FEASTING ON NATURE
After the recent death of SA’ s legendary food anthropologist Dr Renata Coetzee, a dinner was held in her honour celebrating the launch of her last book, A Feast From Nature. By Hennie Fisher
How does one commemorate the life of someone whose extensive research, teachings and writings on South African food culture raised local and international awareness and acclaim? By hosting a dinner, Pretoria University’s consumer and food sciences students, under the guidance of student Darren Vasiljevic, decided. It was to be no ordinary dinner, but one that would showcase the food and culture of early humans in Southern Africa and particularly the Khoi-Khoin people, the subject of Coetzee’s book. It was a noble gesture to cook a meal for 80 guests using indigenous or endemic plant and animal material. The students did a sterling job.
The unusual menu started with a dish of what the students thought would not be too difficult to source the ingredients for — a nature’s salad of morogo purée, spekboom gel, pelargonium sand, lemon foam, pickled papkuil shoots, compressed aloe buds and indigenous edible flowers. But the pickled papkuil (Typha capensis) shoots, which resemble bamboo shoots and were a delicious main element of this course, turned out to be a nightmare to source.
Fancy a dune spinach (Tetragonia decumbens) soup with deep-fried warthog biltong? Coetzee’s long-time friend Truida Prekel helped source the ingredients for the soup from Cape Town (some of them foraged, others purchased from a local market), and the biltong was made by the students.
One does not immediately associate the Khoi people with fish, but in fact they ate a lot of coastal produce. Using a bit of licence, the students served tilapia with dressed sea fennel and oyster leaf purée, both sourced from a grower in Midrand, together with wood sorrel and bokkom crumbs.
The main course, a duo of springbok and ystervark — a braised springbok shank accompanied by a shard of crisp porcupine skin, buttered ice leaf and waterblommetjies, amadumbi, grilled uintjies, cricket rice and a glace de viande.
An Italian favourite took on a local flavour for dessert — a buchu panna cotta served with preserved t’samma, gooseberry and rooibos coulis, arum lily crumble and acacia honey taffy. Arum lily does not immediately strike one as being edible, even though the relatively dangerous calcium oxalate crystals in the plant can be rendered harmless with prolonged cooking. The lily bulb did, however, add an interesting lemony fresh herb taste to the dessert.
Considering there are more than 20,000 species of edible plants in the world, but that less than 20 species now provide 90% of our food, we probably should all be much more interested in what grows around us, and curious about those that are edible and can be made into delicious dishes. The students did Dr Renata Coetzee proud.