Potbrood

Potbrood at Glen Reenen Rest Camp, 2010.

There is no easier recipe: the orginal comes from the 2009 go! magazine camping booklet.

500 grams self-raising flour
340 ml (1 can) of beer or 340 ml Longlife or ordinary milk (I prefer the milk if the bread is for breakfast!)
Large pinch of salt

Mix the liquid into the flour and salt until you have firmish dough. Knead it once or twice to form a nice ball. Put it into a greased flat bottomed potjie (cast iron pot with lid) - or similar. Make sure it really is cast iron. I destroyed my mother's pot on my first attempt. It cracked and the lid handle melted!

Potbrood baking at Cape Columbine Nature Reserve, 2009

I surround the potjie with glowing coals (usually after I have cooked the other braai ingredients liek crayfish in one case, or chops, in another), and I put more coals on the lid of the potjie, to mimic an oven's heat. After about 45 minutes I peek inside. The bread should have a golden crust and sound hollow when tapped.

It's ready. Remove, wrap in cloth, and when cool you can wrap it in plastic or foil. If you still use such things (I do).

Potbrood in the Kgalagadi, 2009.

Naturally this bread is at its most delicious when warm, though the next day it is good, too, if firm. Any later than that and it could be used as cultural weapon or wheel chock.

Mulberry pie

[First published June 2010; updated]

Mulberries...taste of a Bloemfontein childhood, tree-climbing, stained hands and feet, a bowlful for dessert after a midday lunch around a table. In New York I find good mulberries rarely and when I do, they make me tremble. They are best eaten out of hand, or from a bowl with spoon.

But if you have too many? Lucky, lucky you - they make wonderful tarts.

The pastry I use was designated for apple pie in our house, when I was little. Molly Bolt, a friend of my grandmother's in Bloemfontein, circa 1960's, gave her the recipe. It called for margarine! I use butter.

I never met Molly Bolt, but her pastry lives on (it's in my first book, too, in June's serviceberry pie recipe).

The pie  pastry does not need to rest. And it is surprisingly forgiving and versatile. I use it for pies small and large, in a spring-form cake tin, or individual muffin trays, or simply as a flat disk cooked on a baking sheet, to be topped with heaps of your favorite fruit. And: It does not have to be baked blind.

175 gr/6 oz butter
75 gr/2.5 oz sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
300 grams/ 10.5 oz flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt

Beat the butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add the egg. Beat again with a dusting of flour. Gradually beat in the rest of the flour, baking powder and salt. For into two balls, and flatten slightly. Dust flour onto a board and roll out thinly.

Line the bottom and sides of a greased, spring form cake tin [or individual slots in a muffin pan in the case of the mulberry tarts], add cooled filling, cut out a pastry disk to cover, crimp the edges in the way you know best, make two slits for steam, and bake in a 350'F/180'C oven till pale golden and crisp. Baking time varies. For a large tart, like apple, about forty-five minutes. For small mulberry pies, check after fifteen minutes.

Mulberry filling for small pies - makes about 8 muffin tray-sized pies, or one large pie.

5 cups mulberries, stalks removed
1 cup raspberries or serviceberries (Amelanchier sp.)
2 Tbsps sugar

Heat the fruit and sugar in a pan till juice starts to flow. Remove fruit  from pan to a bowl with a slotted spoon. Cook the juice till syrupy. Return the syrup to the berries and cool. Use as pie filling or topping for closed or open tarts using Molly Bolt's pastry.

Waldorf salad with chicken

We're just out of Waldorfs...

...says an insouciant Basil Fawlty to the Loud American, who is demanding a Waldorf Salad.

Lest we forget the good things that the US of A has given the world, a small reminder: Waldorf Salad.

It was a main feature of a picnic we would have annually at Dias Beach at Cape Point outside Cape Town. The rest of the menu, for a brunch, featured unvaryingly: small smoked salmon sandwiches on brown bread without crusts, tiny pork sausages, grilled, with grain mustard for dipping; fresh scones with home made strawberry jam inside (! the convenience! - and in January my friend Fran reminded me that I used to whip these scones up so that our pack of friends could enjoy tea, out of teapots and China cups, on Clifton Beach); and the fixings for Buck's Fizz, here known as Mimosas. Champagne (domestic warkling spine, in those days) and orange juice. Plus flutes to drink from. I There was also hot coffee, in flasks.

This was all packed into many baskets and off we would go in the Kombi, with the Collins' in tow, usually, or other good friends. The Corbets, the Van Heerdens. Some of whom are not with us anymore. There had to be many people so that the picnic luggage had a proper train to carry it down the long cliff-top path and the sudden, steep descent to the empty, cormorant-populated beach, white-smooth with the black birds scattering in formation from it as we arrived, and pounded by dangerous blue breakers.

There is a boardwalk above Dias Beach now, and baboon minders with catapults to scare off the marauding primates. But a few years ago we repeated the picnic with the Collins' again, fresh from London; the small girls now grown and beautiful women, me no longer a paralysed teenager. All of us older, the menu the same as ever, the beach as empty.

So, this Waldorf salad is a take on a recipe I read a million years ago in Cape Town, in a moth-eaten Gourmet or Bon Appetit, per the Cafe des Artistes (shuttered after the summer of 2009) on the Upper West Side.

I read it never guessing I would live in this city, or eat at that restaurant. It adds chicken to the original formula. Real Waldorf salad has no chicken in it.

This is mine and it is retrolicious:

One poached chicken breast (I used leftovers from a roast chicken), cut into bite-sized chunks
3 ribs celery, unstrung (...) and sliced thinly
one apple diced
a handful of fresh pecans
two tablespoons mayonnaise
a shake of sherry vinegar
some salt, pepper

Combine everything in a bowl and toss with your lily white or chocolate brown hands. Either lick or wash them clean. That's it.

Snip some chives over the top for green dusting.

Fish cakes

26 May 2008

I like fish cakes. And I like smoked fish.

For about 6 fishcakes, you'll need:

2 smoked trout fillets (or mackerel, or snoek, or angelfish)

2 slices white bread, no crusts, soaked in milk and squeezed out lightly

2 very small potatoes, cooked and cut into cubish things

2 spring onions (scallions) finely sliced

1 very finely diced shallot

a strip of ancho chile, soaked, about 4" x 1" (yeah, I know) and thinly sliced

juice of a small lime or lemon

1 heaping tablespoon thick plain yogurt, preferably Greek

In a bowl put the trout, which you have removed from the skin and flaked, plus all the other ingredients. Mix with a fork. Because the trout is smoked you will probably not need to add salt, but taste in case ...

Pour some flour onto a plate. Form fish mixture into round cakes, coating each one with flour as you go. Put aside on a clean plate and chill them for a little while to firm up.

To finish the fishcakes, fry them in a little olive oil over medium heat, about 4 minutes to a side till golden and crispy on the outside. Turn once.

I also used Mrs Ball's chutney as a condiment. See if you can find it. It is incomparable.

I like a mango, avocado, cilantro-ish salad to go with this.

Punch

Warm weather. Long, cool drinks.

A bottle of decent but inexpensive German Riesling, off-dry, chilled.
A cup and a half of Paul Newman's Virgin Lemonade, chilled
A cup of bergamot-scented (I used Ahmad Afternoon, but Earl Grey will do) tea, cooled with ice cubes and sweetened
3 sprigs of mint, lightly bruised
3 slices of lemon
2 slices pineapple
Ice

Stir together and pour.