This is my personal journal of pictures of food, chefs, cooks and places I’ve encountered as a photographer and a food lover. I’m interested in the process of eating – the thrills it delivers and the problems it may cause – although we only need a few ingredients to survive, it’s a minefield out there of thousands of recipes, theories, diets and supplements. I believe in sustainable hedonism. Food should be healthy and delicious. It can be. Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with the best of South African chefs: Philippa Cheifitz, Kobus van der Merwe, Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen as well as the French ELLE à Table editor, Alexandra Michot.
I’ve had commissions to shoot food and lifestyle images for local and international publications such as Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, Die Zeit, ELLE à Table, French Elle, Food and Wine, Food Illustrated, House and Leisure, JAN, NRC, Sunday Times Lifestyle, Visi and Zin and I’m currently working with Kobus van der Merwe on our second food book, Wolfgat.
JAC DE VILLIERS
Kobus van der Merwe and Jan joining forces at Wolfgat
Argentinian born winemaker Billy Hughes ticks all the boxes to make an exceptional wine. Based in the Swartland, he runs a small family business making organic wine. Nativo is recognised by the minimalist label which features an embossed, subtly elliptical circle. Billy explains: “The label features an embossed ellipse mimicking the stain left by the base of a wine glass and also alludes to a sense of coming full circle, as is the case of our family, and the natural cycle of life.”
Seafood | Femina
Cheeseburger, coke and comic | Cosmopoitan
Guinea fowl cooked in red wine | Cape Town Food
Nougat | House and Leisure
Vanilla ice cream and blueberries | House and Leisure
Peter Finlayson cooks abalone in its shell | Food Illustrated
Mezé, Anatoli Restaurant,
Cape Town | Bon Appétit
Kobus van der Merwe foraging in a stink kruid field – oncosiphon grandiflorum
THE FORAGER
Kobus van der Merwe is the antithesis of ‘the rock star chef.’ He’s humble and creative and scoffs at the idea that his restaurant Wolfgat was voted the best in the world: “It’s an absurd and meaningless title…” He won by ticking the right boxes – he runs Wolfgat with a small footprint and uses only local foodstuff, while his staff, mainly women, have equal rank. His food’s also sublime.
Tea-smoked angelfish with sweet mustard sauce like a full moon rising, mosbeskuit and wild radish
Smoked West Coast Oysters in their
their element at
Wolfgat – ELLE à Table
Here comes the Sun Hot rocks on the outcrops of Paternoster
Pickled white mussels with Cape Columbin
Red pepper gravlax
Bobbejaanboekie –Daubenya zeyheri
boerbeskuit and avocado
Columbine Flaminkvis | Mock flamingo ~ stuffed calamari, raw nasturtium
Gifbol – Boophone haemanthoides
Soutslaai – Mesembryanthemum guerichianum
Smoking beetroot-cured ostrich over glowing wild sage
Oyster, soutslaai Salt pan below
soutslaai & caviar
White fish pickle, soutslaai, wood sorrel, citrus
Life in a rock pool at low tide in Paternoster
Black olive pasta leaves, salt-dried snoekkuite, sea lettuce Limpets in their
Kelp Forest Limpets
Limpets
Snoekbobotie
Lichen on the rocks, Cape Columbine
IN FULL FLIGHT
Chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen is flying high – his upward trajectory since winning a Michelin star has been nothing short of remarkable. From the Cape to the Kalahari to Niece he’s established his focused brand JAN, himself, his image, being the focal point of his endeavour.
Jan jetting off to the Kalahari
A Bigger Splash! Jan baking sandbread
sandbread in the Kalahari | JAN the journal
Rick Stein photographed at The Olympia Café, Kalk Bay – House & Leisure
RICK STEIN
Stein is a storyteller and his is the story of fish, simply told with intellect and wit. He cooks fish effortlessly all over the world for his wholesome television programs. He got his first big break appearing on one of Keith Floyd’s TV shows and refers to him as a mentor whose legacy he is proud to continue: “What Keith did was bring food to men, and all I’ve done is carried on doing the same thing so I owe him a great deal. But I think he got a bit pissed off. I guess I was the young upstart.”
