Beast’s Moroccan Beef Stew…and especially his killer Harissa sauce; Victor Matfield’s Roast Chicken; Jaque Fourie’s Potato Bake (with prosciutto and Parmesan!) and Bryan Habana’s Chocolate Cake…

**Springbok Kitchen is published by Struik, in aid of the Chris Burger Petro Jackson Player’s Fund.

Elizabeth David

Books for cooks!
Great news for those who’ve never read the woman who revolutionised English food in the 1950s, Elizabeth David, and those (like me) who have, and whose copies of her books have long since fallen apart. Penguin has re-released them. And they still evoke, vividly, the scents and tastes, the markets and kitchens, of France, Italy, the entire Mediterranean.

My favourite is French Provincial Cooking. There are no glossy pictures, no supermarket shortcuts. But if you have ever travelled and eaten in France, loved it, and wanted to know why and how, Elizabeth David, 60 years on, is still your woman!

Her French Country Cooking comes a close second on my favourite food reading list, and Mediterranean Food and Italian Food are superb, too. So is Summer Cooking. No, I wouldn’t want to choose. They’re all worth having in your kitchen library, and the recipes, explanations of techniques and breadth of knowledge are brilliant but unintimidating.

The Silver Spoon (Phaidon):  Italy’s best selling cookbook for 50 years, the Italian equivalent of our Indian Delights – essential, mandatory reading for every young (or old) bride. The Silver Spoon traverses many other cuisines as well as traditional Italian; it is both a learn-to-cook and advanced cookbook.

Brilliant gift

Few other books teach 15 variations on scrambled eggs, plus absolutely everything else you might need to know about practically every ingredient imaginable. THE book in which to look up cooking times, check preparation methods, find new inspiration. A brilliant gift, both for fledgling cooks and experienced campaigners.

Cakebread, Pudding & Pie by Callie Maritz and Mari-Louis Guy (Random House Struik): By a brother-and-sister team who really know their stuff – sweet and savoury. They have even enticed me, a confirmed muffinphobe, into baking one of these boring substitutes for a proper breakfast – and (more crucially) devouring every crumb! Yes, their Fiery Corn Muffin (feta cheese, chilli, onion, rosemary, mealie kernels, etc) was a triumph, though I did ignore their recommendation of just ONE red chilli for the batter…clearly, we in KZN are made of sterner stuff than Cape muffin-eaters.

Also worth a try: Brownie Pudding Cups – super easy, and can be made a day in advance…and from Di Back of Fairview wine and cheese farm, a no-milk, no-butter, no-fat, no-flour Walnut Cake which is wonderful with (as the authors recommend) a glass of Fairview’s  La Beryl dessert wine.

The Sorcerer's Apprentices

Going, going gone
So, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli (the bulldog), has joined the dodo and is no more.  In a remote coastal village on the rugged Spanish coast, elBulli opened for six months a year and served only one meal – of 30 odd dishes – a day, to 60 or so hang-the-cost diners. That’s about 8 000 fortunates annually… and they turned away more than one million callers a year. They needed more staff to ward off punters than prepare the food.

Ferran Adria was the Spanish rockstar chef-genius who shook up the culinary landscape – and socked it to the French – with his revolutionary wafts, foams, bubbles, floating wisps and other tiny mouthfuls, squeezed, blown, hatched, extracted, injected, heated and frozen from seemingly just about anything edible, from far and near…beans from Peru, rose petals from Ecuador, fish backbones, sea anemones…smoke foam, beetroot and yoghurt meringue, distillations of sea water from the cove below the restaurant, essences of essences, deep-fried rabbit’s ears…Ferran blew open – and away – conventional notions of restaurant food.

How do you match all these architecturally flawless, sometimes barely visible bites which appear in staccato succession – around 30 such dishes making the meal – or rather, “the happening”?  You’re right.  Champagne, the ultimate cop-out, the ultimate companion – and with enough foam and bubbles to appear (almost) part of the show.

e lBulli’s choice was very often a label from Gosset – still owned by the family of Ann Huchon of Morgenhof Estate in Stellenbosch…which itself makes a fine Cap Classique.

There have been two fascinating books recently written about elBulli and Adria. The best is The Sorcerer’s Apprentices by Lisa Abend (Simon & Schuster) focused on the young chefs who work a season in the kitchen at elBulli, slave is more like it, for nothing but the experience, and who find themselves assigned to month after month of, say, squeezing pureed peas into pea shapes… Then there is Reinventing Food, an authorised biography written by Colman Andrews (Phaidon). Both riveting for serious foodies, and revelatory (for example, it’s interesting to find out that Ferran loathes the term “molecular gastronomy”, considering it very silly and inaccurate).

Peter Mayle's Provence, A-Z

Sweet!
We’re shortly off to visit mates in the south of France, and dipped into author Peter Mayle’s Provence A-Z for the odd tip. Of course, we’ll investigate one or two or more of the region’s signature rosés, which – as Mayle accurately points out – goes so brilliantly with anything pink! (Think prawns, prosciutto, steak tartare, etc…)

But another wine we’ll definitely put to the test is his recommendation of the sweet muscat from Domaine de Durban – grown and made near the village of Beaumes-de-Venise. We’ll drink it as the locals do – very frosty, as an aperitif – but we’re pretty sure it won’t come near local muscat hero Nederburg Eminence – the 2009, made by Razvan Macici, which has recently been judged the best wine in the Five Nations Challenge – a contest between South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile.

And if that isn’t enough to prove its international credentials and class, add this to its CV: this Eminence was recently placed in the world Top 10 – in the Desserts du Monde competition in France. Definitely the show-off sweet to have in your fridge.