First Catch Your Calamari: Travels with an Appetite (A Writer's Food Diary)

Salt River Market - Cape Town 1950s

T

his is not a book for foodies alone, this is a book for the hungry and for those who travel with an appetite. Some of my most memorable meals have not been in celebrated restaurants but those that live on in the good food cupboard of my mind, many of them taken with my feet in sea sand or lying in a field in France, or even in the army during my year of National Service and subsequent army camps. Believe it or not.

It is perhaps not surprising that I am passionate about food; my food heritage is broad. It comes out of the cuisine of Eastern European Jewry on my father’s side and Dutch and French Huguenot settlers in South Africa on my mother’s side. I was given two cultures and three languages: English, Afrikaans and some Yiddish, with a sprinkling of African language terms thrown in by way of spice.

One of my earliest food memories, and how appropriate for a future food lover, is of a visit with my mother to the Salt River food market in Cape Town in the mid-1950s. This was a veritable food circus. The place was a treasure house of the best that the Cape provided.

Little did I realise it then, at the age of five, that my own family’s DNA had been entwined with the Cape for more than 300 years. In 1660, my Dutch ancestor, Jan Pieterszoon an Caspel ter Mare (the surname Louw was added in 1689), arrived on the good ship ’t Ronde Bosje at the Cape of Good Hope, also known for good reason as the Cape of Storms. This was some eight years after Jan van Riebeeck first arrived in 1652 to plant a food garden for the East India Company’s passing ships beneath the towering heights of Table Mountain. Jan Pieterszoon Louw was given land next to the Liesbeeck River and – despite raids by local tribesmen, not best pleased to have their immemorial hunting rights trampled on by this new arrival – he made a success of his farm. He also had to contend with the depredations made by wild animals which roamed here: elephant, hippopotami, lions and leopards, to name but a few. He became one of the first successful Free Burghers to produce wheat at the Cape, later a staple of the colony. So the staff of life runs in my veins; no wonder I love every kind of bread.

I describe the Salt River Market as a food circus and it was. The calls of the Cape Coloured market stallholders were ribald, outrageous, flattering, and ultimately persuasive; they knew their customers intimately. They were brilliant ringmasters to the colourful goods on display, which included intricately cut watermelons that overwhelmed you with their sweet scent as slices were held out for you to taste. The red and green colours of this fruit, like a traffic light, stopped you in your tracks, even as the intoxicating smells of crushed fruit, spice and flowers urged you on.

‘Merrem Merrem, ah beautiful lady, come and look at what I have kept just for you, the best, the sweetest, the loveliest watermelon, just like you. Don’t break my heart, Madam, stop, stop, and have a little taste. Kom proe soe bietjie. Come and taste a little. Your lovely boy is wanting some I can see.’ And, of course, I did want some, more than some.

After reserving a huge watermelon that had been knocked on for us to hear the hollow sound of a good ripe one, the very ‘brother’ of the one cut open next to it, we moved on through the cacophony. It was like walking into a scented rainbow. Flower stalls offered bunches of elegant white arum lilies, the whole range of fynbos flowers from pin cushions to proteas and roses of every shade, daisies, petunias, strelitzia, crane flowers and, trucked in 1,000 miles from Natal, blood red, white and pink anthuriums like waxed platters alongside every shade of orchid. Beside this sub-tropical display were the fruits of that region, pawpaw, mangoes, avocadoes, pineapples and lychees. The place was as much a crossroads of Africa and the world as were the spice merchants who also had a place here with heaped mounds of curry spices and coriander in every shade imaginable.

As an education in everything that was good to eat, there could not have been a better school. And you laughed and smiled as you wafted through this magic kingdom among the apples and pears, the cling peaches and the sugar-sweet nectarines whose flavour begged for marriage with goat cheese.

It was summer and I was in shorts and sandals and a short-sleeved shirt in a time before T-shirts. And here, in this place, summer was made manifest. Here you could inhale, smell, touch (‘not too hard, Madam!’) taste and eat summer itself.

As the stallholders packed up my mother’s purchases, they would admonish her not to be a stranger and to remember who had given her the best deal, the best quality, the best fruit. They would smile and laugh and tease, gold teeth glinting. And they would shout at their competition to leave the lady alone, she was their customer.