NOBU
Nobuyuki ‘Nobu’ Matsuhisa is one of the world’s most famous celebrity chefs. Serving Peruvian-infused Japanese cuisine, he’s opened 39 restaurants on 5 continents with his business partner, actor Robert de Niro. ‘You know how kids dream of being soccer players or actors? Well, my dream was to be a sushi chef.’
Nobu’s signature dish: Salmon tartare with caviar
TEA MASTER
Sydney Moonsamy worked as a waiter at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town for 35 years, a life dedicated to service. He also became the highly-respected ‘tea master’ or ‘tea sommelier’ at the hotel, where he created the signature blend for their famous high tea mixing Ceylon, Assam, Darjeeling, Keemun, Kenya and Yunnan teas with rose petals from the garden.
Sydney Moonsamy, waiter | Sunday Times Lifestyle
“AS A WOMAN YOU AlSO HAD TO HAVE BALLS”,
savvy chef Margot Janse recently told Dutch journal NRC when asked how she dealt with the egos of the famous chefs with whom she had worked. A Dutch national, and self-trained, she was working at Le Quartier Français in Franschhoek, when in 2002 it was voted amongst The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. On leaving Le Quartier Français in 2017 she decided to do something about the huge disparity between the very wealthy and the poor Franschhoek villagers and through her contacts the dynamic Margot managed to get sponsorship for a feeding scheme at a crèche in Groendal. Today she feeds 1500 needy children through her charity, Isabelo.
Chef Margot Janse | NRC Food Journal
iPHONEOGRAPHY – A NEW APPROACH
The iPhone camera has come a long way. The freedom to shoot fast and spontaneously on my iPhone 13 is a sheer joy! The quality of the image, with extraordinary depth of field, renders it a professional tool that I’m using to illustrate international prize-winning chef Kobus van der Merwe and my new food book, Wolfgat.
Photographed on iPhone 13: Cape galjoen, grapefruit juice, sunflowerseed, milk and fresh ginger @ Wolfgat
FOOD AND TRAVEL
Waldorf market, Stellenbosch, South Africa | Taste
Borough Market, London, UK
Café Slavia, Prague, Czech
LM Prawns, Costa do Sol Restaurant, Maputo,
Maputo, Mozambique | Condé Nast Traveler
Street vendors, Hanoi, Vietnam
Fisherman, Bali, Indonesia
Red snapper, Bali, Indonesia | House & Leisure
Clay food pots, Mexico | House & Leisure
Street butcher, Hoi An, Vietnam | House & Leisure
Prague, Czech Republic | House & Leisure
Karlsbad, Czech Republic | House & Leisure
A
couple of days in the Winelands | French ELLE
Foraging chef Chris Erasmus Delaire Graff Lodge
Head chef Virgil Khan, Delaire Graff Restaurant Octopus salad, Hazendal
Russian tea ceremony, Hazendal
Cheryl Boonzaaier ~ Isabelo Child Feeding
Boekenhoutskloof Winery
Simon Bannister’s wolf sculpture, Boekenhoutskloof
Auntie Ruth’s koeksisters
Biodynamic winemaker Rob Armstrong of Haut Espoir Haut Espoir Sweet Semillon NV
Auntie Ruth’s tea room, Die Teesakkie, Franschhoek
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
An hour’s drive from Kamieskroon, we come across it by chance, up a rough road in Namaqualand, as pitted as Gorgonzola, in the middle of the Broken veld - a real geological term for the rugged topography of this area – a place that has changed little since the Jurassic period. The rocks here are between 600 and 1500 million years old. The sign reads, ‘Nourivier (Narrow River) – Traditional food, tea and coffee’.
Namaqualand in the Northwest Cape on the borders of Namibia is unknown and uncared about because like a butterfly its time of beauty is so fleeting, a springtime of flowers more beautiful than anywhere on earth, that rise after the spring rains in a crush of colours of neon intensity.
The countryside, even in this short, lush season after the spring rains, is flinty and elemental, a semi desert, a dolerite escarpment with folds of limestone that look like pancakes, knobs of rock balancing one on another, veined with milky quartz arteries that shine like rivers. You can pick up a handful of stones that resemble rich jewels.
It was in these Southern African coasts with its capricious, sometimes violent climate, that the first Portuguese explorers had their first glimpse of the people of the area. These people were wiry yellow-skinned who called themselves Khoikhoi which means men of men. They shared the land with a smaller, even wirier people whom they called San and from whom they were descended. It is with the San that human story of Southern African really starts.
The descendants of these people still live in this part of the world, their style of living has changed little and because of frequent drought conditions poverty is often extreme.
The menu at the restaurant at the end of the world is not for sissies or anyone worried about cholesterol. Much of it is plucked from the veld and the flavours are fugitive and a little untamed which sometimes takes a bit of getting used to. The basis of the food is mutton, sometimes lamb, freshly slaughtered from the roaming flocks dimly visible on the escarpment.
The menu changes according to what is available but we eat wildebrei, a mutton stew made with hotnoskool (a type of wild asparagus). If you are a mutton stew aficionado this is the best in the world. It coats your mouth with a thin delicious layer of pure fat. There was a big potjie or pot of afval (offal), with whole sheep’s head. Afval is a specialty of the area, a culinary trick that requires experience, if it is not to taste like the inside of a hangover. Served with rooster brood, bread made on the fire, singed with black stripes, it is durable and filling.
Another specialty of the region is a pofadder, called after the deadly South African snake, approached tentatively by squeamish tourist thinking it is the real thing, made from sheep’s intestine, it is stuffed with heart, lung and kidneys. Pudding is frequently a simple homemade apricot jam and bread. The meal ends with a cup of suringmelk – a celadon coloured concoction with a thick barium-meal consistency made from the yellow flowered oxalis plants and goat’s milk.
The cooking is done by the women from the nearby village of Nourivier in a kookskerm which is a hut used as an outdoor kitchen made out of dry, flammable bushes such as the milk bush and kraal bush, the floor smeared with a mixture of dung and clay. There is a clay oven a few metres away for making bread.
“We grew up on this food”, says Hanna Witbooi, one of the village women, “every season is different, just depends what is ‘hier rond’ (roundabout). We could go into the velt for a day’s walk and not even take any food with us. Just find it there. Bessies (rhus undulata) are my favourite. they come out around November, at first butter yellow turning slowly to bright red. Oh then they taste so, so sweet.”
The whole meal cost R45 a head and for an extra R100 you can stay the night in a small Voortrekker (the original pioneers) wagon or hut made out of reed mats, an experience not for the faint hearted but for seekers of real solitude there is no equivalent in the world.
LIN SAMPSON
HUIS
KOMBUIS
THE FOOD OF AN ABSENT COMMUNITY
As a child in the early 1960’s, I often accompanied my father to a fish market in an area of Cape Town known as District Six, located in the heart of the city in the foothills of Table Mountain. It was a mixed race neighborhood, established about a hundred years earlier as a community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans and immigrants.
Fifty years ago on February 11, 1966, the nationalist government of the day passed a law declaring District Six a whites-only area. The houses were subsequently bulldozed and they were relocated 25 kilometers outside the mother city to a wind-swept sandy scrubland known as the Cape Flats.
Cape Town not only lost a vital chunk of its population and architecture, it lost its soul. Today, a few mosques and churches dot this wasteland where once a spirited community lived.
According to ex-resident Ruth Jeftha, “District Six was all about food – we didn’t have much, but food brought us together. If you had kids to feed you would go to your neighbour and ask for food.”
Linda Fortune remembers the smells of District Six: “I used to walk up Hanover Street on my way home and could identify what different people were cooking. I truly miss the food, the smells of District Six.”
Huis Kombuis (Home Kitchen) is a term coined by a group of 22 ex-residents who participate in a memory workshop program with team leader Tina Smith, curator of the District Six Museum. It’s a design project where storytelling, performance and traditional craftwork involving embroidery, sewing and appliqué are used to document the culinary life of the era.
A couple of years ago Tina Smith invited me to work with her on a food book with the working title, ‘Huis Kombuis – The food of District Six’. It includes the testimonies of her group, their recipes as embroidered artworks, and as stylized food photographs, as well as their portraits, each holding a favourite object that links them to District Six.
It’s a unique cookbook in the sense that it records and celebrates the food of an absent society.
JAC DE VILLIERS
Marion Abrahams-Welsh with her Spode plate Tea and scones
Moegamat Benjamin with his ‘klopse’ umbrella Tomato bredie
Ruth Jefta and her family
Bobotie
Fatima February with the street sign where she lived
Fish smoortjies
Molly
Molly Abrahams with a decanter from her family restaurant