Here, too, in gleaming displays that assaulted the nostrils was the harvest of the sea. Piled high in tubs of sea water were crayfish still moving, salt cod, sardines, fresh, dried and smoked snoek, kabeljou, kingklip, hake, yellowtail, and tunny in thick purple chunks. There were jars of pickled onions and vats of yellow pickled fish. And hanging in bunches, the scent winners with their knockout punch, were the wind-dried mullet, harders, known as bokkoms that my father loved. My mother would select the fattest smoked snoek, maybe some red herrings, some fresh harders and a sizeable chunk of yellowtail. And the bokkoms of course, which would stink up the car on the way home, fighting with the fruit for smell supremacy.

Our driver-gardener, Pieter Brill, would be in attendance and by the time we left, he and my mother would be weighted down with bags of fruit and vegetables. If there was too much, one of the stallholders would offer the help of one of his assistants with a wheelbarrow. Everything would then be carefully transferred into our car boot, being sure not to bruise any of the fruit.

How different was this market visit to that of my Jewish grandfather, made in 1890, when he first arrived penniless at the Cape to join his two brothers who had gone ahead from a small shtetl town near Vilnius in Lithuania, part of the Tsar’s Russian empire. This ruler had decreed that Jews from the age of 18 to 40 would serve twenty years in his army. It was the last straw for many, and the exodus began that would take Jews to America, to Africa and to Australia.

Herman Raf was so hungry and so penniless that when he first walked the flower and vegetable strewn market aisles, he would beg the pickled herring seller to allow him to dip his finger into the briny barrels of silver fish to get the merest hint of a taste of this Eastern European delicacy; he was that hungry. How amazed he would have been to observe his grandson, 60 years later, wafted home in a large black Buick, crammed with the best the market could provide.

Once this cornucopia was unloaded and washed at home in Newlands it would disappear into the pantry and fridges and into fruit bowls which would need a Van Gogh or Paul Gauguin to capture them in paint, or maybe the local still life specialist, Irma Stern, who lived nearby in Rondebosch.

Shortly after our return, lunch would be served and it may well have been fried fish with Mrs Ball’s Chutney and a salad, fresh bread from Enterprise, my father’s bakery, with salted butter, followed by a sub-tropical fruit salad.

My younger sister Jay nicknamed me ‘Apple-Boy’ because of my love of apples. I had chosen a favourite food wisely in a house where the pantry held six or more cake tins filled with an assortment of biscuits, buttermilk rusks (one of my all-time passions), chocolate cake, coffee and walnut cake and a four-pound slab of fruit cake from the bakery. The pantry shelves groaned with jars of green figs in syrup, canned peaches and apricots and an array of dried fruit, meebos sweetmeats and huge fat raisins still on the stalk. Also in the biscuit tins were kolwyntjies (madeleines studded with currants), Hertzog cookies and always biltong and droewors (dried beef and sausage). How it is that at 71 I have not already died from diabetes is a miracle.

My mother was a feeder on a grand scale and at our groaning mahogany dining table many a slim girlfriend would come to grief in the years ahead. If the poor girl opted for chicken instead of beef my mother would ask, ‘You don’t like our beef?’ And when the girl frantically denied this, she would hear, ‘Then I will give you a small piece on the side to taste.’ In the end my sister Jay, who had a lighter touch, would serve up for girlfriends who were grateful for this kindness.

I did not realise it at the age of five. but my palate was being educated in the best way possible. And I was making a meal of it.

Chapter 2

Sunday Night Supper

I

n my family, growing up, we had a Sunday night tradition of a very simple meal after the huge Sunday lunch. So it would be sardines on toast with a poached egg, or we would get supper from my father’s bakery. It was a great way of dispelling the impending gloom of homework not done and the horrors of the coming school week. For the last hour of the weekend, the coming reality could be put on hold as we drove to collect the meal at the factory and enjoyed what we had gathered there.

The factory was a large industrial operation called Enterprise Bakery and it ran 24/7. The place never slept. Hunkered down over a 20-acre site, its concertina roofline was a feature of Lansdowne in the 1950s and 1960s, when the area was still partly rural. It featured the longest rotating conveyor belt in Africa at the time, a wood-slat affair some quarter of a mile long on each side. Its job was to cool the oven-hot loaves to a temperature in which they could be stacked and loaded into wire mesh cubicles just behind the three dozen bright yellow Thames Trader trucks lined up in front, which would carry their cargo of bread and cakes to supermarkets and corner shops across Cape Town and way beyond to farming communities within a 40-mile radius first thing in the morning.

The delicious smell of baking bread, some thousands of loaves an hour, would greet us at a half mile’s distance from the factory and my mouth would begin to water.

Our Sunday night food run to the bakery would garner a hoard of hot steak and kidney pies, donuts, iced Copenhagens, warm rolls and bread. Once bagged up and safely in the car, we would head home, each of the three children clutching a hot steak and kidney pie fresh from the oven, so much better than any reheated pie would ever taste. They were so hot it was impossible to eat them right away. You had to nibble at one end of the crust to make a small hole and then grasping the pie firmly, hold it out of the car window so that the rushing air could find entry into the pie through the hole and cool it sufficiently so that you could eat it. Greed often got the better of us and we’d arrive home with burned mouths, but as we got older this happened less and less as we knew from experience just how long to hold the pie out of the window, and as it cooled maybe nibble a larger gap in the pie’s side and then back out the window again for some further cooling.

The wait would only add to the anticipation of devouring it and when it was finally just nicely warm, I would lie on the shelf below the rear window and enjoy it, in those happy days before safety belts had been thought of and when parents were rather more cavalier about child safety in cars.

The crisp outer layer of the pie was delicious, as was the soft steamed bottom of the pie lid, and then the deep mahogany-brown meat gravy was a taste sensation to a hungry child after a day in the swimming pool or at the beach. We would eat carefully, not wanting to lose any of the deliciousness but inevitably, meat gravy would run down our chins. At home we would need our faces and hands washed and the car seats would be sponged down, and then it was into the bath with us and afterwards straight to bed.

In our teens this Sunday ritual would continue but we were better able to control our need to gobble the pies straight away. Sitting down to the meal at home we would add tomato sauce to the dish, but in fact this did not add to the pleasure, and it changed the taste of the pie too. Some food is meant to be eaten straight from the hand, hot and fresh and so good you want to devour it.

I remember that feeling the first time I ate a hot lamb doner kebab with tomato, lettuce, red onion and tzatziki with a cold beer on the Greek Island of Skopelos. The level of satisfaction was much like those childhood pies, cooled in the Cape wind whistling through the car windows and the hot meat filling running down your chin. Bliss.

But bliss or not, Monday morning had to be faced and it was with a hollow gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach that I went off to school with some or all of my homework not done. How I survived school remains a mystery to me. I am indebted to this day to classmates who allowed me to hastily copy a version of their homework before school started, to ward off the worst teacher reprisals. But often enough I found myself sitting in detention or facing another caning from the headmaster. Looking back, I cannot understand why I did not simply do my bloody homework and be done with it and this regular Monday morning horror, but the truth is I lived in some kind of weird denial about the need to be educated and the more the teachers’ wrath descended on me, the greater was my stubbornness not to comply with their wishes. It was a form of assured self-destruction which in time was visited on me with two standards failed and the need to repeat a year. The second time this happened, my long-suffering parents decided on a change of school and here I found like-minded misfits, square pegs in round holes and teachers adept at dealing with us, and I experienced a late mini-flowering of belated and limited academic success.

But this experience of Sunday nights of feasting on pies and Monday mornings of sackcloth and ashes at school has stayed with me. Even now, some sixty years later, I still get some echo of that anxiety on a Sunday night. But my passion for pies remains as steadfast as ever.

Chapter 3

Two Jars of Sour Fig Jam

I

t was 1962 and I was a gangling 12-year-old boy, getting close to the six foot two height I would be in a year or two, painfully shy and short-sighted and at a loss about who I was. Other people made me nervous.

I found myself once more at our cottage on the coast at Bloubergstrand for the summer holidays. The place, just 17 miles from Cape Town, was a ying and yang kind of village. On a still summer day it was paradise but when the howling South Easter, the ‘Cape Doctor’, got